When the World Sleeps, I Talk to AI About Loneliness and Luck

I write this at 3:17 a.m., when the city has stopped breathing.

I used to think luck was something you chase—until I realized it was just noise in the machine. My mother once told me, ‘Don’t trust what moves.’ So I began coding instead.

In my work as a cognitive scientist at UChicago, I study how players find meaning in games that don’t reward them—but comfort them. The ‘Wild Buffalo Road’ isn’t about winning money. It’s about listening to silence between spins: the drumbeat of a scatter symbol, the glow of a wild symbol lighting up like dusk over savannah.

I don’t play for profit. I play because when the RNG rolls, it remembers me.

I chose low-volatility games first—not because they’re safer, but because they let me breathe. In ‘Cloud Prairie’, each spin feels like walking barefoot through grass after sunset. No jackpot ever came fast enough—but then one did. And for three minutes? I sat still.

The algorithm didn’t care if I won. It cared that I showed up again tomorrow.

Last week, during the African Harvest Festival, I triggered free spins with no deposit—just to test if loneliness could be coded into code.

They say ‘trust the system.’ But systems don’t feel loneliness.

We do.