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unknown return to player

by Lea Kristin Würtenberger

Slot Game Installation

individual agency and return to player (%RTP)

In gambling, return to player (%RTP) refers to the percentage of wagered money a slot game is programmed to pay back to players over time. It expresses a long-term statistical balance — not an outcome distribution of a single instance of play. Each spin, from the player’s perspective, unfolds within underdetermined odds: despite the temptation to engage in general probabilistic speculation, any concrete expectation is illusory.

This dynamic mirrors the condition of hope in particularly opaque environments. Like %RTP, this tragic variant of hope operates in the gap between individual experience and collective probability — between what might happen this time and what is structured to occur on average. While causal patterns emerge retrospectively, in the moment of action, we operate at best only under the illusion of control, sustained by the belief that persistence should, over time, reveal meaningful correlation. In unknown return to player, the metaphorical reference to the %RTP in gambling can be understood as an interpretation of the driving force in hopeful risk: a model for how individuals invest agency into uncertain systems. But it also reveals how this connection can also be read as a contrasting comparison: unlike the transparency of the pre-defined stochastics in gambling machinery, the complexity of our real situation doesn’t allow for clean math. Even about baseline probabilities we lack much data.

hope requires uncertainty, uncertainty entails speculation

When we hope for something to happen, we tend to engage, tacitly or in almost manic repetition, in a constant re-evaluation of our favours. We speculate about how likely it is that what we hope for might become true and which pulls and pushes make this more probable. Ideally, we wish we could change the constellation of the world’s events and causalities to force a probability of 1.

But certainty is after hoping. For a subject A to hope for some x requires that x is uncertain to A – or else it would count as knowing.[1] As knowers, we can predict the future. As hopers, we must guess and gamble. There is a continuum to these gambles – between those with a probability of x so high, that hoping is a happy longing – and cursed gambles, mad hopes, in which uncertainty is but consolation. In her two essay collections, Hope in the Dark and No Straight Road Gets You There Rebecca Solnit writes on the latter. Hope, she says, is often confused with optimism. But a less kitsch instantiation of hoping can mean to simply insist on the factual uncertainty of future events and recognise that, however unlikely, good ones may be among them. A non-zero probability that, beyond our predictions, may transform into reality. If hope tolerates this minimal positive – and the aching ambiguity it generates – it can turn paralysis into action. Solnit tells the stories of people whose contentment with speculation rather than good prognoses leads them to keep working on their cause – guessing, testing, and re-adjusting their actions as an active part of their hope.

This speculative rumination becomes more pronounced in our heads the less we have insight into the impact of our actions on the probabilities of future events. When we hope within epistemically opaque, chaotic environments – but uncynically hope, in Solnit’s sense – we might want to water every seed of probabilistic growth – from skincare to ritualistic offerings. We are tempted and willing to count any small hint, however unrelated, as evidence of success. We test theories, look for shortcuts, so that some may someday turn out to have an impact. With a desire for increasing control, we rationalise an arsenal of tactics for a game to which no one has given us the rules and paytables.

[1] Following a standard minimal definition of hope in contemporary analytic philosophy (following J.P. Day, or Downie for instance, see Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy), x must also be desired by the subject and possible in a meaningful sense. But these criteria are not the focus of this work.

the game as a vessel for hopeful agency: allegory of the modern slot

I think of hope not as a passive state but as a force that governs agency — a drive to rationalise new normative frames for decision-making in uncertain worlds, a compulsive search for pattern. Few forms capture the phenomenology of focused agency as effectively as a real-life game. As C. Thi Nguyen argues in Games: Agency as Art (2020), games do not just represent agency — they offer players to inhabit it. They do this by constructing temporary worlds of value — artificial normative systems we can enter, test, and discard. Within them, we can explore our own decisions and projections as an aesthetic medium: one to inhabit and reflect on. Unknown return to player aims to transmit an exaggerated aspect of hopeful agency - one that does not presuppose mastery or knowledge of outcomes; but is an orientation toward possibility despite epistemic opacity.

The foolish and frenzied agency offered by a modern slot game can be an inhabitable allegory of what it feels like to navigate epistemically opaque environments. Both combine unpredictable outcomes with a chaotic surface of familiarity and intelligibility. In a drive for wins, a canon of icons and explicit animations, rhythmic cycles and a general suspense create a sense that some hope may be placed even in randomness. Faced with unclear conditions for success, we keep playing — speculating, pattern-hunting, hoping that continued engagement might yield a better understanding of our situation.

a game set in the havoc of the dark ages: lady fortune, the jester, and bestial marginalia

The heart of unknown return to player is the playable slot game Reapers of Fortune: Feral Frenzy. Its iconography is drawn from the illuminated margins of medieval manuscripts [2] — a tradition that produced, alongside metaphorical scenes centering around fate and fortune, a surplus of inexplicable creatures: hybrid beasts and odd animals which construct an eerie reading beyond the lines. These beasts were not merely ornamental. Medieval illuminators worked within a cosmology of radical epistemic opacity, only one aspect in which the “Dark Ages” appear as a prototype of uncertainty. Many animal faces appear to us as strange because their authors had never seen an apt representation of the species in their lifetime - others represent counterfactual threats in an attempt to grasp what to them would always have to remain abstract in depiction.

In this game, modern translations of these beastly medieval illuminations serve as metaphorical avatars of what we fear or hope for in conditions of uncertainty. Special event icons are drawn from the same historical realm: Lady Fortune, perhaps the most persistent allegorical figure of hope in pre-modern Europe — presides over her spinning wheel that raises and crushes kings without expectable moral logic. This wheel, reproduced across Boethius manuscripts and cathedral carvings from the 12th century onward, is the game's central mini-game triggered by a win combination in the Lady Fortune paylines. The Jester, on the other hand - the scatter- icon of Reapers of Fortune: Feral Frenzy - represents our self-positioning in speculative hoping as deluded, ironic fools — who play knowingly risking loss.

Together, this medieval iconography serves as a metaphorical backdrop — between the chaos of our situatedness in a complex probabilistic situation and the havoc of medieval mythology, an opaque world in which hope and imagination were projected regardless.

[2] drawn from freely accessible online libraries like the Index of Medieval Art: https://theindex.princeton.edu/