No Warnings in the Ring Toss of Life

The carnival came each autumn to the small Ohio town where I grew up.

Over the languorous months of summer, we had picked blackberries and sold them door to door, or we ladled out tepid lemonade at a nickel a cup, hoarding our money for the coming of fall, and of the carnival.

Then it arrived, and set up its kilowatt glamour, its mirrors and canvas and paint. And we abandoned the farm animals to mount the gilded ponies of the carousel, and we wondered anew at the physics of cotton candy. We searched out our favorite booths--the ring-throw game, the penny toss, the tiered milk bottles--to try our hand again at winning the prizes that hung temptingly in each tent, glittering canes and tin popguns, prizes we had coveted from the year before.

You know the rest. By the time our parents herded us home, our pockets were empty; empty, too, our arms, of the cheap loot we had longed to win. Somehow the rings we tossed always fell askew, the coins bounced and skittered away, the milk bottles teetered but didn’t fall.

It took a few years of blackberries and lemonade to realize we had bought something more valuable for our 10-cents, three-for-a-quarter tries than a goldfish or a plush toy. We bought an education. We bought a life lesson--take your pick: Don’t throw your money away, life is not fair, there’s a sucker born every minute and today it was you.

Years later and miles away--Thursday morning in a Los Angeles courtroom--a lawsuit is expected to be settled, one that required many hours and hundreds of pages and thousands of dollars, for grown-ups to learn what a traveling carnival once taught children for the price of a quarter.

*

Comes now several unhappy people versus Rainbow Crane, a company that makes a game in which players manipulate a crane whose three-pronged claw can pluck a small toy--out of a glass box.

You’ll find the crane game at arcades, outside markets, in front of family restaurants to while away the time waiting for a table. A 50-cent turn buys you 15 seconds.

It’s supposed to be fun. To the plaintiffs, it’s rigged. Their lawsuit says it’s more a game of chance than of skill, and therefore may be as illegal as a slot machine. And they filed this suit not just for themselves and their children, but as a class action, for any Californian who’s dropped four bits into this one-clawed bandit.

I’ll leave it to the language of the lawsuit to express what an outrage this is: “The claw mechanism is engineered in such a manner that it does not cover the entire field of play. . . . The inaccessibility is greatest at the front where the claw can only come with[in] approximately 3 to 4 1/2 inches of the glass, depending on the claw’s rotation. . . . At best, the design of the machine will not permit the claw fingers to access 104 square inches, or 8.6% of the field of play. Conversely, the claw can access, at best 91.4% of the prize area. If the claw is rotated away from the perimeter, the inaccessible area is increased by an additional 178 square inches. If this factor is added to the 104 square inches that the claw never can access, the combined square inches of 282 equates to 23% of the total prize area which cannot be accessed by the claw.”

It goes on like that, page after page: the good prizes are jammed in too tight, no warnings or instructions are posted, players win maybe only a third of the time. (In baseball, an unarguable game of skill, however tedious, a batter who hits a third of the pitches is Hall of Fame material.)

How many quarters did these people lose before they called a lawyer? How often did they play? (A few years ago a Costa Mesa handyman confessed to an obsessive $30-a-day Rainbow Crane habit.) Did they lose, and so lose face, in front of children who had begged dad or grandma to pleeeeez get them that toy?

Their attorney likened this to the broken-window theory that small offenses, unstopped, lead to large offenses, unstoppable. If lawmen and women have turned their eyes from these offenses, then the citizenry must hold the offenders to account.

Out of Thursday’s settlement conference, Rainbow will probably add signs in English and Spanish stating obvious truths, like “skilled players are more likely to win toys.” The maker will produce a video showing workers how to load toys so they don’t settle in shipment like so much cereal in a box. Tests will evaluate the skill vs. chance element. A judge will decide who pays the fees and costs.

Ladies and gentlemen, see the egress, right this way.

*

Patt Morrison’s column appears on Wednesdays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com.