The cast of a contemporary online slot lobby will be familiar to anyone who watches wildlife or grows plants. The front page is shared by wolves, bison, eagles and koi carp, cherry blossom, lotus flowers and rainforest canopies. Nature has become one of the most dependable sources of imagery in digital games, and the explanations tell much about how individuals perceive animals and plants.
The clearest place to see this is on a phone, where players in the United Kingdom now tend to meet these games through a mobile casino rather than a desktop lobby. Wildlife titles take up a noticeable share of the Goldenbet casino catalogue, and the Goldenbet app carries that catalogue onto iOS and, in a separate build, onto Android handsets. Download and setup take a few minutes, one login covers the Goldenbet online casino site and the app alike, and the GB version of the lobby keeps the same nature-heavy front page as the browser edition.
Why the Natural World Suits a Five-Reel Grid
A slot symbol is not an easy task. It has to be identifiable within a fraction of a second, at the size of a postage-stamp, and be placed next to ten or twelve other symbols without the screen becoming visual noise. Animals that have bold outlines and plants with unique shapes pass that test with less difficulty than most subjects.
Colour is equally important. A savanna palette of ochre and dusty green, or the cold blues of a boreal forest, hands a designer a coherent scheme before a single symbol is drawn. Nature comes with its art direction, and studios have been glad to take the gift.
Fauna on the Reels: The Species Studios Return To
An approximate tally of nature slots reveals the same few animals reoccurring and reoccurring. The trend is based on the species that already have meaning to a large audience, be it folklore or a childhood trip to a zoo.
The two biggest names are provided by the American plains. The bison, which typically stampede across the reels in a dust cloud, supports a whole family of games, and the most likely animal to be the highest paying symbol in a North American forest theme is the grey wolf, often standing before a full moon.
In Asian and African environments, big cats perform the same tasks. The tiger and the lion provide the same combination of a familiar face and a reputation of strength, and the rhinoceros and the elephant complete the safari list where a developer needs to add some weight to the reels.
The favourite bird is birds of prey. Eagles and hawks are much more frequent than song-birds, whose little bodies and dull colours disappear on a busy reel, and the only one is the owl, whose round face and frontal eyes are easy to see.
The koi carp and the reef fish are dominant underwater, in part due to their colour, and in part because East Asian themes are biased towards the koi as a representation of fortune and perseverance. Insects are more of an exception, but honeybees and butterflies are frequent, the former due to the honeycomb providing a bonus grid, and the latter due to the wings being a ready-made pattern.
Flora on the Reels: Blossoms, Canopies and the Original Fruit Symbols
Plants are older on the reels than animals. The cherries, lemons, plums and melons of the traditional fruit machine date back to the early twentieth century, when American manufacturers placed pictures of fruit on machines that dispensed chewing gum, and the flavours became the icons.
Contemporary flora motifs are more airy. Games of Japanese influence feature cherry blossom as a scatter, or a frame, Chinese influence the lotus and the peony, and the Irish theme could not have been made without the four-leaf clover, a rare form of a common plant, not a species.
Rainforest and jungle environments do not consider plants as symbols but as scenery. The reels are framed by broad leaves and hanging vines, which add depth, and the animals are placed in the foreground. To a botanist, these backgrounds can be the most precise aspect of the design.
How Faithful Are the Animals?
Liberties will be spotted by readers who are familiar with the species. Wolves are depicted howling at a full moon, a behavior that has more to do with cinema than biology, as wolves howl to maintain contact with the pack and the moon is a by-product.
The most famous example is also the most misleading one. The shaggy animal on Buffalo-branded reels is an American bison, which the National Park Service notes is not related to the true buffalo of Africa and Asia despite sharing the name. Studios keep the older word because players recognise it, not because a zoologist approved it.
The case of white tigers is less obvious. The animal featured on most winter-themed reels is attracted as a specific species of snow, when in reality the white colour is a rare colour variant of the Bengal tiger due to a recessive gene. The artwork is attractive, but it turns an Indian colour morph into an imaginary arctic predator.
Nature Themes on the Small Screen
The desktop to phone transformation has transformed nature themes. A five-reel grid crammed into a portrait screen gives each symbol much less room, so studios have made outlines thicker and eliminated the finesse that used to distinguish a red fox and a coyote.
Small screens have also changed which animals get chosen, because a wolf’s silhouette reads clearly at thumbnail size while a hummingbird does not. The Spinyoo casino lobby shows the effect well: the wildlife section of the Spinyoo mobile app leans on bold, high-contrast species, and the same line-up appears whether a United Kingdom player opens it on iOS or on an Android handset. Download links for both platforms sit on a single page, the login is shared with the Spin Yoo online casino website, and the app ends up feeling less like a separate product than a pocket edition of the mobile casino that GB players already use.
What the Trend Says About Players
The fact that these themes are popular is an indication of the love that people still have towards the living world. A gamer who picks a wolf instead of a pharaoh or a pirate is picking something that is real, that can be seen on a stroll or on a hide, and that has a lifetime of connotations.
To the naturalist the judgment is ambivalent. The reels become flat and simplified and they sometimes even invent, but they also preserve bison, tigers and cherry blossom in front of millions of people who would otherwise pay them little attention. That is an odd form of conservation outreach, but it is not nothing.