For those that just can't wait, the $2.99 preview came out today. It has the sandman story. The hardcover had this story plaus stories of the other endless. I went ahead and bought the preview even though I know I'll end up buying the hardcover eventually.
I posted this on the prior thread but there were already 500 posts so no one noticed it, but isn't it Universal that is going to copy protect all their CD's? So even at $12 a broken CD is still a broken CD.
If only the police had access to some kind of engine designed for searching. A sort of searching engine, if you will. Then they could type this mysterious word "famicon" in the searching engine and find what the word meant...
There are two drawbacks to quicksaves, or saving too often in general.
- No risk experimentation.
The player really isn't afraid to jump out that window or off that cliff. They can dive into a room full of armed thugs without any fear at all. The lack of risk and fear of losing your "life" takes both immersion and reward out of passing an obstacle or event.
See I think I have to disagree here. I think that the riskless exploration is one of the great things about quicksaves. It is liberating because in a First-Person Shooter, it gives the player room to do that exploration and be able to ignore the goals of the game ofr a time. I can remember once while playing the KISS Psycho Circus game (which I think is a pretty underrated game) and once I had killed all the creatures on the level, I noticed a ledge occorss a canyon. It was obvious that the player wasn't supposed to be able to jump across that gap. But because of the quicksaves, I was able to experiment and try to make that jump without fear of losing my place in the game or without fear of death. Quicksaves let the player to kind of subvert the game and make it more of a free goalless play area which is very liberating. Certainly the presence or absence drasticly changes a players playing style. However, I don't know that it is productive to say that one is better than another. Doom was origninally intended to have a limited number of lives and be more point oriented. Had they done that Doom would have been a very different kind of game. Rules in games structure what is possible and different rules allow for different play experiences.
In the last part of the article, 3 games are listed, Combat, Pong, and Pac-Man. All three of which have have had remakes in the last 2 years. While they may not have been great games, its not like these franchises are languishing in obscurity.
I've posted on this issue before. Basically my point is not that videogmaes are or are not violent. It is that there are a lot of other things that go on in western society that seem much more violent but yet aren't considered violent because they are older forms of entertainment.
This issue of violence gets to a deeper issue. What is a violent videogame? Would you consider Madden 2002 to be a violent game? How about NHL 2K3? In all likelihood, Madden 2002 would not be considered "violent." Why? Because it is "just football." In American society (and probably in much of western society as well, although I am no expert on international culture), sports are naturalized. We consider them harmless. Even more than that, we encourage children to participate in them saying that they will be moral builders and the like. However, let us stop a moment and think about what actually happens during a contact, "masculine" sport like football (both kinds), basketball or hockey. How do players hype themselves up for the game, how to they refer to their opponents? "Let's kill 'em! Let's rip their heads off! Let's destroy them!"
So here we have an activity that involves actual real violence, hitting one another and face to face trash talking and yet we do not seem concerned that this will lead to other acts of violence? But we have these mediated, virtual enactments and we are concerned? Real violence does not cause more violence, but virtual violence does? The worst injury I have ever heard of at a LAN party is carpal tunnel! How often do fights break out at LAN parties? How often do they break out at sporting events? Remind me again which one of these causes violence?
This is not to suggest that sports are bad. Not at all. It is to show a point. Sports are considered part of our society. They have been since ancient times. So the thought that these may cause violence does not even occur to most people. However, these damn kids and their videogames. Now that is another story. Videogames are a new medium and they are a new entrant into our culture. Hence the moral panic surrounding them. Remember what rap was supposed to do to our kids? Remember what heavy metal was supposed to do? Remember rock and roll? There have been moral panics about technology dating all the way back to the popularization of the printing press. What is going on here is nothing different and as such we should try to see through the moralistic, "what about the children!?!" hype and see that the real issues here are not "do videogames make people violent?" but "Who decides what 'violent' is?" and "Why is that considered violent when there are so many other things in society that aren't?"
I will feel safe in admitting that videogmaes MIGHT make SOME kids POSSIBLY more violent when the media and anti-videogame zealots admit that physically agressive sports MIGHT make SOME kids POSSIBLY more violent. After all, I don't know about anyone else, but when I was in high school it wasn't the gamers that were beating up other kids it was the athletes.
There are tons and tons of games rated E for everyone. From sports games, to racing games to flight simulators to puzzle gmaes. Every gaming platform has lots of non-shoot 'em up games to offer.
Amazon and Toys r us have a "kid safe" web page listing only E rated games. Just because Grand Theft Auto gets so much press, we shouldn't let the impression that ALL videogames are violent. Just as there are films ofr every age group so too are there games for every age group.
While it is certainly sad that someone died, it is unfortunate that videogmes are once again being used as a scapegoat. There are many other hobbies that people participate in for hours and hours a day but are rarely if ever considered an "addiction" or scapegoated in the same way that videogames so often are.
How many people do we know who can't miss an episode of a soap opera? or how many people spend all night every night watching television? It seems highly likely that many more marriages have been broken up over a man who spend all his time working on his car than have been broken up by online games. What about every episode of Behind The Music where the musician neglects his family in order to make music go on tour and entertain? But none of these are stigmatised or scapegoated by being called "addictions."
I'm not arguing the technical definition of addiction. As I said, what I'm talking about is that there are lots of other activities out there that people do that take up just as much time as playing videogames but they aren't commonly called "addictions." Why is this? It seems that once again it goes back to the notion of moral panics and that people always seem to be looking to blame the new thing for old problems as a way of finding easy answers to complex problems. Children have died by playing in cars before and unfortunatly they almost certainly will again. It is terrible, but the problem is not Everquest. That Everquest is blamed is yet another sign that videogames are not respected and that they are even feared.
Well it has to do with all of this Radway male gaze things. men are the lookers, they are the one's that look and women are to be looked at. Men are active they do the looking, women are passive they are looked at. Men are voyuers and women are exhibitionists.
I can't beleive no one has posted the link yet, but the actual report (in pdf form) is available on the ESA site.
One thing of personal interest to me, as someone who studies videogame players, is that once again, there is not one word on the race of the people who play videogames. There has been a lot of work on gender and gamers but very very little on race.
The reason attractive women in advertizing work so well is that (hetrosexual)men want to get with the attractive woman and women want to look like her.
Women in western society are seen as such sex objects that it is acceptable for women to be able to admit that another women is attractive. On the other hand, however, if another man admits that another man is atractive then the accusations of homosexuality start to fly.
I had heard about microsoft's selling their software to college students at drasticly reduced prices before. however, I am currently going through orientation in a PHD program at a certain University in Indiana and they have Microsft office available for FREE to students via download. And certain students can get acess to their OS's for free as well. Now certainly what has happened is that my university has probably included the cost of these in tuition.
During orientation I mentioned that you could download Openoffice and its open source. Their responce was, "But microsoft office is free, why not use it?" I could not get these people to understand why they shouldn't download a microsoft product.
If we can't get phd students who claim to be active in social causes to understand why microsoft is evil, it will be very long time before we get the typical apathetic person to understand.
This wasn't a bad little article, especially for a general mostly non-gameplaying audience. But then they had to go and talk to the guy who had to go the "what about the children" moral panic route.
"I worry that the message that cheating is OK might carry over to more significant areas. If parents buy their children these magazines, it sends the message that it's OK to do this." Boo hoo. When will people realize that videogames are not exclusivly a children's medium?
I suppose that since there is no way to cheat in board games, or card games, or hide and seek, or on a test, or on one's spouce, then OF COURSE videogames are a horrible influence.
Remember that the Matrix videogame was heavilly hyped as being "written and directed by the Waschowski borthers" we all know how that turned out.
Writing a game is very very differnt than writing more traditional mediums. Each has their own language and style. I am always leary when I hear that "so and so" name writer has been brought in to "write" a videogame. It's also kind of sad that the videgame industry feels that they need to hire this outside talent rather than trust that people who make games for a living actually know how to make games.
Now all this being said, I was a big galactica fan and am looking forward to reading reviews of the game.
unfortunatly there seem to be a lot of people out there who just don't understand, "spend more upfront, save over the long run." In college I spent ten minutes trying to explain to one of my roommates that if he bought the big bottle of steak sauce it would be cheaper because he wouldn't have to buy it as often. His responce was, "But the little bottle's cheaper!"
Doom was made with mods in mind. In the first press release they hyped modability as one of the features. Wolfenstien, however, was not made with mods in mind.
Actually it isn't really about it being a guy thing. It is really about youth. Ever since adolecence has come to be seen as a seperate time period from childhood and adulthood, people have been afraid of teenagers and anything associated with teenagers. Rock and Roll, the internet, video games, rap. Back in the olden days all of those mental hygine films that today companies like Somthing Weird video sells that show kids doing drugs and stealing and getting into gangs. It is a pretty well documented thing that every generation people become stressed out about youth cultures.
You know there is almost a niche where this kind of thing could work, but unfortunately with it's stupid pay per play pricing scheme it is doomed to failure.
I think that if they made it a regualr generic pc, but totally standardized them so that every one they sold was the same and made a big deal about gauranteeing that any game would play on it out of the box without fiddling and that for a modest suscription fee it would download patches and whatnot and every two years you would get an updated modle, I think that a lot of suburbanites who aren't computer savy might buy it. With a completely homogenious product line, they could go to the game developers and say here test your game on this box and the game developers could make sure it worked. They could put a little "Phantom approved" logo on it.
If instead of spending all this time on making a secure backend for this streaming game stuff, they would spend time programing a sort of auto updater patch installer program they could make it more hands off for the idiot consumer. They could keep a database of games and the ratings for them and impiment a kind of V-chip for videogames to have a parental lock for games. "Parents don't be concerned about what your child is playing. The phantom has built in parental controls to keep your child from playing games that you don't approve of."
But no they aren't doing that, something that could succeed. They are trying to do what divx failed at and what the original versions of rhapsody and pressplay failed at, namely to try and make us pay and pay for something we otherwise would already own.
Why does every First-Person Shooter seem to have to have vehicles in it anymore? Amd I the only one who just hates it when you have to drive a vehicle in a FPS game?
i can think of a couple reasons. the fisrt is that it will probably be at least a couple weeks after the game comes out when teh other versions are ready, so that gives them some time after the game is out the door to work on it rather than have to wait for them to get done.
secondly, and this is a more speculative assumption, is that if it is downloadable, then maybe they don't have to offer tech support for them? I can't imagine the average game tech support guy being too helpfull on a linux question.
Well, I didn't work in Vegas and as i understand it generally their payout percentages are better than the casino i worked at. In Indiana (where I worked) the only industry that is more heavilly regulated than ours is the nucular industry.
You may have fun, but the vast majority of the people who go to the casino i worked at left angy and broke. I'm not talking about the person who goes four times a year. I am talking about the retired people who are throwing away their entire retirement fund. At our casino the most busy weekends were the first weekend of the month when people got their checks in the mail. I'm talking about the people who would come up with a pocket full of change to get just one more dollar bill. I'm talking about the people who try to use multiple different credit cards to get more money only to have them all rejected. Those people vastly outnumber people like you who go to have fun and know when to quit.
Certainly there are people who can go to casinos in moderation. Just like there are people who can do drugs in moderation or anything else. However, most people that go to my csino do not appear to have your ability to have fun.
Casinos are not all marble and gold because they are losing. I'm sorry that I obviously hit a nerve, but I feel certain that the next time you go to a casino if you look around you will see that the majority of people at a casino are not winning and do not share the same attitude that you do.
As a former casino employee I can attest that the most innovative thing about most slot machines is the licencing. At my old casino more and more slot machines were Austin Powers or I Dream of Jeanie, Monopoly, or Cassablanca. So in that way they were like pinball machines. The differenece is that, with the sole exception of the Austin Powers machine, all of the licences were things that had been around for over 20 years. No doubt it was because most of the suckers, err I mean customers, were at least 50 years of age.
I hear people say all the time, "Oh I just play the nickles" but nickle slot machines are the bread and butter of casinos. Our casino used to open at 9 am (its now 24 hours) and it was so funny to see the little old ladies push and elbow each other to get down to the nickle machines.
The thing people don't realize is that a lot of those machines you can play 90 nickles a spin. That's $4.50 a spin. How they get you is "Oh wow I won 40 tokens." but it took you 90 to get it and you won't even "win" that much on every spin. I can still remember those damn machines. They crank the sound all the way up on them so if you worked in the cage like I did you got to listen to their stupid crap all night long. "Life of Luxury!" "Wow that was a good one!" "I've been waiting!" "That's a good one!" "Scratch and win!"
If you want to go to a casino, just give me your money and I'll kick you in the balls. Because that's how you're going to feel when you get done 9 times out of 10. Of course its that one time that keeps the suckers err I mean customers coming back.
Slashdot Mirror
For those that just can't wait, the $2.99 preview came out today. It has the sandman story. The hardcover had this story plaus stories of the other endless. I went ahead and bought the preview even though I know I'll end up buying the hardcover eventually.
I posted this on the prior thread but there were already 500 posts so no one noticed it,
but isn't it Universal that is going to copy protect all their CD's? So even at $12 a broken CD is still a broken CD.
If only the police had access to some kind of engine designed for searching. A sort of searching engine, if you will. Then they could type this mysterious word "famicon" in the searching engine and find what the word meant...
Wasn't it Universal that was going to copy protect all their CD's? So now we don't have to pay as much for something that is broken anyway?
See I think I have to disagree here. I think that the riskless exploration is one of the great things about quicksaves. It is liberating because in a First-Person Shooter, it gives the player room to do that exploration and be able to ignore the goals of the game ofr a time. I can remember once while playing the KISS Psycho Circus game (which I think is a pretty underrated game) and once I had killed all the creatures on the level, I noticed a ledge occorss a canyon. It was obvious that the player wasn't supposed to be able to jump across that gap. But because of the quicksaves, I was able to experiment and try to make that jump without fear of losing my place in the game or without fear of death.
Quicksaves let the player to kind of subvert the game and make it more of a free goalless play area which is very liberating.
Certainly the presence or absence drasticly changes a players playing style. However, I don't know that it is productive to say that one is better than another. Doom was origninally intended to have a limited number of lives and be more point oriented. Had they done that Doom would have been a very different kind of game. Rules in games structure what is possible and different rules allow for different play experiences.
In the last part of the article, 3 games are listed, Combat, Pong, and Pac-Man. All three of which have have had remakes in the last 2 years. While they may not have been great games, its not like these franchises are languishing in obscurity.
Combat , Pong 3d and Pac-Man World 2.
I've posted on this issue before. Basically my point is not that videogmaes are or are not violent. It is that there are a lot of other things that go on in western society that seem much more violent but yet aren't considered violent because they are older forms of entertainment.
This issue of violence gets to a deeper issue. What is a violent videogame? Would you consider Madden 2002 to be a violent game? How about NHL 2K3? In all likelihood, Madden 2002 would not be considered "violent." Why? Because it is "just football." In American society (and probably in much of western society as well, although I am no expert on international culture), sports are naturalized. We consider them harmless. Even more than that, we encourage children to participate in them saying that they will be moral builders and the like. However, let us stop a moment and think about what actually happens during a contact, "masculine" sport like football (both kinds), basketball or hockey. How do players hype themselves up for the game, how to they refer to their opponents? "Let's kill 'em! Let's rip their heads off! Let's destroy them!"
So here we have an activity that involves actual real violence, hitting one another and face to face trash talking and yet we do not seem concerned that this will lead to other acts of violence? But we have these mediated, virtual enactments and we are concerned? Real violence does not cause more violence, but virtual violence does? The worst injury I have ever heard of at a LAN party is carpal tunnel! How often do fights break out at LAN parties? How often do they break out at sporting events? Remind me again which one of these causes violence?
This is not to suggest that sports are bad. Not at all. It is to show a point. Sports are considered part of our society. They have been since ancient times. So the thought that these may cause violence does not even occur to most people. However, these damn kids and their videogames. Now that is another story. Videogames are a new medium and they are a new entrant into our culture. Hence the moral panic surrounding them. Remember what rap was supposed to do to our kids? Remember what heavy metal was supposed to do? Remember rock and roll? There have been moral panics about technology dating all the way back to the popularization of the printing press. What is going on here is nothing different and as such we should try to see through the moralistic, "what about the children!?!" hype and see that the real issues here are not "do videogames make people violent?" but "Who decides what 'violent' is?" and "Why is that considered violent when there are so many other things in society that aren't?"
I will feel safe in admitting that videogmaes MIGHT make SOME kids POSSIBLY more violent when the media and anti-videogame zealots admit that physically agressive sports MIGHT make SOME kids POSSIBLY more violent. After all, I don't know about anyone else, but when I was in high school it wasn't the gamers that were beating up other kids it was the athletes.
There are tons and tons of games rated E for everyone. From sports games, to racing games to flight simulators to puzzle gmaes. Every gaming platform has lots of non-shoot 'em up games to offer. Amazon and Toys r us have a "kid safe" web page listing only E rated games. Just because Grand Theft Auto gets so much press, we shouldn't let the impression that ALL videogames are violent. Just as there are films ofr every age group so too are there games for every age group.
And anti-videogame attourny Jack Thompson rears his ugly head in 5...4...3...2...
While it is certainly sad that someone died, it is unfortunate that videogmes are once again being used as a scapegoat. There are many other hobbies that people participate in for hours and hours a day but are rarely if ever considered an "addiction" or scapegoated in the same way that videogames so often are.
How many people do we know who can't miss an episode of a soap opera? or how many people spend all night every night watching television? It seems highly likely that many more marriages have been broken up over a man who spend all his time working on his car than have been broken up by online games. What about every episode of Behind The Music where the musician neglects his family in order to make music go on tour and entertain? But none of these are stigmatised or scapegoated by being called "addictions."
I'm not arguing the technical definition of addiction. As I said, what I'm talking about is that there are lots of other activities out there that people do that take up just as much time as playing videogames but they aren't commonly called "addictions." Why is this? It seems that once again it goes back to the notion of moral panics and that people always seem to be looking to blame the new thing for old problems as a way of finding easy answers to complex problems. Children have died by playing in cars before and unfortunatly they almost certainly will again. It is terrible, but the problem is not Everquest. That Everquest is blamed is yet another sign that videogames are not respected and that they are even feared.
Well it has to do with all of this Radway male gaze things. men are the lookers, they are the one's that look and women are to be looked at. Men are active they do the looking, women are passive they are looked at. Men are voyuers and women are exhibitionists.
I can't beleive no one has posted the link yet, but the actual report (in pdf form) is available on the ESA site.
One thing of personal interest to me, as someone who studies videogame players, is that once again, there is not one word on the race of the people who play videogames. There has been a lot of work on gender and gamers but very very little on race.
The reason attractive women in advertizing work so well is that (hetrosexual)men want to get with the attractive woman and women want to look like her.
Women in western society are seen as such sex objects that it is acceptable for women to be able to admit that another women is attractive. On the other hand, however, if another man admits that another man is atractive then the accusations of homosexuality start to fly.
I had heard about microsoft's selling their software to college students at drasticly reduced prices before. however, I am currently going through orientation in a PHD program at a certain University in Indiana and they have Microsft office available for FREE to students via download. And certain students can get acess to their OS's for free as well. Now certainly what has happened is that my university has probably included the cost of these in tuition.
During orientation I mentioned that you could download Openoffice and its open source. Their responce was, "But microsoft office is free, why not use it?" I could not get these people to understand why they shouldn't download a microsoft product.
If we can't get phd students who claim to be active in social causes to understand why microsoft is evil, it will be very long time before we get the typical apathetic person to understand.
This wasn't a bad little article, especially for a general mostly non-gameplaying audience. But then they had to go and talk to the guy who had to go the "what about the children" moral panic route.
"I worry that the message that cheating is OK might carry over to more significant areas. If parents buy their children these magazines, it sends the message that it's OK to do this."
Boo hoo. When will people realize that videogames are not exclusivly a children's medium?
I suppose that since there is no way to cheat in board games, or card games, or hide and seek, or on a test, or on one's spouce, then OF COURSE videogames are a horrible influence.
Remember that the Matrix videogame was heavilly hyped as being "written and directed by the Waschowski borthers" we all know how that turned out.
Writing a game is very very differnt than writing more traditional mediums. Each has their own language and style. I am always leary when I hear that "so and so" name writer has been brought in to "write" a videogame. It's also kind of sad that the videgame industry feels that they need to hire this outside talent rather than trust that people who make games for a living actually know how to make games.
Now all this being said, I was a big galactica fan and am looking forward to reading reviews of the game.
unfortunatly there seem to be a lot of people out there who just don't understand, "spend more upfront, save over the long run." In college I spent ten minutes trying to explain to one of my roommates that if he bought the big bottle of steak sauce it would be cheaper because he wouldn't have to buy it as often. His responce was, "But the little bottle's cheaper!"
Doom was made with mods in mind. In the first press release they hyped modability as one of the features. Wolfenstien, however, was not made with mods in mind.
Actually it isn't really about it being a guy thing. It is really about youth. Ever since adolecence has come to be seen as a seperate time period from childhood and adulthood, people have been afraid of teenagers and anything associated with teenagers. Rock and Roll, the internet, video games, rap. Back in the olden days all of those mental hygine films that today companies like Somthing Weird video sells that show kids doing drugs and stealing and getting into gangs. It is a pretty well documented thing that every generation people become stressed out about youth cultures.
You know there is almost a niche where this kind of thing could work, but unfortunately with it's stupid pay per play pricing scheme it is doomed to failure.
I think that if they made it a regualr generic pc, but totally standardized them so that every one they sold was the same and made a big deal about gauranteeing that any game would play on it out of the box without fiddling and that for a modest suscription fee it would download patches and whatnot and every two years you would get an updated modle, I think that a lot of suburbanites who aren't computer savy might buy it. With a completely homogenious product line, they could go to the game developers and say here test your game on this box and the game developers could make sure it worked. They could put a little "Phantom approved" logo on it.
If instead of spending all this time on making a secure backend for this streaming game stuff, they would spend time programing a sort of auto updater patch installer program they could make it more hands off for the idiot consumer. They could keep a database of games and the ratings for them and impiment a kind of V-chip for videogames to have a parental lock for games. "Parents don't be concerned about what your child is playing. The phantom has built in parental controls to keep your child from playing games that you don't approve of."
But no they aren't doing that, something that could succeed. They are trying to do what divx failed at and what the original versions of rhapsody and pressplay failed at, namely to try and make us pay and pay for something we otherwise would already own.
See, I hated ever single second that I had to drive in Halo. I never got used to the controls, especially the flying vehicles. hated hated hated it.
Why does every First-Person Shooter seem to have to have vehicles in it anymore? Amd I the only one who just hates it when you have to drive a vehicle in a FPS game?
i can think of a couple reasons. the fisrt is that it will probably be at least a couple weeks after the game comes out when teh other versions are ready, so that gives them some time after the game is out the door to work on it rather than have to wait for them to get done.
secondly, and this is a more speculative assumption, is that if it is downloadable, then maybe they don't have to offer tech support for them? I can't imagine the average game tech support guy being too helpfull on a linux question.
Well, I didn't work in Vegas and as i understand it generally their payout percentages are better than the casino i worked at. In Indiana (where I worked) the only industry that is more heavilly regulated than ours is the nucular industry.
You may have fun, but the vast majority of the people who go to the casino i worked at left angy and broke. I'm not talking about the person who goes four times a year. I am talking about the retired people who are throwing away their entire retirement fund. At our casino the most busy weekends were the first weekend of the month when people got their checks in the mail. I'm talking about the people who would come up with a pocket full of change to get just one more dollar bill. I'm talking about the people who try to use multiple different credit cards to get more money only to have them all rejected. Those people vastly outnumber people like you who go to have fun and know when to quit.
Certainly there are people who can go to casinos in moderation. Just like there are people who can do drugs in moderation or anything else.
However, most people that go to my csino do not appear to have your ability to have fun.
Casinos are not all marble and gold because they are losing. I'm sorry that I obviously hit a nerve, but I feel certain that the next time you go to a casino if you look around you will see that the majority of people at a casino are not winning and do not share the same attitude that you do.
As a former casino employee I can attest that the most innovative thing about most slot machines is the licencing. At my old casino more and more slot machines were Austin Powers or I Dream of Jeanie, Monopoly, or Cassablanca. So in that way they were like pinball machines. The differenece is that, with the sole exception of the Austin Powers machine, all of the licences were things that had been around for over 20 years. No doubt it was because most of the suckers, err I mean customers, were at least 50 years of age.
I hear people say all the time, "Oh I just play the nickles" but nickle slot machines are the bread and butter of casinos. Our casino used to open at 9 am (its now 24 hours) and it was so funny to see the little old ladies push and elbow each other to get down to the nickle machines.
The thing people don't realize is that a lot of those machines you can play 90 nickles a spin. That's $4.50 a spin. How they get you is "Oh wow I won 40 tokens." but it took you 90 to get it and you won't even "win" that much on every spin.
I can still remember those damn machines. They crank the sound all the way up on them so if you worked in the cage like I did you got to listen to their stupid crap all night long. "Life of Luxury!" "Wow that was a good one!" "I've been waiting!" "That's a good one!" "Scratch and win!"
If you want to go to a casino, just give me your money and I'll kick you in the balls. Because that's how you're going to feel when you get done 9 times out of 10. Of course its that one time that keeps the suckers err I mean customers coming back.