ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, June 7, 1996 TAG: 9606070026
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-6 EDITION: METRO
"PUT THIS plastic penny in the little slot, honey. Ooooo. See the lights flashing! Hear the music playing!
"Push these three buttons now. See the blinking lights slowing down? Ooooo, they've stopped on one ... two ... three! Three kitties in a row! Wow! Plastic pennies are pouring out of your little toy. You're a winner!
"This is sortuv how you play the slots, kid. It's child's play."
The game is child's play, sad to say. Penny Slot (for ages 5 and up) is on shelves of toy and retail chains, beckoning kiddies with its cartoon mugs of smiling kittens, dogs and pigs, "TRY ME!" emblazoned on the front of its colorful package.
It also is raising a stink among anti-gambling organizations, which protest that this and other such toys teach children to gamble and provide practice for later in their lives, when the coins will not be plastic and they won't be pennies. One toy chain promised to examine the game and take it off the shelf "if it does, in truth, represent something that would teach children to gamble."
That it would seems likely, unless a child is unable to learn how to play. The game is, after all, a toy slot machine. But it has legitimate value, a spokesman for one discount chain insisted. "These slot machines and the slot machine-type motion have been used for years to develop eye-hand coordination," a Wal-Mart public-relations assistant told The Christian Science Monitor.
Say what? Many toys are available that require eye-hand coordination, and are not innocuous-looking introductions to adult vices. Gambling "toys" are equivalent to the candy "cigarettes" kids used to suck in imitation of another unhealthy adult habit. Ah, those slender white sticks of plaster-like sugar with the red-dyed tips. They came in their own little "flip-top box." Cool. So grown-up.
Now, if the toy slot machine took every plastic coin, and enticed young players to give up their other toys too, for keeps, that would be closer to the real thrill of gambling. A toy like that might be educational.
LENGTH: Short : 44 linesby CNB