When Gov. Ed Rendell signed slot legislation into law last week, he passed a significant milestone. Never before has a chief executive, with the stroke of a pen, opened the door for so many slots.

		David G. Schwartz is the coordinator of the Gaming Studies Research Center at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas (dgs@unlv.nevada.edu). He is the author of "Suburban Xanadu: The Casino Resort on the Las Vegas Strip and Beyond."

While this may seem revolutionary, it is actually a natural progression of the expansion of slot machines over the past 20 years, and it may offer a significant view into the future for residents of other states. The slots bill's passage could represent the opening of a new phase of gaming expansion, as neighboring states feel the need to open up their own slot parlors or risk missing out.

Since a German-born mechanic, Charles Fey, invented the first reel slot machine in the early 1890s, slots have been wildly popular, even when quasi-legal or illegal. When allowed to flourish with the sanction of state oversight, slots have become increasingly widespread.

In 1981, they surpassed table games (blackjack, craps, etc.) in annual Nevada casino revenue, and have not looked back since. Despite a recent mini-surge in the popularity of blackjack and the boom in poker, slot machines remain the dominant feature in virtually all casinos, providing between 60 and 100 percent of total gaming revenue in the 15 states with slots in 2003.

A variety of political and economic factors have prompted the expansion of legal gaming in the past generation. In a sentence, state government spending has outpaced the politically acceptable tax threshold. Caught between two equally unpopular options -- cutting programs and raising taxes -- many state governments before Pennsylvania have turned to lotteries, racetrack slots and casinos to bridge budgetary gaps. The creation of jobs (Rendell has promised 36,000 of them) and the revival of the horse-racing industry are added bonuses.

Gov. Rendell and the state Legislature are hardly alone in turning to slot machines. Upon taking office in California, one of Arnold Schwarzenegger's immediate priorities was to ink new compacts with Indian tribes that would give them the right to increase their numbers of slot machines in return for a higher cut for the state; he has just negotiated such agreements with five tribes, garnering the state a $1 billion up-front payment, and more may be following.

Racinos have recently begun operating in New York, and Delaware has had racetrack slots since 1995. Once found legal only in Nevada, slot machines are rapidly becoming the norm rather than the exception.

The growing political acceptance of slots has been mirrored by their technical evolution. Gone are the mechanical one-armed bandits that invited players to line up three cherries or lemons across three reels to win a 200-coin jackpot. Slots began to go electric in 1964 (presaging Bob Dylan by a year), and during the 1970s manufacturers experimented with substituting a random number generator and video screen for the traditional reels. In 1979, Si Redd's International Game Technology launched the first successful video poker game; since then, IGT has become an industry behemoth with about 70 percent of the slot machine market.

Although slots were once fed by pocket change, many of today's machines no longer use coins. Bill validators allow players to insert currency directly into the slot without the mediation of a change person or change machine. TITO (ticket in/ticket out) technology obviates the need for a crash of coins when a player cashes out; instead, he gets a coupon that can be played in another machine or redeemed for cash.

It is conceivable that, in the future, slots could incorporate electronic funds transfers, allowing players to place an ATM card directly into a slot, withdraw money to play and (so they hope) deposit winnings. As Americans decreasingly use cash on a daily basis, this will help casinos keep pace with current retail and entertainment practices.

Even the stakes have evolved. Linked progressives, joining machines in several locations, now allow players a chance for a life-changing super-jackpot: the biggest slots payout to date, nearly $40 million, went to a Las Vegas Megabucks player in 2003. These games are becoming increasingly common. IGT now offers no less than 33 "MegaJackpot" games, in denominations from pennies to $5.

Nickel and even penny machines have become increasingly popular, but this does not mean that people are betting less. Rather, they are given the option to play 45 credits ($2.25 on a nickel machine) or more a spin. Over the past decade, these machines have emerged as player favorites, and it is likely that they will continue to be popular. It is games like these that, analysts project, might earn over $5 billion annually if Pennsylvania gets all 61,000 slots that the law permits.

People have been gambling for 10,000 years, perhaps longer, and styles of betting have always kept pace with the current technology. Stone-age gamblers tossed sticks or threw crudely carved pieces of bone, the ancestors of today's dice. Renaissance gamblers made use of standardized, block-printed playing cards.

With the mechanization of American business and entertainment in the latter part of the 19th century, the turn to a gambling machine was natural. That these machines are now essentially computer systems with video screens is also no surprise. Slots have replaced lottery games as the game of choice for players and, as a consequence, governments, because they provide gambling in a form familiar to those used to sitting in front of a computer or television screen.

Despite longstanding trends dictating the turn to gambling, Americans are hardly united in support of gambling. Critics of expanded gambling and, in particular, slot machines argue that gambling creates no new wealth, and that it incurs economic and social costs that outweigh the benefits brought by increased employment, economic development and reduced taxes. Gambling, according to them, siphons money from "legitimate" businesses and leads inevitably to an increase in crime, corruption, bankruptcy. Any advance of gambling, critics contend, will lead to no more than an increase in desperation.

Gambling advocates counter that though there is a small percentage of the population unable to control its gambling, but for the vast majority gambling is a legitimate entertainment option and a socially accepted, healthy use of one's discretionary income.

Utilitarians might even point out that, since gaming is taxed at a higher rate than other recreations, citizens are actually being more supportive of their communities when they choose gambling over a night at the movies.

Finally, gambling proponents argue, any value judgments on how one's money is best spent is best left to the individual. In choosing to legalize slots, Pennsylvania has followed the lead of most other states and opted for the promise of prosperity and responsibility of personal choice over worries about potentially negative social and economic consequences.

Pennsylvania, of course, is not the only state looking to harness the dollars spent by a public eager to play slots. Already, the state is ringed by jurisdictions with the machines. Atlantic City has hosted slot machines since 1978; West Virginia, 1990; Delaware, 1995, and New York, 2003.

As in many states, the pro-slots campaign succeeded in Pennsylvania not necessarily because voters enunciated a strong support for a legislative expansion of gambling, but because they first voted with their feet by patronizing casinos and racinos in surrounding states. While the slots bill is remarkable for the large number of machines it will permit, Pennsylvanians can hardly claim to have rolled the dice on a novel form of state-sanctioned gambling.

Still, Rendell signed a significant bill into law. Future historians might speculate that the Keystone State's jump into the slot machine marked a tipping point in the redefinition of the national gambling landscape.

It is possible that Pennsylvania might represent the beachhead for a new wave of gaming expansion, similar to the role played by New Jersey in 1970 when it created a lottery featuring weekly, not monthly or semi-annual, drawings. Within five years, nearly every state in the Northeast had a lottery, as competing states began to fear that they would miss the "painless" revenues that neighbors enjoyed.

Today, lotteries are the norm in states from California to Maine, and states have authorized daily drawings, instant games and video lottery terminals in an effort to maximize gambling revenues. Now that Pennsylvania has opened the door to an unprecedented expansion of slot machines, other states will likely follow.

Already, New Jersey officials have discussed expanding gambling by permitting slots at racetracks, and Delaware is considering proposals to expand its slot industry; Maryland, Ohio, Kentucky and the District of Columbia have all debated slots, and it seems more than reasonable that legislators in these states will come to the same conclusions as their Pennsylvania counterparts.

A Massachusetts professor recently concluded that, should neighboring Rhode Island permit casinos, his state might see over $1 billion a year flow to surrounding casino jurisdictions. Legislators schooled in this kind of math, confronted by the rising costs of government and a restive tax base, might decide, as have the leaders of Pennsylvania, that slot machine revenues are best kept at home.Stacy Innerst/Post-Gazette