Adaptation of The Little Girl and the Wolf: The Man and the Casino

Publius Horatius Eruditus

In downtown Reno on a cold October night during the 1970s casino boom, there was a public school janitor who was divorced, lived in his car, and made little money. He had a hard life making minimum wage and tried to meet his kids every now and then. After getting divorced the janitor got into the unhealthy but addicting habit of gambling. This new addiction consumed most of his wages and left him unable to pay rent. But his love for the dopamine hits bound him to the casinos. This man had just lost all his monthly wages again by gambling all of it away. He cried himself to sleep. The next month after receiving his paycheck he was on the way to meet his kids, when he saw a casino billboard. Unable to fight the urge, he immediately turned around and set out for the casino. But on the way he thought to himself, “Have I ever actually come out ahead? Is this really the best way to spend my hard earned wages?” The man realized how manipulating and addictive the casino really was. He realized there were no windows, no clocks. He observed that the casino deceived people by disguising losses as wins, and masking the value of money by using chips and cards. The place was built so you wouldn’t know you were losing. And worst of all, he realized how many others would lose their money, resulting in horrible consequences. Out of his new realization, he made friends with some employees, suspicious of the casinos owners and the mayor, because at the last city meeting the mayor helped pass some laws allowing casinos to build hotels into them. After doing some research, one employee discovered evidence of the falsified tax records created by the mayor. He quickly got together with the janitor and was able to expose the operation, threatening the casino’s license, destroying its reputation, and forcing it to shut down.



One response to “Adaptation of The Little Girl and the Wolf: The Man and the Casino”

  1. Publius Docitius Praeceptor

    This correctly adapts the fable’s poetic triad if we identify the recognition in Thurber’s fable as the girl’s awareness of the wolf’s intent to victimize her, and the reversal as the girl’s resistance to the wolf’s violence with violence of her own. The ‘sophos’ in Thurber’s tale suffered by the wolf. In this adaptation, the gambler is sucker that has long been taken as prey by the predatory casino that is like a wolf, until he realizes and resists.

    Develop the other six elements of narrative more completely to give the story plausibility. Also develop the triad so the analogy is clear: characterize this gambling man like a little girl that is easily fooled rather than a broken man whose vice is a result of his moral failure. Describe the wolf-like nature of the casino. The sudden bankruptcy of the casino lacks plausibility, but it is analogous to the girl shooting the wolf.

    “One night” answers the time and “in downtown Reno” answers the place. These can be developed more. Consider setting “the night” in a specific time frame. Was this in the 1970’s when there was a surge of new casinos in Reno and before the rise of tribal casinos in California that flattened out the growth of gaming in Reno? Was it in the malaise days about ten or twelve years ago when Reno’s gaming revenue was in a structural trough? Or was it just before that and this man’s denouncing the casinos caused it as much as the wave of new tribal casinos across the border? Was there anything remarkable about the night itself you could describe? Was it hot in August? Was it a better cold January night?

    “A man” is the narrative element of “agent.” Who was this man? He had wages? What kind of work did he do? Who paid his wages? Did he need the wages for anything other than rent? Did he rent a home or live in his car? Did he have a family or was he divorced as a result of his broken status? How can you make the reader empathize with his victim status and not just pity his foolishness?

    You’ve begun to describe the casino’s predatory tactics: keeping daylight and clocks out so the people playing games don’t stop for a change in the day or hour. What other ways does this “wolf” trick it’s victims? Besides architectural and spatial design manipulation, look into the game design deceptions like “losses disguised as wins” and the use of structural mechanics to obscure real value like the use of plastic chips, paper vouchers, and electronic cards instead of cash. Consider how they’ve changed Blackjack payouts from 3:2 to 6:5 or how double-zero roulette wheels raised the house advantage from 2.70% to 5.26% and now triple-zero wheels that raise the house advantage to 7.69% are prevailing. Finding more legal but predatory practices of casinos should be easy.

    The man’s protest on the casino floor and the effectiveness of his campaign to curtail gambling habits seems implausible. In Thurber’s tale, the girl’s countermeasure was implausible — little girls aren’t expected to be carrying automatics — but the effectiveness of the device was totally credible — the automatic would certainly do the wolf in. When I think about unlikely but effective means to do a casino in, simply making it illegal comes to mind, but I don’t think that makes a good story. It sounds more like propaganda. I think you could come up with something improbable, but effective for the destruction of the casino. I hope you don’t just blow it up with dynamite. Someone already tried that. In Thurber’s story, he didn’t stop all wolves everywhere from being hungry so that no girl would ever be prey again, but he used irony by arming his victim. You mentioned stocks in the part about the victims putting their money in stocks or savings. What if they bought the casino’s stock and turned it into a meme stock? With a controlling share they could change the business from gambling into something else. More credibly, holders of a smaller but significant portion of shares could create a market confidence death spiral by dumping their shares and shorting the stock at the same time. They could also make a “Bear Raid,” wherein traders flood the market with short sales and sell orders simultaneously to force a cascade of automatic stop-loss orders and margin liquidations. Casino victims organizing a bear raid is about as likely as a girl pulling an automatic out of her picnic basket, but the raid’s effectiveness in destroying the casino without just blowing it up or banning it is without question.

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