Over at Vox Brad Plumer wrote an exceptionally good article about how casinos get players to play for extended periods:

• Casinos are designed so that guests don’t have to turn at 90 degree angles – doing so activates decision making sections of the brain, and they don’t want that.
• Slots are now responsible for up to 85% of a casino’s profits. Regulators have encouraged them as a cheap source of tax revenue in challenging economic times, without the negative stigmas associated with other types of gambling such as poker.
• Technological advances have let casinos better manipulate human emotions through slots. They used to be all or nothing machines, but these days the machine can give you 30 cents back if you play for a dollar – the brain registers such “partial wins” as real wins.
• Gambling houses these days come with ergonomic seats that don’t cut off circulation and allow players to stay seated for hours.
• They also design seats so that buttons are as close to the player as possible, requiring very little movement of them.
• Casinos have learnt that having players feed coins into machines gives them time to think. Instead they encourage the use of cards with magnetic stripes, so the money being lost seems less real.
• The stereotypical gambler in Las Vegas is now a 35 year old mother of two.

Read how casinos use food to retain your attention, why some players are irritated when they win the jackpot, how machines skirt the edge of the law by making adjustments to the volatility of machines based on your mood and much more over here.

Source: Vox