Money Wired

The next step for Net Vegas will be to weave the town's networks together. Right now, the slots don't talk to the digital cards; surveillance doesn't talk to bingo; casino security systems are only beginning to communicate with one another. (One exception is Harrah's, which has 26 casinos nationwide and tracks the gambling style and behavior of nearly every regular customer through "club" cards.) But the Internet is already enabling casinos to link disparate databanks and surveillance systems, and it will expand the notion of where Las Vegas itself begins and ends.




Net Vegas, fully assembled, will spread beyond the Nevada desert and into your home. The long view: You're playing online in your house in Los Angeles and reach a certain level of winnings. Suddenly, the hotel sponsoring your game makes an offer: Come for three days, everything covered. You'll see some shows and continue where you left off.




In other words, a lifetime running tally. And it may come soon. Nevada recently legalized online gambling, and though it's still forbidden by the federal government, three casinos—MGM, Hilton, and Station—are already gearing up with "play" versions planned for their Web sites.




In this scenario, the physical elements of Las Vegas—glitter, volcanoes, lap dancers, lion tamers—do not vanish. But, like the arm on a one-armed bandit, or the dealer who doesn't really deal at a digital card table, physical Vegas becomes vestigial, a kind of appendix in a gaming world that has moved to a new level. Not farfetched if you remember that Las Vegas was a sleight-of-hand play from the start: a city where no city should be, a promise of riches to all comers that statistically is never kept. Remember the brutal efficiency Las Vegas lives by. "Does it make more money?" Bill O'Hara asks. "If the answer is yes, it happens in Las Vegas. It has to."




Dan Koeppel, a contributing editor at National Geographic, has written for Wired and Star Trek: The Next Generation. He lives in Los Angeles.