For a start, it is legal everywhere you don’t have to travel to the desert or a Native American reservation to be allowed to play Super Mario Bros Wonder. It shares some features with that old meaning of gaming-an inherently pointless nature, psychological tricks designed to keep us wanting more, predatory profiteering off the same-but it is mostly something totally different. It can be art, and it can be cheap bullshit. It is nostalgia for childhood, a thing to do on the bus, a way to hang out and make friends. It is a multibillion dollar industry, a cultural force, a whole area of Universal Studios and a source of Hollywood IP machine movies. It is video games, not in the sense of those big poker machines but in the sense of Mario and Fortnite. Gaming is something else now, something much better. ![]() It is basically pure evil, in the middle of some of the most gloriously wild and precious landscape in America, a delicate and fragile ecosystem that has been bent and broken towards the temporary flourishing of the most wasteful and damaging sort of human settlement ever invented. Everything there is primed to activate parts of your brain that you have little control over, parts that evolved to let us get good at cracking open coconuts or spotting bugs on leaves and are now directed towards flooding us with rewarding chemicals when we see Good Number On Screen. ![]() ![]() It happens amid a horrid sea of gargantuan flashing machines, stretching across the carpeted floor of a casino that smells of hotel soap and smoke, where the elderly feed money into an endlessly ravenous maw. Much of this does not take place in fun or glamorous circumstances, done for a laugh or easily stopped. In the old days, “gaming” meant the thing that Las Vegas is known for: Gambling.
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