Lottery Scratchers?

Lottery tickets are an interesting kind of non-game.  I got a few Scratchers today as an odd holiday challenge, and I have to start off by saying I do NOT recommend buying these Scratchers for any reason.  They are designed to tickle any kind of gambling genes you might have.  They give you the illusion of choice, make you feel like you almost won, and give minimal wins to make you feel like you have more of a chance than you actually do.

They are not games by any stretch of the imagination, but they do a good job of capturing the iconography of games and social trends.  These crossword and bingo styled cards give you a set of letters or numbers that you have to scratch off, and in the end you have to count how many words you made (or some other pattern) to see if you "won" or not.  These cards really make you work for it.  Along the way you feel like you are actually playing a game, but you are just unveiling the things that were already printed on the card when you bought it.  And when you're done, you can recheck all the letters, feeling like you only missed the prize by one letter.  When in fact, the card was either a winning or loser before you even bought it.  Nothing you could have done would have changed it.  It's not like the letters appear the moment you scratch the stuff off of them -- they were there the whole time.

That is the twisted attraction of these things.  The illusion of choice.  The invoking of the hope that luck might be on your side.  Whatever the heck "luck" is supposed to be.  They print the chances of winning right on the back of each scratcher.  It's usually 1 in 4 chance of winning, 1 in 6 chance of a cash win here in California, but the chances do vary by a few tenths from card to card.

Back when I was a game designer, building shareware games back in the 1990s, I found the lottery scratchers a really interesting source of ideas.  They kept coming up with new interfaces, new things for people to scratch off, new combinations to compare on some grid.  These days, the way they manage to release new themes for every holiday, every targeted demographic, is so much like our modern app-based games, it's scary.  They will give away a free ticket, which feels lucky, but that card you won has the same 75% chance of being a dud.  They give away $5 or $10 a few times out of every stack you buy -- so much like our apps -- but when all is said and done you're almost always far behind, and some amount of hard-earned money has left your wallet.

For a while, I collected used lottery scratchers.  I had stacks of hundreds of these from many different states and decades.  They make an interesting collectible, for sure.  The used cards are also harmless.  They're not going to get you.  They have a lot of state flavor, a lot of "Americana", but you can explore similar tickets from at least half the countries in the world.

The California Lottery website has pages listing all of their current scratcher designs.  Right now they have Year of the Rabbit, Pumpkin Spice Payday, the Addams Family Fortune, California Dreamin' and a ton of cards that just sound like little cardstock slot machines.  Well researched and targeted, and addicting by design.

We all want to win.  We all want luck to be on our side.  But I want to get my blog back to actual games now.  These just got me thinking, and I had stories to tell, so I felt this diversion was worth writing up.