The idea came to Neil Walshe in the neon-lit aisles of a pokies room on a night out with mates.

Watching the whir of symbols and numbers, Walshe, who recalls a brief curiosity with poker machines when he was 18, suddenly felt bewildered by the mechanics of the games.

“I realised that there’s no losing sounds,” he says.

It gnawed at Walshe, an advertising creative director, so much so that he decided to create a poker machine with a distinct losing sound on every spin.

“If pokies machines actually played what’s going on, you’d know before you sat down that you’re probably going to lose money here,” he says.

The campaign takes into account the potential dopamine effect of winning sounds on pokies. Milos Mlynarik

More pokies than ATMs are in Australia, a country that loses between $13 billion and $16 billion every year on the machines.

NSW accounts for the bulk of those losses, with $9.3 billion gambled in that state last year.…