Really only finite possibilities?

Been reading 37signals recently - their design philosophy really is inspiring...

In one post, they talk about how readers warn them of websites that rip off their design, and upon a warning from 37Signals, they sometimes get a response to the affect of "how many different ways are there to design a web page or a web app?"

Whenever I run into designer’s block ... I turn to the world of wrist watches.

A wrist watch is a tiny canvas with something to keep that canvas tied to your wrist. It’s just a couple inches round or square or triangular. It has a fixed, common purpose: Tell time...

And yet somehow, with these physical and practical constraints, watch design flourishes. From analog to digital to a combination of the two, tens of thousands of designs are born. Different type, different proportions, different shapes, different perspectives, different indicators, different buttons, different bezels, etc. Fresh new designs hit the market all the time. Here are about a hundred different interpretations of the same question: “What time is it right now?”

I would think the same thing about how it's so difficult to innovate standard genres in games. How many FPS's can there really be after all? Then Team Fortress comes around... and Portal, what about Gunz? I also thought that all the genre's really have already been created (or that new genres would just be combinations of the existing ones) - but here comes physics based games like Armadillo Run.

I don't consider myself a creative person - just resourceful. I assume that I'm like most people in hoping to be on the edge of innovation.

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Guaranteed Play Video Poker

I subscribed to "Southern Gaming" for two reasons
#1: I am really into probability (especially video poker)
#2: It was free at the time.

I admit, most of the time they just go into the recycling bin after I thumb through them, but every once and a while I stumble on some fun articles.

In this one, there was just a blurb about a new style of video poker: "Guaranteed Play(tm) video poker".

In one test version at a 25-cent denomination, a $20 ticket bought 100 guaranteed hands of Deuces Wild. Instead of starting with 80 credits on the meter, as in a regular 25-cent video poker, the meter starts at zero - that's the key to casinos being able to offer the guarantee. Bet, and the credit meter moves to minus-5. Hit four of a kind for 20 credits in this Deuces version, and the meter moves to plus-15.

At the end, if you have positive credits, you can cash out. If the meter is negative, you just walk away - you never pay more than your original buy-in, no matter how negative the credit meter gets.

So what are the potential winnings here? Let's say you break even every hand. At the end of the session, you walk away with the same amount of money as if you lost every hand - nothing... for a net loss of $20. So in order to actually make out, you have to not only stay in the black to get paid, but you need to be up MORE than the amount of your buy-in. How many people actually double their money in a casino?

To combat this problem, there has got to be some user-side benefits or else the system would fail. You'll get more hands than $20 would normally buy or much better odds.

So what about strategy? When you're playing with virtual money and you're in the hole anyway nearing the end of your session, you might as well go for the gold. A low pair with some face cards? You would save the face cards normally... but when you're -100, being -95 won't do you any good, so go for the four of a kind.
So what's going on here - why this over regular video poker?

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