Last Monday was a day of joy and relief for many senior citizens in the state of Florida. It was also a day of vindication for Gale Fontaine, owner of the Tropicana Rec Room in Pompano Beach. Fontaine was charged with running an illegal gambling establishment by the State Attorney's Office in Broward County, Fla. But Fontaine, her attorney, supporters and customers claimed she was simply running an "adult arcade."

For the sake of clarity, let me explain. An adult arcade isn't a place that features sexually explicit video games. Rather, adult arcades or "rec rooms" are the senior citizen equivalents of video game arcades. The elderly patrons of these adult "arcades" aren't playing Doom or Pac-Man; instead, they're playing slot machines, video poker and other games you'd typically find in a Las Vegas casino. There's just one problem - while gambling is legal in Vegas and a few other regions in the U.S., it is not legal in Florida. And therein lies the rub.

Florida, which boasts a tremendously large senior citizen population, has a number of adult arcades and rec rooms. According to the "Miami Herald," there are an estimated 100 such establishments in Broward County, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade region. Adult arcades have become increasingly popular with retirees in recent years, and it's not hard to see why, given senior citizens' affinity for games such as bingo at their local church. But while bingo is a form of legalized gambling, slot machines are not in most states, including Florida.

So how are adult arcades like the Tropicana Rec Room allowed to stay in business? By pretending to be video game arcades, of course. Fontaine is also president of the Florida Arcade Association (FAA), an industry advocacy group has nothing to do with actual video games. For years, these businesses would pass themselves off as nothing more than a Chuck E. Cheese restaurant for retirees - indeed, they exploited an exemption to state gambling laws called "the Chuck E. Cheese exemption," which allows businesses to offer coin-operated games that require a level of skill and pay out non-cash prizes.

A real video game arcade...

..and a so-called "adult arcade."

The State Attorney's office in Broward County, Fla., brought the charges against Fontaine because it believed that the Tropicana Rec Room resembled a casino rather than a video game arcade. Fontaine was hauled into court as part of a larger trend of state authorities cracking down on the adult arcade industry because of a growing concern regarding senior citizen gambling addiction, which many perceive to be a growing problem. For example, a recent study from Farleigh Dickinson University and the New Jersey Council on Compulsive Gambling found that nearly one quarter of New Jersey senior citizens who gamble have an addiction to gambling.

The prosecution's case must have appeared sound. Technically speaking, adult arcades are gambling establishments and trying to pass off a slot machine as a video game is laughable at best. But according to Fontaine's defence attorney and the Florida Arcade Association, the rec rooms don't qualify as casinos because the slot machines "require an application of skill." A level of skill? Come again? Anyone who has ever played any type of slot machine knows definitively that the only skill involved is the ability to press a button or pull a lever. There's a reason that slot machines are called "one-armed bandits."

Yet somehow, Fontaine was acquitted of the charges by a jury of her peers, which allowed the defendant and the FAA to exploit a ridiculous loophole big enough to drive a truck - or a bus-load of senior citizens - through it. Now, other adult arcades like the Tropicana Rec Room will masquerade under the guise of being a Chuck E. Cheese or other video game arcades.