Making SuperMemo Addictive - Slot Machines As Inspiration (Pictures, sounds, music)

One subject of great interest to me is the slot machine. Personally I do not gamble, but the entire casino and specifically the slot machine industry is fascinating.

Generally speaking, using a slot machine will result in a net loss for the user. Statistically, the user WILL lose money, and aside from the immediate stimulation and comfort of the machine, they leave that experience with NOTHING to show for it. Despite this basic fact, many people continue to willfully use these slot machines.

Why does such a contradiction exist? It seems that in order to compensate for the one big negative aspect of the slot machine, the creators do their best to max out every other positive aspect of the machine:

Comfortable chairs, pleasant sounds, fragrant smells, periodic wins (but not too many), buttons that feel good to touch, addictive algorithms, and so on. Basically the creators of slot machines make every possible effort to maximize the comfort level of the user so that these positive aspects outweigh the big negative aspect of it being a money sink.

If you remove the questionable ethics of the gambling industry, the slot machine is a great example of how you can make a negative thing FEEL positive.

I look at slot machines as the “level 100 Pokemon” in terms of making a negative activity addictive. If you want to gain some insight into the world of slot machine psychology, I would highly recommend the book “Addiction By Design.” The book is dense with useful information, very little fluff. Watching any talk given by the author (Natasha Schull) is also worth an hour of your time. I linked one of her talks in the picture of the book.

Specifically in the context of SuperMemo, i like thinking about “what can I do to make SuperMemo less like study hall and more like a slot machine?” Over the years I have experimented with how I use SuperMemo, and it has resulted in a few permanent SuperMemo routines:

1. Pictures on every card - slot machines are extremely visual, they often have pictures themed around popular IPs. Lesson: my flashcards would benefit greatly if they feature a picture (As long as it doesn’t give away the answer. In this case, the picture should appear when the answer is shown). Of the 110,000 cards in my database, probably less than 3% of them do not have any kind of picture associated with them. Almost every flashcard I have has a “logo picture” that identifies the type of knowledge represented. I have “logo cards” for foreign languages, books, “idea genres”, and so on.
2. Positive sounds - Slot machines all feature brief but pleasant sound effects that you don’t get tired of hearing repeatedly. Lesson: if possible, associate positive sounds with reviewing flashcards. Even before I got really into slot machine psychology I decided “pass” and “fail” needed their own sounds. Over the years I have used a number of different sound effects for “pass” and “fail,” right now I think I’m using the “menu select” sound from the Persona games. In the past I used the “dialogue done” sound from Ocarina of Time and the “menu select” sound from Pokemon Red/Blue. Video games and specifically RPGs are a good source for sound effects you don’t mind hearing repeatedly over time.
3. Music - Slot machine creators LOVE it when the machine features music that is nostalgic to the player (One of the reasons that “The Price is Right” slots are so popular). Lesson: Incorporating music into my flashcards will make them more fun to review. This has been more of a mixed bag, so I’m not sure if I would recommend going down the weird rabbit hole I have, but here it goes. Over the last six or seven years, I would daily take 5 songs that I loved and isolate 30 second chunks of the song that give me the most joy (Sometimes the same track contains multiple chunks). Ideally they would be spots in the song that would give me goosebumps. Using audacity I would record those 30 second snippets and use the tools in Audacity to make each chunk fade in and out. By the time you’re done, you basically have a ringtone of your favorite part(s) of a song. Doing this has been a fun little hobby over the years, since it has forced me to decide WHY I like a particular song. Long story short, I have about 4500 of these tracks, and it still grows by 2 or 3 tracks per day. Many of them are in SuperMemo and are played when a flashcard answer is shown. Often times I listen to drone or ambient music lightly while reviewing flashcards so the SuperMemo answer song acts as the “sprinkles” on top of the ambient vanilla ice cream that I’m enjoying. I don't really use SuperMemo as a jukebox, but a side effect of SuperMemo has been that I've tried to become more objective about what stuff I like. I think my weird little ring tone library is a manifestation of that.
4. 
   Wii Remote - Slot machine creators do their very best to make sure every aspect of the slot machine is enjoyable to touch, ESPECIALLY the aspects of the machine that the player interacts with (Touch screen, handle, buttons, etc.). Lesson: The process of doing SuperMemo should be fun to touch. It’s possible to use a mouse and keyboard to review 400 flashcards, but it’s not extremely fun. Shortly after the Nintendo Wii came out, I remember thinking to myself “I would LOVE to use a Wii Remote to review flashcards”. It wasn’t possible because our family computer didn’t have bluetooth and the dongles that I bought online weren’t compatible with the Wii Remote 😢. Eventually I bought the proper bluetooth adapter and learned some rudimentary programming with GlovePie to get my Wii Remote to do SuperMemo things on the family computer (A button = 4, B button = Enter, + button = Tab, etc.). For more than 15 years I have used the SAME Wii Remote for SuperMemo, a testament to the durability of Nintendo’s hardware design (Switch problems notwithstanding).
   

I guess those are some of the biggest lessons that have positively impacted my SuperMemo use over the years. If I think of something else, I'll write another post.

Also, I'm reading all of your comments and mail, and I'm trying to respond to them in a post and not just give you a quick sentence or two response. Thanks for your understanding 😅