If you play a "free" game on the phone or online, you are usually bombarded with ads. As they say, if you didn't pay for the product, then you're the product.
Most of the ads I see are for other games. I feel somehow if I got a game advertised on another game, and a game advertised on that one, eventually it might lead me to One King Game that rules them all. But more likely it would just lead me back to the first game. It takes about 250 million years to orbit around the galaxy center, though, and it might take me that long to get around to the original game.
Some ads make me wonder just what everyone involved was thinking. Such as this.
I haven't seen the TV show in a long time. I'm pretty sure that's not the vibe one gets from that, though.
However, I have been to a few casinos, and I know that they love to have slot machines that are dolled up with pop culture icons of the day, just the way pinball machines used to be. But they have to have that excitement-after-the-dark feel that casinos love. So, wheels of fortune become wheels of flame, I guess.
As I've noted in this space before, gambling is about the one vice that doesn't tempt me much because I am a skinflint, from a long line of skinflints, and I hate the idea of money flying away, leaving nothing behind. However, I do see the appeal of a fast-moving game with something on the line, so I'm not entirely immune. The other appeal that I understand that many upright folks don't is that seediness, darkness, and decay are not bugs but features for those whose minds bend that way. The grim little bar, the greasy buffet, the sweaty dance floor, the dirty magazine, the disgusting shooting gallery, and yep, the hellish gambling den have a kind of pull that defy good sense and good taste. Therefore, a dark, flaming Wheel of Fortune for a gambling game, rather than the cheerful, sunny TV show, makes a kind of sense.
I don't speak from any moral tower here. It's my good taste or good sense that keeps me from gambling, just my cheapitude, which is a vice all its own. Moral uprightness is trickier than it looks.
I never liked gambling. I rather have the money ready to use for sure things like food.
ReplyDeleteFood is good.
ReplyDeleteThe thing that strikes me about gambling as a vice is, while you can't get jailed for driving while gambling or get HIV from sticking a croupier's stick in your vein, the amount of money you can blow is theoretically infinite. An addict can only spend so much before it kills him, but a gambler can go through everything and then some.