Electronic gaming machines currently employ antiquated locking, entry, and access log techniques. For access logs, operators (i.e. casinos) and suppliers alike use paper log books to manually enter and track machine access information, which (in the simplest form) includes the technician information, reason for accessing the gaming machine, date, and time. There are many opportunities for errors to be introduced in this manual process, and the information entered into the log book is locked away in the gaming machine or a stand underneath the gaming machine, making review and data monitoring from these log books a time consuming process. Additionally, the operator may receive out of date data from these log books as a result of the recorded information having to be physically retrieved from every machine or machine stand in order to be viewed. There have been occurrences where a certain gaming machine's filter becomes clogged, and the decreased air flow actually causes parts in the computer portion of the gaming machine to melt down and fail. If the log books containing information of the frequency of the filter changes were more readily available, for example, the operator could have possibly prevented the computer failure by changing the filters more often, relocating the gaming machine, or changing other external factors around the gaming machine.
Another barrier to machine maintenance and accurate record keeping is the entry method itself. Using physical locks and keys to gain entry to a gaming machine, while very secure, is also very out of date. Physical locks and keys in gaming machines have always been specified, purchased, installed, and tracked by the operator. Often, gaming regulators require two locks on the main entry door on a machine, then another lock to gain access to the cashbox drop, and then one (and in some jurisdictions, two) more lock(s) on the cashbox itself. With this possible combination of up to five locks per machine, it is easy to imagine that the cost to purchase, maintain and track all these lock and key sets is quite expensive for even a small gaming floor. Additionally, consider the case where a technician may lose a key or have it stolen, and then the operator must replace their entire gaming floor with all new lock sets to ensure the security of the gaming machines—this is a very costly situation.
In gaming properties, security is paramount to the operators, and machine maintenance—while important to the profitability of the gaming machine—is a lower priority. A floor supervisor's (often called a “pit boss”) job is to ensure the security of the games and compliance with the regulations of the operator's legal jurisdiction. Because of these concerns, it is a common practice to disallow technicians to access the gaming machine to perform preventative maintenance or even read information from a paper log book when a patron is playing the game; furthermore, due to these security concerns and various regulations, access is limited during certain times of the day. As such, both the difficulty of machine entry with physical locks and the out of date paper log books affect the frequency and even the methods of how a machine is maintained and serviced. It is common for gaming machines to be serviced only when a particular problem has occurred. Preventative maintenance is not commonly performed and only occurs as a result of trial by error because there is currently no good way to gather meaningful or timely data.
An additional result of the security measures is that an operator usually only had a small window of time in which to make their cash “drops” (changing out the cashboxes full of money with empty ones). A large inefficiency in the cash drop process, as noted, is the use of physical locks on the gaming machines due to the manual process of finding, inserting, unlocking, locking, and removing the correct key and then moving on to the next machine. Because their time is limited and the cash drop method is cumbersome, cash drop crews often only do half of the floor one day and the other half the next day; this ties up half of the day's take and leaves it in the gaming machines, and it also introduces the possibility of a gaming machine going down because the cashbox is full and will not accept any more tender.
Last, with regards to security, the gaming machines currently have no way of communicating to security or the pit boss that there is questionable activity going on. Common cheating practices involve attempting to “string” (pull a inserted bill back out via an attached string or wire once the credits have appeared on the game), drilling holes in the gaming machine to access components, electrically shocking the gaming machine, etc. In addition to cheating, patron damage to machines is also a concern. To address cheating and damage problems, operators invest in security systems that are monitored in back rooms by security officers, who then have to communicate to pit bosses and security officers on the gaming floor of a possible problem that they have identified via, for instance, a security camera. This is akin to installing a webcam outside of a parking lot in order to monitor a car in the parking lot instead of just simply installing an alarm in the car itself.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds