The Palace Pier arcade in Brighton in late October smells like hot doughnuts and WD-40, with a base note of wet carpet. It is a two-storey shed of a building, a few hundred feet of flashing cabinets bolted to the floor, and on a grey Tuesday lunchtime it holds more people than any pub on the seafront. Pensioners shuffle between the penny falls carrying tubs of 2p coins. A man in a hi-vis jacket feeds a tenner into a machine shaped like a combine harvester, watches it lose, and feeds it another. A toddler watches a stuffed dinosaur swing in a claw grabber and does not let go of his mother's sleeve. Near the door a sign separates the family end from the cash prize section, with "18+" in the cheerful font of a birthday card. I am thirty-four, on my own, and I walk past it like I own the place.
I have come to Brighton to compare the old way of losing money with the new way. The old way is this: you go somewhere, hand over cash, and a machine in a public room takes it from you while other people watch. The new way is this: you lie on a hotel bed and the machine runs inside your phone. I wanted to know which one felt worse at the end, so I did the honest thing and set myself a tenner.
Before you reach the machines that take real money you pass the machines that take pretend money. The penny falls and the 2p pushers run down one side of the room, and the physics of them is more fascinating than any slot: you drop a coin onto a moving shelf and the shelf pushes other coins toward the edge. The odds do not matter. The edge is a wall of coins, and every coin you drop moves the wall a fraction of a millimetre. The kid next to me spent twenty minutes and about £3 making the wall move enough to drop a single 2p piece, which he collected with the solemnity of a banker closing a deal. His mother filmed it. Spend twenty minutes at the penny falls and the economics become clear: you pay for the clatter, the collapse of the coin wall, the small victory of one 2p piece landing in the tray.
The woman at the counter swapped a note for a plastic cup of change so fast I had no time to ask whether they still kept the old-style machines, the ones with actual reels and a handle. She said they had gone years ago. She pointed at a bank of cabinets with screens the size of toasters and said the ones on the right paid the best. Everyone always says that about the ones on the right. The Gambling Commission calls this section gaming machines, as if a new name changed what they do. I found a machine advertising a mystery jackpot of £500 and settled in. It was a nothing machine. Five reels, a few cherry symbols, one button that spun them. The cabinet fizzed, the lights strobed, and a recorded voice told me I had won 40p. Then nothing. Then 60p. Then nothing for so long I checked my phone to see if anyone had texted.
The thing about a land-based machine is that it sits in public. You lose out in the open, surrounded by other people losing, and nobody minds. A woman on the machine next to me was working a system: fifteen spins, one tea from the counter, fifteen more. Her husband stood behind her reading the racing page of a newspaper he had finished an hour ago. I asked whether she had ever won anything worth mentioning. She said she had won £250 on that exact machine in March and had been trying to get back to evens since. The line between a hobby and a grudge is thin, and she was living on it. I wanted to ask how much she had put in since March. Her face said she did not want to do that maths.
The arcade's own maths was easier. I left after forty minutes with a bag of 2p-pusher prizes: a rubber duck, a plastic ring, a keyring shaped like a fish. The pier had taken £8 off me for the privilege of an afternoon out, and I felt, against my better judgement, that I had got my money's worth. The machines had given me something the phone never would: a room full of strangers doing the same stupid thing at the same stupid time.
Back at the hotel, with the curtains closed against the seafront wind, I did what you do now. I lay on the bed and looked at my phone. The advertising follows you off the pier. Every gambling site in the country wants a piece of the same boredom, and they have got good at finding it. The one that got me was the Nightluck No Deposit Bonus, free credit for signing up, no top-up required. That felt more honest than the pier, in a way. The pier took my money before it let me play. This time the free credit came first, and the asking came later, if it came at all.
The registration page asked whether I had used GamStop and offered a link to set deposit limits before I had seen a single game. I set one anyway, £20, and felt smug about it. Then came the verification. Four minutes of photographing my driving licence in the bad light of a hotel bathroom, the same way you photograph a passport for any number of government apps at once. Then an email. Then a second email. Then I was in, staring at a grid of slots whose graphics looked like the designer had seen a slot machine described to them by a friend.
I played the games no sensible person plays with real money. Pig-themed ones. A slot based on a film I have never watched. A fruit machine where the symbols exploded into smaller symbols, which the help screen described as a feature. The free credit was the point of it all. It existed so I would play the games, feel the wins, get comfortable, and top up when the credit died. I knew that. The people who built the game knew that. I played anyway, because the alternative was watching the curtains move in the draught.
The free spins came with wagering requirements, which I read in full for the first time in my life, and they were not the horror story the forums make out. The first night I turned £10 of free credit into £23. The second night I turned £23 into £4. The symmetry was neat, and it taught me more about how the house edge works than any explainer I had read.
Over the next week I worked through the things I had been meaning to try. I spent one evening on the slots at HighSpin Casino, a site I had bookmarked months ago and never opened, because I have a rule about depositing into places I know nothing about. The free credit got me past that rule, which I assume was the point of the whole exercise.
The same week I read Unlim Luck's welcome terms all the way through, which I have done for maybe three casinos in my life. The wagering requirements read like a human being had typed them, and I meant that as a compliment.
The difference between the pier and the phone is the silence. On the pier, a win is public property: bells, a light show, strangers looking up from their own screens. In the hotel room, a win is a number in a wallet going from £4.20 to £6.80. You wait for something to happen. Nothing happens. You press spin. The number changes again. There is no clatter of coins, no one to share the small shock with, and no reason to stop except the deposit limit I had set myself and the growing conviction that the game was designed to make me miss the clatter.
The clatter was the point all along. The pier sold me an afternoon. The coins, the tub, the fizzy lights, the woman working her system, the man who had not moved since Tuesday: the product was the room as much as the chance of winning. The app sold me the chance of winning and nothing else. It put that chance in the most efficient loop I have ever been offered. One more spin. One more spin. One more spin, until the credit died or the limit stopped me.
By the end of the week I had turned the free credit into £17.40 and then into zero. I did not mind as much as I expected. The free credit was never money I had owned. Losing it cost me nothing except the hours, which was the trade the casino wanted and also one I was fine with.
The next morning I went back to the pier. Same machines, same tubs of 2p coins, same man in the hi-vis jacket, who seemed not to have moved since Tuesday. I put my last pound into the penny falls. The coin clattered down the shelves, knocked a stack of 2p pieces off the edge, and I won a rubber duck. I took it home and put it on the shelf next to the keyring. It cost me £8 and it survives the walk to the bank. The £17.40 did not make it to the weekend. I know which one I would rather have.