A federal court judge has found Crown Melbourne and a poker machine developer did not breach consumer law through the design of one of its popular electronic gaming machines.
The case was brought by former gambling addict Shonica Guy, who was represented pro-bono by Maurice Blackburn lawyers. They argued that Crown and Aristocrat Technologies had engaged in deceptive, misleading and unconscionable conduct by misleading people who played Dolphin Treasure poker machines about their chances of winning.
Lawyers representing Guy, Ron Merkel and Peter Gray , argued the machines were designed unfairly and players were not properly informed about their prospects of winning, which they argued was a breach of consumer law.
But delivering her judgement in Melbourne on Friday following a three-week hearing in September, Justice Debra Mortimer found the design features of the machine did not amount to misleading or unconscionable conduct.
While she said an ordinary gambler may find information on gambling machines about returns confusing, “I have found any such impression formed would be dispelled as soon as she or he actually starts gambling and the randomness of the operation of the machine and returns become apparent”.
“The impression is fleeting and may cause confusion but it is not misleading or deceptive as the law defines those concepts,” Mortimer found. “I did not find anything in the conduct of Crown or Aristocrat that could be characterised as unconscionable.”
Both Crown and Aristocrat complied with regulations, she found.
Guy’s case focused on the Dolphin Treasure’s oversized fifth reel, which contains 44 symbols rather than the 30 featured on the first four reels. This design, which made it harder to land on the winning symbols, was impossible for players to notice, lawyers argued.
Further arguments addressed the “starving” of the reel – the appearance to the player that there is some regularity in the distribution of the symbols, when in fact the configurations are not even; allegedly insufficient information provided to players on display screens; and the alleged disguising of losses as wins through flashing lights and playing of sounds.
Those design features amounted to deception that no reasonable player would be aware of, Maurice Blackburn argued. They hoped the case would lead Crown and Aristocrat being forced to remove the machines or change their design.
There were 38 Dolphin Treasure machines on the Melbourne casino floor, the court previously heard. Lawyers chose to focus on that machine, first released in 1997, as it contains features common to other electronic gaming machines.
Mortimer added that it was not up to the court but regulators to determine whether gambling was ”desirable or undesirable”.
She said her findings should not diminish the accounts of Guy and other witnesses who had given evidence about the harm gambling had on their lives.
“I accept their evidence was genuine and acknowledge the courage it must have taken to give those accounts in a public forum,” Mortimer said. “Most of this evidence was not specific enough to contribute to proving the allegations made.”
She added that more research was needed into gambling.
A professor of public health at Monash University who has studied the harms of gambling, Charles Livingstone, said he believed there would be many more cases brought against casinos and gambling machine manufacturers in future as new information was revealed.
“As we learn more about the relationship between gambling machines and addiction, and find out more about how these machines cause harm, then we can expect changes in how the law interprets these issues and how governments regulate the industry,” he said.
“We saw the same thing with big tobacco.”
