BetRivers Adds Variable Rewards To Variable Rewards

Living in New Jersey, I will occasionally venture into the online casino waters. Well, I do so daily, to pick up the pennies and nickels in bonus offers, but after that … yeah. Sometimes I’ll dabble in the slots.

Truthfully, I use it like I use TikTok — to pass the time. I set limits for myself, I play a dime a spin, it’s mostly harmless fun. (I’ve tilted out before, hence the limits.)

But even mindless dopamine-seeking behavior such as this has its own set of limits. For real: Who among us hasn’t wasted an hour scrolling through the aforementioned TikTok (or Instagram, or Facebook, or X, or Snapchat, or whatever) and then looked up from our phones, bored and tired and wondering where the last hour went?

Same thing with the slots. Mindlessly spinning, getting that dopamine hit after dopamine hit, and then … emptiness.

Well, BetRivers is seeking to cure this, adding a whole ‘nuther level of dopamine to the whole enterprise. 

Mystical

It’s called “Mystic Fortune.” It’s not advertised as far as I can tell, instead buried in the middle of the casino’s app, and it’s dumber than bricks.

“Not sure what to play?” the words read. “Let fate decide!” 

Then you click the button, and the thing spins for a second or two, and it randomly selects a game for you to play.

In a nutshell: It’s a variable reward system built on a variable reward system.

Quick Psych 101 refresher: Back in the 1950s, B.F. Skinner stuck some pigeons in a box and figured out something that’s been destroying human productivity ever since. Reward a pigeon every time it pecks a lever, and it pecks when it’s hungry. Reward it on a random schedule — sometimes a pellet, sometimes nothing, sometimes a pellet jackpot — and that pigeon will peck the lever until it keels over.

The unpredictability is the addiction. 

Turns out your brain doesn’t get the big dopamine hit from the reward itself; it gets it from anticipating the reward, and anticipation cranks way up when you don’t know what’s coming.

That’s slots. That’s TikTok. That’s every app on your phone, designed by people who now know exactly what Skinner figured out. Pull the lever, scroll the feed, refresh the inbox. You’ll get maybe nothing, maybe something great, maybe a video of a child whose little brother just bit him.

Our brain doesn’t care what we get — it just wants to find out what it is. Over and over and over again.

And now BetRivers has stacked one variable reward on top of another. Click Mystic Fortune and you don’t know what game you’re getting. That’s dopamine hit one. Play the game it picks for you and you don’t know what you’re winning, for dopamine hit two. It’s a Skinner box inside a Skinner box. 

Keep going

But honestly, why stop there?

Throw in more animation. Add a sound effect. Let me “unlock” rarer game-pickers. Then maybe I can unlock the chance at bonus spins or bonus cash. Or maybe a super-secret slot I can only get to by unlocking a series of Mystic Fortune buttons.

There’s no ceiling here, because the ceiling is whatever the human brain will tolerate before it short circuits. And know this: Some pigeons ended up hitting the lever five times a second for over 15 hours without more than a 20-second break at any one time.

I suppose a dire gambling addiction warning is buried somewhere in here, and I’m sure anyone with that bent will see what BetRivers has quietly rolled out and loudly lose their mind. But I gotta tell you: I admire the engineering, right up until I remember the 94.87% RTP. Then, not so much.

Maybe I’ll just stick with TikTok for my variable rewards. Probably not, but maybe.