The receptionist handed over the card key for the room with a slightly apologetic instruction. “You put it in the slot beside the door, this way round, then wait” – he gave the word “wait” a special emphasis – “until you hear a click, then the door is open.” Oh, the vagaries of the hotel card key. Oh, the incompetence, so the receptionist hinted, of the average hotel guest.
But I did wait, and the door did open. Then the difficulties began. I couldn’t find the little cradle that such cards often slot into to operate the electricity. I searched high and low, but to no effect. Fortunately, a chambermaid was still at work down the corridor. I looked pathetic, affected my best Italian pronunciation of “elettricita”, and she pointed to a horizontal slot actually in the wall, unmarked and almost invisible. The power sprang to life. I could now make the door say, “Do not disturb”; I could make it say “Clean the room, please”. I could, in theory, set the room temperature and the air conditioning (though I couldn’t make them work; my fault, I’m sure).
Someone, it seems, has sold Italian hotels, even small ones, a job lot of these all-embracing “smart” systems; I’ve come across quite a few of them over the past 10 days, and become adept at wiggling the card in the slot when, as often, it did not immediately connect.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m a fan of card keys and the eco-friendly power-saving they facilitate. But, as the brains behind the recent failed launch of Microsoft’s Windows 8 learnt to their cost, those who spend all their waking hours refining hi-tech gadgetry can get so far ahead of the rest of us that they end up making our lives more complicated, not less.
Italians have long been in the vanguard of techie progress. On assignment in Rome in the late 1980s – long before cellphones, the internet and online anything, a time when we foreign correspondents routinely dismantled phone sockets and teased out the wires to send reports electronically – the press room had screens on wheels that scrolled the latest news from international news smartcardfactory, continually updated. They were elegant, efficient, state-of-the-art, but – best of all – you didn’t need to know how to work them.
“Sorry,” she continued a moment later, in a calmer tone. “But you had three ‘cross fever’ symbols in the corners. You should have held them and raised your bet. If you get four, a jackpot is almost inevitable.”
Actually, the jackpot would have been entirely theoretical, as were those 8 cents I lost. We were playing the machine secretly and for free, in a South Florida arcade closed last month when the Florida Legislature passed a harsh new video gambling law.
The owner opened it up, reinstalled the computer motherboards in several of the machines, and invited a few of the arcade’s regular customers back for an afternoon so I could test one of the frequent criticisms of the slots: that they’re pure games of chance in which skill plays no part.
The no-skill allegation came up again during the legislative debate this spring over a bill, which eventually passed, to ban video gambling in senior arcades, gas stations and mom-and-pop cafes. “They are not games of skill,” lobbyist Ron Book — who represents pari-mutuel racetracks, which wanted to stamp out competition for their casinos — told the Florida House. “They are clearly games of gambling and chance.”
Nobody denies the machines involve gambling; you play them for pennies in hopes of winning a much more valuable prize. And they certainly involve an element of chance, like all games, even chess. (Many statistical studies have shown that the player who gets the white pieces and the first move, which is typically decided with a coin flip or something similar, wins between 52 and 56 percent of the time.)
But if skill plays a part in the video games, even a small one, then they aren’t gambling devices under Florida law. And if my afternoon at the arcade means anything, skill matters a lot.
Three arcade regulars — including a mentally handicapped woman — beat me like a drum for hours as we tried out various machines. Regular players (some of them visited the arcade six times a week before the new law closed it) have learned strategies and physical skills that help them win on a regular basis.
“Don’t feel bad,” another regular — retired furniture saleswoman Gail May, herself a pretty fair player — consoled me as Sciandra piled up winnings while I lost and lost and lost. “I don’t think I’ve seen her leave this place once without at least a $25 gift card,” one of the prizes that the arcade used to award to big winners.
“It’s like anything else, if you practice and pay attention and work at it, you can win,” said Sciandra, 72, who retired a few years ago from her job as a cafeteria worker in the Broward school system. “Not everybody does that — some people are content to just punch the button and let the game play out, like you would a regular slot machine in a casino. But that’s not the way I do it.”
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