The Game That Made Me Cry Was Not the One I Played

I used to think the reels were dancing.

They weren’t.

They were counting.

Every spin—every flash of neon symbols—was a data point harvested from my attention economy. Not luck. Not destiny. Just entropy dressed as euphoria.

I grew up in Chicago’s cultural fracture: mother’s voice on Zoom, talking about responsibility while I coded slots into midnight dreams. My father said ‘play within your means.’ But what does that even mean when your means are measured in microtransactions and your soul is monetized?

The game promised me carnival.

It gave me code.

I chose ‘Samba Night’ because it had drums in its pixels—because it whispered, not shouted. When the bonus card triggered, it didn’t feel like winning—it felt like being watched by an algorithm that learned my sighs.

I once spent six hours chasing a straight line across three reels.

It never came.

The RNG didn’t care if I cried.

It only cared if I kept clicking.

Now I journal in dark mode: #1E1E3F background, Fira Code font, glitches fading slow like heartbeat irregularities. Every entry is a question: ‘What did you lose when you stopped playing?’

Not money. Not time. But the quiet between spins—the space where joy used to live before they packaged it as a product.

You don’t read this to win. You feel it in your bones.