INDUSTRY INSIDER: MARK MCGUINNESS
deposit, one swipe to stake, a bet slip that never argues back. Speed became the entire religion of the product.
Decision science complicates that story, and usefully so. Every additional choice on a screen raises the cost of deciding, so removing needless steps demonstrably helps the player, and the evidence on cognitive load is not seriously disputed. Yet friction is not a single thing. Some of it obstructs, and some of it protects: a deposit limit that asks one further question, a pause before a loss is chased, a default that sets a sensible ceiling until the player chooses to move it. Handled well, these are not drags on the experience but the experience itself, the difference between a product that respects the person using it and one that merely harvests them. The craft lies in knowing which friction to remove and which to build. Friction is not the enemy of experience; the wrong friction is. Remove the friction that insults the player, and keep the friction that looks after them. None of this is new science. Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein gave it a name, choice architecture, and a Nobel Prize duly followed; governments now run dedicated behavioural units on the strength of it. Gaming, curiously, has been slower to apply the discipline for the player’s benefit than almost any consumer industry it competes with for attention.
THE ENDING IS THE MEMORY Now to the part most operators ignore almost entirely: how a session ends. There is a well-evidenced quirk of memory known as the peak-end rule. We do not store an experience as an average. We remember its most intense moment and its ending, and we judge the whole by those two points
alone. A session that closes on a small, well-handled moment is remembered kindly, almost irrespective of what preceded it. A session that ends in a clumsy upsell, a chased loss or a withdrawal made deliberately slow is remembered as the entire relationship. No welcome offer buys that impression back. Here is what I see time and again. We pour the design budget into the first thirty seconds and leave the last thirty to chance. That is backwards. The close of a session is where experience and player protection meet, and it is where decision science earns its keep. Engineer that ending with the same care as the opening: a clear statement of where the player stands, a fast and uncomplicated withdrawal, and a graceful off-ramp when the signals say stop. Do that, and the player leaves intending to return, which is the only retention that was ever worth having.
We pour the design budget into the first thirty seconds and leave the last thirty to chance. That is backwards
THE HONEST NUDGE I can hear the objection, because I have raised it myself in boardrooms. Is this not merely a polite word for manipulation? It can be, which is the very reason it matters who holds the tools.
Every lever here cuts both ways. The same default that protects a player can be reset to drain one, and the same frame that clarifies a choice can be engineered to distort it. Choice architecture is never neutral, so the only honest question is the direction in which it points, towards the player’s interest or against it. In an unregulated market you can aim it the wrong way and prosper for a time. In a licensed one, under a regulator scrutinising conduct and an audience that compares notes within seconds, only the honest application endures. I am not resting on the moral argument here, though I would happily make it; I am making the commercial one. Trust is the asset that decision science either builds or quietly spends, and in this industry, once spent, it does not come back. The regulated operators I work with are beginning to grasp this. The ones that will struggle are those still treating behavioural design as a growth hack to be concealed, rather than as a discipline to be governed and, where it protects the player, openly displayed.
THE NEXT ADVANTAGE Here, then, is where I believe the edge now sits. It is no longer in a flashier interface, though the past two decades were won there, nor in a new market, though the map still holds its white space. The next advantage in digital gaming belongs to whoever understands the player’s mind most honestly and designs the entire experience, from the first tap to the final withdrawal, for the human who is actually there. Nature spent four billion years learning that you design for the organism you have, not the one you might prefer, and we now have both the research on the shelf and the regulator at the door.
There is no excuse left for building for a player who was never real.
About the author
Mark McGuinness is a marketing leader with more than 20 years across gaming, iGaming and Web3, advising operators and the suppliers who serve them on go-to-market strategy, brand architecture and the use of behavioural science in commercial decisions. His work centres on building brands that earn trust and turning customer data into player
experience that lasts. He is currently Marketing Lead for
CreateFuture’s iGaming division.
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