Disorderly Content

I must admit to a fascination for casinos. Not the table games; despite my fondness for classic James Bond in Monte Carlo or somesuch place, I don't like the stakes. No, I'm strictly a slot player. And penny ante at that. Literally; I like to keep my bets at two bits or less.¹ But I enjoy the occasion visit to Vegas or Reno, where I am typing these very words.

It used to be that you'd put coins into the slot machine and it would pay off the same way. The machines had metal trays for receiving your winnings, which would make quite the racket when you won big. And that was the point, of course. They wanted everybody to hear the big winners. (The losers weren't nearly so noticeable.)

Immediate payoffs are mostly a thing of the past. Now the machines hold your coins so you can keep placing bets without having to take them from the hopper and drop them back into the slot. Eventually, assuming you haven't lost everything, you hit the Pay Out button and out come a flood of nickels or quarters or silver dollars. (Which haven't had silver in them for ages. And aren't even silver colored any more. But we still call them that. Nostalgia, I suppose.)

So the big noise from the big payout was delayed. But it still happened. There were a couple of problems, though. Like the machines jamming before they finished dumping a couple of hundred coins. Which happened quite frequently, at least to me. And then there's the mess of handling all those dirty coins, if only to dump them into the plastic bins provided by the casinos. Those wet towelette things did a fair job, but your hands still smelled of all that metal.

Things have changed again, if my experience this week is any indication. There aren't so many coin machines around. Now the slots pay off in certificates. And they accept them as well, so you can move from one machine to the next without having to touch dirty money. And you can put your certificate into a change machine that will turn it back into cash. Mostly worthless American cash, thanks to government fiscal policy. But spendable, which is the main thing.

But what of the psychological factor of all those coins clanging against metal receiving trays to remind gamblers that there's money being won all around them? Can't lose that, can we? So the certificate printers on the slot machines all have little speakers. And they play recordings of clanging coins while you wait for your scrip to pop out of the slot. What's next? Artificial scent generators to add the aroma of cheap cigars?

1. For any non-Americans who are confused by the expression, two bits refers to a quarter dollar. I believe the phrase comes from a Spanish coin called an ocho Real, which was designed to be broken into eight separate pieces to make change. So two bits are a quarter of the whole. It's also the source of the pieces of eight phrase so beloved of pirates. At least the movie versions thereof.