Inside Asian Gaming

October 2009 | INSIDE ASIAN GAMING 19 members and to the industry as a whole is the ability to organise committees of cross industry experts to discuss, develop and implement common standards. “In response to requests from the Native American gaming industry in the United States, GSA developed a language that allows us to extract information from their system servers. It’s called S2S—System to System. So the operators implemented the S2S language and they now can communicate to one server. The servers can now ‘talk’ to each other using one simple language.” In this context, manufacturers that have spent a lot of time and effort developing competing, rival technologies need to be confident that open standards do not mean surrender of competitive advantage. This is especially important in Asia, where the protection of intellectual property rights and enforcement of those rights varies across legal jurisdictions. “We have policies in place that govern the way we operate,” says Mr DeRaedt. “We have anti-trust laws in place about the way we deal with intellectual property and anti-trust issues. That structure is very well thought out over the last 11 years. We have clear directions from our board that define the focus groups. At this point in time, it happens to be about communication standards. But that doesn’t stop us looking at other technical standards for the industry.” Keep it not so simple Open communication standards are driving innovation in the marketplace. For example, under the shared protocol approach, an interactive player screen from Supplier A can be fitted to Supplier B’s slot machine.This benefits all: the companies, the casino and the players. Supplier A increases its market reach and Supplier B boosts the functionality of its own slot product. “[Slot] Machines used to be relatively simple,” says Mr DeRaedt. “Information used to be exchanged in a unidirectional way. That means from the gaming device to the computer at the back end. In that world it made sense to use proprietary protocols for data collection. What you were able to get out [in data] is what you had available to work with. There was no interaction with the player. There was no ability to offer services. There was no capability for people to do side bets or multiple bets at the same gaming terminal in the case of slot machines. “Now slots have the capability of the service window. So you suddenly have an interaction between the back of the house and the front [of house] where the player is. You can now reach out to the player and have ‘conversations’,” points out Peter DeRaedt. “Whether these ‘conversations’ are the operator offeringproducts, suchas discounts in a restaurant, or the ability for the player to order drinks doesn’t really matter. The key thing is the ability to interact, very much in the same way as if you log in to Amazon.com and the site sends you a screen where you can start ordering stuff. “Communication is now a serious issue, and the industry has addressed that with GSA’s standards system.” S 2S (System to System) was developed in response to requests from the Native American gaming industry in the United States. It allows operators to communicate with many system servers via one simple programming language. G2S (Game to System) provides a common game to system communication protocol. Manufacturers are seeing G2S as the vehicle to enable the new features that will make games more interactive and fun for players. The first G2S applications were seen in California, Florida and Nevada in the US as casino operators looking for a competitive edge started using some of the powerful features available in G2S on their gaming floors. GDS (Gaming Device Standards) is the Association’s USB-based serial protocol. It is used to connect gaming peripheral devices such as printers, note acceptors and card readers together in a gaming device. The GDS protocol provides the powerful ‘plug and play’ capabilities of USB 2.0 along with the ability to download new firmware to peripheral devices. GDS is fully USB compliant and is based on USB’s HID (Human Interface Device) class definition. Along with USB support comes UTF-16 support. This character-encoding scheme allows symbols from major languages (including the important Chinese, Japanese, and Korean character sets) to be represented and sent from a gaming device to a peripheral device, such as a printer, in just two bytes of data. GSA at-a-glance A brief guide to some of the Association’s work in promoting unified standards In Focus