BOSSIER CITY, La.--Casino game designers by and large tune their machines to drone, jingle, chink and burble cohesively in a major key--more often than not they sound in C--to provide the din a harmonic center. This is stickier than the ambience that would result from the random use of sound effects or, worse yet, the silence that could be engineered into the model electronic slot machine.
If the machines in the penny slots room of the Horseshoe Casino were not harmonized, the atonal metal-on-metal recordings of metal coins striking metal trays (no real coins drop anymore; accounts are cashed out via a printed and bar-coded voucher slip) might repel some would-be gamblers. Silent machines have been tested; no one likes them.
As it is, the noise is loud but controlled--if you want you can attend to the bro-country pumping through the remarkably balanced speakers overhead or even hold a conversation with a fellow button-pushing pleasure seeker--and designed to energize and reward the patrons. Triumphant three- and four-note trumpet flourishes sound when a win occurs, no matter how small (say 14 or 40 cents on a quarter bet) is scored. The only note of dissonance comes when the player elects to quit the game. Cashing out elicits a metallic grinding noise, a sputtering raspberry of disapproval.
Slot machines work the same way video games and smartphone apps do--they mean to keep you engaged, keep you pushing buttons, trying to reach the next level. They mean to encourage you just enough to keep going, giving you just enough positive feedback that you lose your bearings in regard to reality. Nobody really thinks they can beat a slot machine--it's not like poker or blackjack where you can imagine yourself competing against human beings who might not be as skillful at the game as you are--but most people can be lulled into a kind of collusion with the device. If you're the sort of person who loses hours to Candy Crush or Angry Birds, you probably should stay well clear of a casino, or at least leave your credit and ATM cards in your room (or in the possession of a heartless friend) when you go.
Still, on nights like this, I can't understand how casinos stay in business for all the winning going on.
My mother is on a penny slot machine of Australian make, one of several games that feature a character known as Mr. Cashman, an iconic figure (in Australia) who first appeared there in the 1990s. The game makes no sense to me, but my mother alternates between pushing a button that wagers two credits--two pennies--and asking me or Karen to push that button for her. Because, I suppose, it is family time and this is an activity we are doing together.
I don't question the wisdom of this because my mother is playing with, as they say, "house money." She ran up her initial $20 to $100 before we arrived, and she seems to be losing at a painfully slow pace.
But then, every so often, Mr. Cashman--an anthropomorphized yellow coin wearing a top hat and oversized white gloves which aren't quite connected to his body by limbs--appears on the video screen and does something odd like re-spinning some of the columns and tossing multiplier values about. And suddenly the 15 cents my mother won turns into 80 cents. And then he shows up and demands she touch a star on the screen. And then another star. And then another star. And suddenly my mother's $20 is up to $97 and we're demanding she cash out before she blows our inheritance.
Then we walk a few feet over to where my Aunt Lois is wrestling with some blue-tinged seizure inducer with my Uncle Ken kibbutzing. Lois is batting the buttons like some kitten who's been injected with a sci-fi serum that has made her super intelligent and the only one who can re-program the invading Tralfamadorians' vastly superior artificial intelligence protocols and save the planet by rendering them allergic to Twitter.
As we're watching, she wins $80.
Then we move a few more feet down the corridor where my mother's high-roller friend Paula--whose player reward points secured our free room in the casino's luxe hotel (Karen called the Horseshoe and was quoted $309 a night so we were all set to stay in the Microtel before Mom told us we had a freebie)--is conducting business with one of the quarter machines. She's ahead too. Sure, she is.
Having just gotten off the road from Little Rock, we prevail on them to walk out of the 65-degree casino, down the corridor to a coffee shop where Mom can spend some of her winnings on us. (She's winning now, but I know how casinos work.)
So we push two tables together, order coffee and a bag of surprisingly good chocolate cookies and catch up on the past few months. Which were pretty eventful but nothing that I can talk about here because they've all caught on to the fact I write about these semi-yearly meetups with Mom, who just turned 81 last week.
In fact Paula, who thinks sitting at a high table places one closer to one's food and therefore allows one to eat quicker, pointedly asked me before we came down if I could print out a copy of the column I wrote where I revealed her novel time and motion theory. So I guess the jig is up and from now on I'll have to write only the dull stuff (or at least refrain from posting these columns on Facebook). I'll never get the family up to Arkansas if Paula thinks that people here are going to stare or worse ask her about her ionic foot pad detox regime or the great salamander massacre.
I don't dare tell you about the aging RV my 22-year-old niece bought with her boyfriend.
Not that any of those things would be all that interesting to y'all anyway. Y'all know how families are.
At least I hope you're lucky enough to know that kind of crazy love.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 07/17/2018