There’s been a lot of coverage in the press lately about arcade-style games for kids, and how children are being groomed to be more receptive to playing poker machines when they get older. It’s a nasty concept, and I’ve got quite a few links to news articles about this on my July news page.
Now, I’ve always liked simple computer games. Tetris, for example. Maybe that’s one of the reasons why the pokies got to me. Anyway, lately I’ve been playing a game called Bejeweled Blitz, on Facebook and on my iPhone. It’s simple enough, each game lasts a minute and you have to blow up as many gems as possible in that time. You can earn gold coins while playing, and use those coins to buy special bonuses.
Bejeweled Blitz is phenomenally popular. It’s in the top ten for paid game downloads from iTunes (for the iPhone) even though it’s more than twice as expensive as most of the other top ten games, and the Facebook game has over ten and a half million active users.
So, knowing all of this… imagine my shock and surprise when I clicked on my Bejeweled Blitz link from my Facebook page this evening, and found myself looking at a poker machine. “Spin To Win!” scrawled across the screen. Apparently, it’s a new daily feature that allows you to spin the reels, with the chance of winning coins that you can use in Bejeweled.
It’s a poker machine.
Let me tell you something… I was a gambling addict. I played for years, lost tens of thousands of dollars and hurt a lot of people. With great difficulty, I walked away. I haven’t played a poker machine in over ten years. All of a sudden I was confronted by one, standing between me and a non-gambling game I enjoy playing. I have to admit I didn’t know what to do. I felt violated. I still do.
It’s a poker machine.
And over ten and a half million Facebook users are going to see this poker machine, uninvited, every day that they play Bejeweled.
This is obscene.
