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Week of March 4, 2003 |
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Baby Boomers with Buckets of Quarters |
NEW YORK, March 4 (UPI) -- Okay, read this list and tell me
what the following terms have in common:
Andy Capp, Betty Boop, Blondie, Frankie & Annette's Beach
Party, The Lone Ranger, Popeye, Playboy, Ray Charles' "America
the Beautiful," To Tell the Truth, American Bandstand, Austin
Powers, Evil Knievel, Elvira Mistress of the Dark, The Addams
Family, Jeopardy, I Dream of Jeannie, The Mummy, The Price Is
Right, Clue, Ripley's Believe It Or Not, Yahtzee, Budweiser, The
Honeymooners, The Incredible Hulk, Let's Make a Deal, Rubik's
Cube, Spider-Man, The Three Stooges, Hollywood Squares, Pac-Man,
Pictionary, Survivor.
All of these are, of course, popular culture brand names--
for celebrities, cartoons, movies, game shows, magazines, parlor
games, video games, TV series, a beer and a motorcycle daredevil.
But if you're wondering why there was so much money spent
about a month ago in a successful effort to get our copyright
laws extended for an extra 95 years, look no further than this
list. These are all . . . slot machines.
And of course I haven't even named the main one--"Wheel of
Fortune"--because that would have given it away.
How can there possibly be this many media companies earning
money every time a quarter is dropped into a slot in some Indian
casino in Minnesota?
For me the jaw-dropper on the list is the "Ray Charles
America the Beautiful" slot. Bear Stearns, the Wall Street
brokerage firm, describes the game as taking "interactive game
play to an entirely new level, allowing players to truly
experience the sights and sounds of Mr. Charles' long and
illustrious career. When players line up three Ray Charles
Concert Tickets, the monitor comes alive and players select
different concert tickets from Mr. Charles' storied past. Mr.
Charles then tells a different story from the specific concert
venue before the bonus feature concludes with a stirring
rendition of 'America the Beautiful.'"
You know, it was great when he sang it at the 1984
Republican Convention in Dallas, but the idea of hearing 12 bars
of Ray singing "America the Beautiful" every 30 seconds in a
casino is just absolutely horrifying to me, not least because the
grotesque combination of gospel style, Americana, and patriotism
filtered through a tinny speaker and competing with hundreds of
whirring machines is bound to feel like the psycho-in-the-
funhouse scene in a Stephen King movie.
But then you have the other extreme--a machine based on
Budweiser beer. "This game," we're told, "utilizes the hip images
of the number one beer brand in the world. Featuring the swamp
bonus, which follows the antics of those famous lizards Frank and
Louie, this fun game takes you to the swamp to find the brand-
belching frogs 'Bud,' 'weis' and 'er.' Players rack up credits as
they search the swamp for these elusive frogs. Available in a
unique Budweiser bottle-shaped cabinet."
Okay, I guess that means if a Budweiser machine is next to a
Ray Charles machine, then we'll have croaking comedy-frog noises
along WITH "O beautiful for spacious skies" and "Wheel! Of!
Fortune!" I can't wait.
Obviously the common denominator here is that people who
play slot machines are older than the norm--to say the least--and
so their cultural icons are from the sixties and earlier. But
Betty Boop? Andy Capp? The Lone Ranger? That stuff is too old for
the Nostalgia Channel.
I'm not a big fan of slot machines, but this is obviously
the future of gambling. There are currently 600,000 slot machines
operating in the U.S.--most of them in the 14 states that have
large-scale casinos--but with eight states considering a major
expansion of gambling this year or next, there could be as many
as 100,000 more sold by the end of 2004.
What's strange about the trend is that legislators always
say that slot machines are a "limited" form of gambling, whereas
table games like blackjack and craps are somehow dangerous to
society. It's obviously the reverse. Ever since 1981, the first
year slot revenues exceeded table revenues in Nevada, the trend
has been toward more and more slots, fewer and fewer tables--and,
in fact, it's impossible to limit gaming anywhere you have slot
machines. In the year 2001, slot machines accounted for 75.8
percent of total casino revenues, leaving 24 percent for every
other kind of game.
In some states slots are even more dominant. In Iowa 91
percent of the business is slots. In Illinois the figure is 84
percent. Even in the "old" gambling states of Nevada and New
Jersey, slots contribute most of the casino's revenue--65 percent
in Nevada, 73 percent in New Jersey. Then there are the states
that don't even allow table games. In Delaware, 100 percent of
all gambling income comes from slots and the lottery.
And it's not just quarters anymore. The so-called "low
limit" player--the grandmother from Scranton--is no longer
sitting there for several hours and spending just 50 dollars or
so. The standard bet used to be quarters three-across, which
means you would place three 25-cent bets in the hopes that the
third reel will pay a huge jackpot. If you just bet one quarter,
you're not eligible for the big third-bet payoff.
But that was revolutionized in the following way. Modern
video screens have five symbols instead of three, and they show
three-to-five lines of symbols instead of one. You can then bet
on these symbols straight across, up and down, or diagonally. And
to sell this to the customer, they introduced "nickel slots."
Nickel slots aren't really nickel slots. In order to have a
chance to win the big payoffs, you need to bet 45 nickels at a
time--so the quarter player has already become a $2.25 player--
and in the latest generation of machines, there are incentives to
make you wager $5 every time you pull the handle or press the
button. (Nobody pulls the handle anymore.)
But the slots floor of the future has a few more surprises
likely to make you spend more. When the two biggest casinos of
the last ten years are unveiled--Borgata, opening this summer in
Atlantic City, and Le Reve, scheduled for 2005 in Las Vegas--they
will have "coinless" slots floors. The way this system works is
that you put money into the machine, but when it's time to
collect your winnings, the machine prints out a ticket with a
cash value. You can use that ticket to play another machine or
you can cash it at the bettor's window. (This system is already
in place in some smaller jurisdictions, like Oregon.)
It might sound like a small thing, but it has huge
implications for the industry. For one thing, it doesn't require
any employees--no hopper fillers, no change ladies, no managers
to pay off jackpots, no technicians to work with machines that
get jammed with coins. But more importantly, the casinos know
that any kind of cashless betting encourages more betting. The
more you can make it seem like you're playing with Monopoly
money, the more aggressive the bettor will become.
Even two years ago this would have seemed impossible. The
conventional industry wisdom since the beginning of time was that
the gambler needed to actually HEAR the money being paid out in
cash. That's why the coin receptacles are made out of noisy
reverberating tin. The sound of coins falling into the hopper was
considered one of the chief motivators for slots players.
What changed that is the video revolution. Slots games now
have so many bells and whistles--literal bells and whistles, as
they're twice as noisy as ten years ago--and so many "bonus
rounds" and video entertainment features that the gambler is now
more focused on the screen itself, the game action, and not on
the mere collection of profit.
But you wanna hear something REALLY scary? Go check out
official U.S. patent No. 5,902,983, which was awarded to
International Game Technology--largest slot manufacturer in the
world--on May 11, 1999. It's a patent for something called
"Preset Amount Electronic Funds Transfer System for Gaming
Machines."
Are you following this? They have a slot machine that can
double as an ATM. Not only is it coinless--it's cashless. You
insert your ATM debit card directly into the slot machine, key in
your PIN number, request whatever credit you want on the machine,
and the bank wires the money INTO THE MACHINE. You never see the
money or touch the money. It's like hooking up the slot machine
to your bank account!
Yikes. I would say it's like taking money from a blind man,
but that wouldn't make sense, because you're GIVING the money to
a blind man: Ray Charles. * © Copyright 2003 United Press International and Joe Bob Briggs |