An independent play index built in Wellington

Full disclosure: I used to build slot machines for casinos.

Eleven years. The first six on a manufacturing floor across the Tasman, assembling cabinets for casino operators — wiring looms, bill validators, button decks, reel and screen assemblies, burn-in testing before a unit shipped. The next five on the other end of it: service and installation on casino floors, walking a gaming floor at two in the morning with a toolkit, swapping a board on a machine that had four people waiting behind me to keep playing it.

Nobody in that industry talks about "fun." They talk about hold percentage, time-on-device, coin-in. I sat in the specification meetings. I know why a reel takes exactly that long to stop, why the celebration sound starts a fraction of a second before you've actually won anything, why the button sits under your hand and not your eye. None of it is an accident. Every one of those decisions was engineered by people with data, tested against real floors, and signed off by someone with a revenue target.

That's not a confession. It was a licensed, regulated industry and I was a tradesman in it, paid well, working to standard. But building those cabinets taught me to read a machine from the inside, and once you can do that you never stop doing it.

Then my nephew showed me a free game on his tablet.

He was nine. He wanted me to look at a timer counting down to a chest he could open — unless he paid to open it now. I recognised the shape of it in about four seconds. Same near-miss. Same drip of small wins to cover the long stretch of nothing. Same escalation curve, drawn by people who'd read the same behavioural research my old employer read. The cabinet was gone. The maths had moved into a phone, and this time there was no minimum age on the door.

A slot machine on a casino floor is at least honest about what it is. There's a sign on the wall, an age limit at the entrance, and a regulator who checks the payout. A free game has none of that. It's called free, it's rated for kids, and the part where it asks for money shows up in week three — once you've built something you don't want to lose.

So I started writing it down.

I came home to Wellington, and Forgeoutback is that habit turned into a site. I play each game myself, on ordinary hardware and ordinary home broadband, long enough to reach the point where it starts asking. Then I write down what it asks for, how hard it pushes, and whether the thing is still worth your evening if you never spend a cent. Most aren't. Nine currently are.

I don't host games, I don't build them, and no publisher can pay me for a kind word. Every outbound link goes to the official publisher and nowhere else — I know what the counterfeit side of a gaming industry looks like, because it was a live problem in my last one too.

Some people will say a man who spent a decade assembling casino cabinets has no business writing about fair play. Fair enough. I'd put it the other way round: I know where the levers are because I installed them.