Trigger Happy
stylish businesswomen on their lunch hour, lean elderly men in tatty suits dropping cigarette ash into the machines’ integral ashtrays. Lined up in endless rows like workers on a factory conveyor belt, the players are nevertheless all alone, gazing intently at the machines in front of them. The air is electric with a thunderous clacking: the result of thousands upon thousands of silver balls hitting each other in a mesmerizing dance.
The name Pachinko is supposedly derived from pachi-pachi,a Japanese term describing the clicking of small objects or the crackling of fire. The game is set up vertically: behind a covering pane of glass, hundreds of small pins are set perpendicularly into a board. When the knob is turned, a stream of tiny silvercolored steel balls shoots out of a funnel at the lower left-hand corner, spraying up to the top and thence downwards, where they bounce off the pins (thus making the clattering noise). Lower down the board are a few special slots; if a ball bounces off the pins in the right way and falls into one of these, it sets off a computerized slot-machine-style set of three “wheels.” If these wheels come to rest at a desired combination, the player wins something. What is the prize? Uh, more tiny silver balls. They gush out of the bottom of
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