Comment by acjohnson55

This reminds me of the last time I went to Vegas with my two best buds from college. I was a broke grad student, so I couldn't really do any of the entertainment stuff in the city. I also don't really like gambling, so I had a conundrum of how to spend the daylight hours, before the nightlife started up.

We ended up sitting at the nickel slots, playing just enough to stay busy so we could flag down cocktail waitresses for comped drinks. If you were economical enough with your slots play, not selecting multiple lines or multipliers, it was a cheap way to drink.

Pretty quickly, it occurred to me that I was doing a bullshit job. Why had I come to Vegas to feed a machine that wasn't even entertaining me? I felt like livestock.

Eventually, I cracked to the peer pressure of my buddies and decided to play poker with them. I won about $700 as someone who had played maybe twice before in my life, but that's another story...

Interestingly, one of the friends I was with was one of the first people I ever met to make money selling virtual goods. As a high school kid in 2001 or 2002 (well before the Second Life example the author cites in 2005), he made money selling Diablo II accounts he had beefed up in his spare time.