In 1913, Marcel Duchamp let three one-meter threads fall one meter onto three strips of canvas. He would then fix each thread in the position where it had landed. Each resulting curve was slightly different, shaped by its own momentary drift of air. Duchamp would name the series “3 Standard Stoppages,” and they are now held at MoMA. These pieces would come to represent a creative thought process that would influence the next century. This creative process would be characterized by bringing a degree of order to a situation and then letting the process run its course, imposing a restrictive framework and allowing for unpredictability. That intentionally restrictive framework would prove far more fertile than most people would realize. The same structure would appear in music, choreography, and eventually digital casino gaming.
The logic behind this principle is most clearly illustrated by a mechanism that most people encounter as entertainment. When you play a digital reel game and hit spin, the result is determined at the instant of initiation by a PRNG (Pseudo Random Number Generator) cycling through thousands of numbers per second and landing on a number that correlates to a pattern of symbols. Designers have control of all other aspects of the game. Designers choose and control the symbols, how often each symbol appears, what each combination is worth, how volatile the game is, and how the wins occur throughout the game. The one thing the system releases completely is which combination of symbols actually appears. This system is how all reel games, from the basic three column game to complex Megaways games, operate. Betinia New Jersey offers players a variety of reel games, and what each spin returns is completely random. Duchamp would recognize the logic behind this system of random outcomes, even if the language is now expressed in jackpots as opposed to canvas and thread.
Threads, torn paper, and the rules of accident
Duchamp’s threads were the opening move, and Jean Arp pushed the same idea further in 1916-17 with his Untitled (Collage with Squares Arranged according to the Laws of Chance). Arp began this work by tearing paper and gluing the torn pieces where they landed. Each piece of the collage fell to the floor and was glued in its random landing position. The process was described by MoMA as “assisted chance,” since the position of some of the pieces was nudged by Arp. The idea was that the pieces would land randomly, but there would be some control. The set rules allowed random landing, while the nudging was controlled, permissible human contact. The outcome was genuinely unpredictable, and the possible results were still undefined.
Duchamp and Arp pioneered a redefinition of authorship. The artist set all the framework constraints: the height of the drop, the dimensions of the canvas, paper size, and the use of gravity to decide rather than intention. Everything within the constraints was undefined and free. The use of the word “accident” is almost inappropriate, since nothing of the sort occurred. Everything happened perfectly, exactly according to the definition. The goal was to achieve a surprising, genuinely unpredictable result within a predictable, definite framework.
When music let go
John Cage arrived at the same logic from a completely different direction. His Music of Changes (1951) for solo piano derives its name from the Chinese I Ching, an ancient divination system composed of 64 hexagrams generated by coin tosses or yarrow stalks. Cage developed an extensive matrix of musical events: pitches, rhythms, dynamics, silences. The consultation of the I Ching determined what musical event resided in what position of the score. Cage decided on all the rules of the game: the potential sounds, notation, the rules of the matrix, the structure. The I Ching determined what actual sounds occurred.
This idea was pushed to its extreme with 4’33”, premiered in Woodstock, New York, on August 29, 1952, by David Tudor. In this work, the performer sits at the piano and plays nothing. The “music” is the sounds that occur in the performance space. The sounds that fill the performance space are different in every performance. This is not due to the performer’s improvisation. It is due to the restrictive system of silence that allows an endless range of sounds to occur: the sound of traffic outside, a cough in the audience, the wind blowing against the windows. The composer controls everything and then yields to the audience’s experience. The score is the restrictive system. The event is the unpredictable, open result. This is the same structure Duchamp established with threads.
Bodies in unpredictable space
Cunningham worked with Cage directly, but theirs was a deeper collaboration than just an exchange of ideas. For Suite by Chance (1953), Cunningham had made exhaustive charts, taking several months to complete them. The charts had every single movement, every single duration, and every single spatial direction that a dancer could face. Then Cunningham employed chance procedures to determine the dancing sequence of each dancer, the number of dancers on stage at a given moment, and the timing of each entry and exit.
Initially, audiences found the movement unsettling for two reasons: it had no beginning, middle or end and no narrative logic, and it carried no imposed emotional arc, with no reason one movement followed the next except which side the coin had landed on the night before. Cunningham was clear that this disorientation was a feature. He was showing the dancers and audiences that there were movements that the dancers knew well, and a vocabulary that was immutable and repeatable, and that unpredictability could be found in the order in which movements were presented.
Cunningham’s work showed that true unpredictability and complete order could exist side by side.
Reels, algorithms, and the architecture of surprise
A digital slot machine uses a fixed structure to produce completely unpredictable outcomes, something that would have astounded Cunningham. Each ‘event’ is determined independently of the last, with the underlying system making thousands of determinations per second.
Everything beyond the mechanism in the system is fixed by the designer with great care. A purposefully designed symbol hierarchy makes premium themed symbols less frequent and gives them the highest payouts. Low value card symbols occur more frequently and provide smaller, more frequent returns. The paytable outlines the returns for each symbol combination. Volatility determines the size of the returns and whether they come as large infrequent returns or small, frequent returns. A high-volatility Megaways title can feel entirely different from a low-volatility classic three-reel slot, even when they share the same expected return to player (RTP). A designer can control the rhythm of a session by the mathematics of the game.
This doesn’t change the outcome of individual spins. Design controls the system’s grammar. For individual spins, control is relinquished to the algorithm. This is the same division of control Cage referred to when creating his musical matrix. Set the parameters and systems, and then surrender to the outcome of the individual case.
The purposes here are entirely different from those of Cage or Cunningham. In a reel game, unpredictability is part of the player’s experience. The structural parallel is real, but the context and motivation behind it are different, and so is what the player actually experiences.
The same grammar, different sentences
The most helpful comparison to bring all of this together is vocabulary and the outcome it provides.
Cage’s matrix includes every possible sound; Cunningham’s charts include every possible movement for a dancer; a slot game has its list of symbols for each reel. The vocabulary is finite; what differs is the sentence.
A difference worth mentioning is that for Cage or Cunningham, relinquishing control to chance made a statement about authorship and what could be perceived as the “meaning” in a piece of music or dance. In a slot game, relinquishing control to chance is the design: the unpredictable outcome is the draw for the player. The structural logic is the same, but the reasons for using it are entirely different. Both methods work toward different ends.
Why We Keep Returning
The pattern, fixed rules and random outcomes, is too prevalent across too many fields to be random. Something about it fits the way human attention and pleasure actually work.
A system with no constraints produces noise. A system with constraints that entirely define each possible outcome produces nothing interesting. Systems that strike the right balance between constraint and flexibility retain audience interest in a way that pure order and pure chaos both fail to do. Duchamp’s threads would be boring if they always fell in the same location. 4’33” would be boring if the background noise was simply recorded and then played. A slot game would be boring if every single spin produced the same result.
Cunningham made an important observation relating to this concept. His audience experienced movement that was fresh to the dancers because the combinations that the audience experienced were a direct result of the chance procedures that he used. As a result, audiences shared the same surprise and experienced an outcome that was not a result of the choreographer’s preferences or the audience’s expectations.
It is this very quality that structured chance is most known for, and that quality is shared among the many variations of structured chance. The medium, the goal, and the context may all change; however, the basic principle and structure are the same. Carefully construct the system, and then release the event, and then wait to see the outcome.
