I saw this game listed on the list from another thread of
the "Greatest Gaming Innovations of All Time". He mentioned how the
game has persisted (outliving hundreds of other slot games) because
it appeals to the slot player's psyche. Well, there's one aspect of
the game that is both a signal aspect of that and a salient
characteristic of casino marketing:
We know that 99% of casino marketing is based on fraud and
deception: make the player think he's getting something for nothing;
make him value something far more than reality should suggest;
misrepresent the true odds against him, the true nature of the games
he's playing, etc. etc. Well, WOF does all these things wonderfully,
simply via the VISUAL LIE of the bonus wheel. You see, the wheel is
divided into a number of "slots" (22, I think) with widely varying
payouts on them, from 25 coins to 1000. Which value actually comes
up is determined, not by the actual spin of the wheel, but by the
RNG of the machine, making the actual "spin" an irrelevant sham. The
RNG is biased extremely heavily toward the lower amounts (the two
lowest values, 25 and 30, come up half the time).
The net effect of this is to make the uninitiated gambler THINK that
he has a 1 in 22 chance of hitting the "1000" slot on every spin,
when in reality, his chances are about one in six billion (eight
billion at Harrah's-owned casinos). Casinos and slot manufacturers
might argue that the gambler is wrong to take the visual
representation of the Wheel of Fortune at face value, i.e., as an
actual spinning wheel. To counter that, I would argue that the
presentation of the wheel, the association of the game with the well-
known game show, and the sound effect of the "spinning" "wheel" all
reinforce that mistaken impression in the gambler's mind, and
therefore crosses the line into deliberate misrepresentation of the
game's characteristics, aka FRAUD.
Of course, I only mention this to agree on WOF's being a "great
gaming innovation". As we all know, casino fraud has been perfectly
legal in Nevada for decades.
