limn

The Touch-point Collective: Crowd Contouring on the Casino Floor

Historically, casinos have been eager adopters of technologies that help them to gather knowledge about their customers. The knowledge-gathering repertoire of the modern casino has shifted from telephone surveys, focus groups, and rudimentary datasets to complex feats of reconnaissance and analysis enabled by player tracking systems, data visualization tools, and behavioral intelligence software suites. Many surveillance techniques first applied in casinos were only later adapted to other domains—airports, financial trading floors, shopping malls, banks, and government agencies.[1] “Knowledge is power and perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the gaming industry,” observed a trade journalist in 1999, before Internet corporations like Google, Amazon, and Facebook had become famous for their innovations in consumer monitoring and marketing (Parets 1999:19). “The unique advantage of our industry,” notes  gambling executive Lars Klander of TechResults, “is that we have hundreds of touch points a week or month, thousands per year, so you’ve got a profuseness of data that you don’t have in other areas.” Out of this data casinos draw the contours of customer groups that we might think of as “touch-point collectives.” An examination of the ways that casinos detect, intervene in, and shape these groups offers insight into the workings of such collectives in other contemporary domains.

Advertisement for Bally Business Intelligence: “See your players, your games, your floor, and your business like never before.”

Nearly 70 percent of casino patrons in the United States participate in so-called loyalty programs, using player cards to gamble rather than coins, paper money, or tickets. While their participation grants them redeemable points based on the volume of their play, it grants casinos a wealth of information. Casino player tracking systems, inspired by airline and credit card reward programs in the mid-1980s, record the value of each bet gamblers make, their wins and losses, the rate at which they push slot machine buttons, and what drinks and meals they purchase. Tracked gamblers are treated less as individual subjects than as “dividuals” in the Deleuzian sense—collections of traits, habits, and preferences that casinos can systematically compare to those of others in order to identify distinct customer niches (Deleuze 1992; Andrejevic 2007). Harrah’s, a franchise that tracks players seamlessly from coast to coast by pooling information from its national chain of properties into a single centralized database, parses its market into ninety different segments and addresses each with a unique marketing scheme.[2]

In the past, strategic adjustments to casino layouts, game selections, or marketing campaigns were based either on trial and error or on projective modeling techniques such as “stochastic migration,” in which theoretical individuals created from samplings of actual behavior (typically recorded by note-taking observers) were followed through virtual simulations of an environment before and after a proposed design change—moving a bank of machines a few feet left, for instance, or widening the entryway to a gaming area. While the challenge for such techniques was to gather enough of the right information on existing customer behavior to forecast the effects of a particular change, the challenge for tracking techniques is different: How to extract meaningful insight from a continuous stream of “live data” that is overwhelming in its volume and detail? “We’ve got 20,000 [behavioral] models per second, streaming off the floor,” remarks Javier Saenz, vice president of network systems at IGT.

The challenge has given rise to behavioral intelligence software suites like Compudigm’s seePOWER, a technology that promises to help casinos cope with “atomic level data across the enterprise in real time.” SeePOWER transforms massive amounts of touch-point data into colorful heat maps that represent collective “tendencies and preferences” in and over time, as a company press release puts it. A representative gave a demonstration of the software’s abilities on her laptop computer during the 2007 Global Gaming Expo in Las Vegas. She pulled up a map titled “Time Played—Females,” picturing data for women players on one casino slot floor over a twenty-four-hour period. Dark red clots of color appeared around the machines they had played the longest, encircled by bands of progressively “cooler” shades around those they had played less—magenta for sixteen hours, pink for twelve hours, and so on (See Animation). In a time-lapse animation, these shaded contours undulated as gambling activity waxed and waned at different machines.