Slot Machines and Player’s Memories
11
pneumatically endowed women in relatively unrevealing costumes,
providing eye candy to the player who sits down to play an otherwise
unimaginative game; however, it also hearkens back to a time when a
picture’s importance for its male adolescent discoverer lay only in its
existence as a picture o f an adult woman— a picture which symbolized
the world o f adult heterosexual identity. The obvious fact that the game
objectifies women is simply rendered irrelevant to the player.
While slot machine technology becomes increasingly
sophisticated, their themes remain constant. W hen the “colossal reel”
machine first took its place on the casino floor, for example, the
compelling twin display reflected “the same old law“ as Walt Whitman
would say in Song o f Myself. instead o f the characters from the newest
vampiric sensations, the Twilight series, there on the screen in beautifully
rendered, highly detailed faux paintings, were the characters o f Van
Heising, a name which hearkens back to the original vampire novel,
Dracula. Instead o f Once Upon A Time, the newest version o f twisted
children’s tales retold for adults, there was L il’ Red, an adult update o f
“Little Red Riding Hood.” Greek and Roman cultural tropes were
represented by an updating o f Zeus’ stories and the story o f Spartacus. In
sum, the idea is not to appeal to players in terms o f what they are reading
in the here and now, but in terms o f what they absorbed as children from
books, movies, and the storytellers in their lives— parents and teachers.
There is a loud and persistent voice throughout the Internet positing that
advertisers whet children’s appetites for adult products such as cigarettes
and alcohol by using cartoon characters and populär culture references;
here, game manufacturers are doing the same thing, only they are
whetting the gaming appetites o f those who are already grown by
appealing to the children within their psyches.
M organ State University
J.A. White
Works Cited
Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses o f Enchantment: The Meaning and
Importance ofFairy Tales. New York: Vintage, 2010. Print.
Previtti, Bill. “Casinos make way for even more slots.” ABQ Journal. 8
Feb 2013. Web. 5 Apr 2013.