Oh, I thought this was known. I'm not even joking... A few years ago, I was at a local comic shop, and I watched someone (a kid) play the machine and appear to get a "perfect" shot, key went exactly into the fucking hole... but then it just pulled back. No prize! I was stunned when the kid asked an employee essentially "WTF?" and the employee replied "there's a chance the key may not turn even though it's lined up." So... it's a game of luck and not a game of skill. All I could think was "doesn't that make it straight up gambling then?" Who would be liable for changing the mode of operation? Regardless, it's fucking sketchy and all around pretty awful to take advantage of people like this... $5 million is a bullshit fine for literally stealing from kids. I still feel bad for that kid, it was like a Nintendo Switch or something fucking cool he, IMHO, had stolen from him...
It is simply gambling for kids. These 'games' are much more profitable than traditional arcade games (street fighter/mario kart/pacman/etc/etc), and when you boil them down it's because they're essentially slot machines.
They're certainly scummy but, I mean, this isn't any different from the claw crane machines that are usually exempted from gambling laws under certain conditions (win chance, prize value, where they're located, etc); machines that nobody expects to be fair.
I for sure did. In fact, on my long list of "someday/maybe" projects, there was this one entry sitting for some 15 years now: build a little machine for the claw crane game, that would time a button press perfectly. I just saw the video where Mark Rober does this to another arcade game[0], so I won't bother anymore - I can already guess the outcome.
I also don't know anyone else in my circles who thought the claw crane was a game of chance. It looks like a game of skill, it behaves like one. And sure, maybe the crane wasn't oiled in a while, but nobody tells you that in the end, it also rolls a dice to determine whether to allow you to win.
It's a big deal to me, and I think it should be a big deal for everyone. It's yet another violation of trust in society. Yet another seemingly legit business out there to scam you.
When I grew up, we saw arcades as fun places to be with friends, and if we lost on what looked like a game of chance, we assumed we just sucked and need to keep playing to get better (or rather, until all our sources of coin money go dry). We didn't know the cake was a lie.
When my kid grows older and I take her to an arcade, I'm going to tell her up front - you can have fun here, but these games and these people are out there to scam you. Your joy is your own - you have to take it in spite of, not thanks to, this place. I don't want to be telling her such things. I would like for her to live in a world where she can default to trusting businesses and taking their offers as good-spirited attempts of mutually beneficial transactions - not to be constantly on the guard from technically legitimate businesses trying to scam her.
So, I'd very much like to see every single one of these arcades to be investigated, dragged to court for selling illegal gambling services to children, and the entire industry to be beaten up with criminal code, until every such game is either banned or has its exact rules posted on it, in a clear and unambiguous form. Fuck caveat emptor - the measure of civilization is in the things you don't have to actively worry about.
> I also don't know anyone else in my circles who thought the claw crane was a game of chance.
Maybe it's cultural/regional? Everyone around me gets explained they're rigged as a kid (I'm late 30s), maybe in your country they prefer to feed the excitement/illusion of kids?
I'm Spanish, and we have a saying that goes "fallar más que una escopeta de feria", roughly translated to "failing (to work properly) even more than a gun from a fair", as said guns are popularly known to be purposely misaligned, or to use pellets of lower caliber than the barrel to make them lose accuracy. So generally very few people, and almost exclusively kids, show any trust towards fair/arcade games with prizes. They may still play for fun or to burn unwanted change, though.
On the other hand, many people around me needed to reach adulthood to start suspecting WWE fights aren't real.
There is a difference between a game of skill that is rigged to be much harder to win than it appears and a game of chance. To use your carnival guns as an example, it is one thing for the sights to be misaligned. It is another thing to find out that the guns don’t actually fire pellets most of the time, and only allow a pellet to be fired based on some formula of how long it has been since anyone won the game. The same with the claw games. It is one thing to know that the claws are intentionally weak and lack grip and swing around to dislodge things. it is another thing to know the claw will not pick anything up until a set number of attempts. You can overcome a rigged game of skill by being more skilled. Hell, that is part of the appeal for some people. To figure out how a game is deceptively difficult, and to compensate for it. You can’t overcome of a game of “chance” that forces a certain number of plays.
> "failing (to work properly) even more than a gun from a fair"
Born in the 80s, in the US, I understood that carnival games are rigged in some way, but that arcade games were skilled based.
Only as an adult did I start to learn that the 'games of skill' in arcades were worse than carnival games.
I should have known arcade video games were rigged, given the cheap deaths/impossible to dodge attacks, but there's no reason I should have known the crane and other physical 'skill' based games were, for the reasons already mentioned by the GP comment.
Edit: reading further down, it looks like this may have been a recent change with the crane games. That makes me feel better about the arcades I used to frequent as a kid (mall and skating rink).
They were crappy, but I know people won stuff from them. But the usage rate was also quite high, given how popular arcades were back then.
I always thought the games were made more difficult than they appear, or that elements of randomness were introduced to games of skill, such as using inaccurate guns for shooting galleries.
I did not think that apparent games of skill would be rigged so as to be impossible to win when played perfectly until a certain number of losses had occurred. I expected that kind of behavior to be regulated as gambling, and probably outright banned most places that have sophisticated regulations about gambling.
About 30 years ago, my siblings and I went through a claw machine mania phase. We sampled every machine in a 30 mile radius, and found that the ones that slipped, always slipped. And the ones that gripped, gripped pretty frequently. Once we figured out which claws would actually grab, we won constantly. We collected around 50 stuffed animals over the course of a year.
Or maybe we were being superstitious. At any rate, we felt quite claw-machine-rich.
I’d assume so. Back in primary school I got a friend who was pretty much perfect at claw machines (and at Tekken). Later I’ve noticed they made it more difficult (shorter timelimit, limited number of moves, etc.), but never expected they would turn this into a vulgar scam.
Most machines I've seen can be configured at least on 3 parameters (names might be diferent):
-Base grip power
-Improved grip power
-Probability of improved grip.
Some have two actuators with different powers, some actually introduce a delay in the grip with a single actuator, and so on, so it might be not exactly like that.
What I mean, they're set up according to the wishes of the operator. Sometimes it's the same as the owner of the venue, sometimes the venue rents the space to the operator.
So it's totally normal to find some that are more skill-based than others, even within the same manufacturer and model.
Story time: a friend worked in an arcade/bowling venue in the early 2000s, they had 3 machines, and changed the settings weekly to extract more money. Basically one of the machines had higher probabilities just at the level of breaking even, but that was enough to have someone stick around for longer and attract other customers to the other two. The week after those who had "luck" that came back would stick to the same to show off (and fail). Occasionally short queues for certain machines appeared.
Seeing this as a kid/teenager who spent a lot of time in arcades between 1985-2000 or so was really eye-opening.
My uncle managed the local Aladdin's Castle and was constantly tweaking the claws when people would win too much. Also the games where a light spins and you stop it- I saw many times where it landed square on jackpot and stalled a half second then moved to the next slot, and this was just for tickets and $.10 plush toys.
Now as an adult having seen this and having been in software so long, I knew instantly these new 'fish games' were totally rigged. People play quarters on a table top arcade game that shoots at fish,like a top down Duck Hunt. I have some family members/friends for whom this is super addicting. They spend hundreds/thousands over time but don't see it because of that time they won $200.
When I try to explain how weights work, how video slot machine games are rigged too...they never believe me.
Why?
It would be illegal if they did that, so I must clearly be wrong.
Last time we went to vegas my friends got mad that I only played a few hands of blackjack for the experience. To me it's all just giving money away.
I was told the machines are programmed with a certain value above which they'll pay out, (e.g. once the machine has taken £200, allow a win, then repeat).
If the machine is not ready to pay out then the claw just releases on the way back up to make it look like you came close to winning.
Likewise block-stacking machines - it's a little harder to tell with those though as you need to get all the way to the top before you'll know. The block very clearly jumps to the next space on the top row if you time it correctly and it's not ready to pay out.
In America I've never actually won anything from a claw machine I'd ever want and always just thought the arms were purposefully under powered so you can't actually win.
In Japan the items in the game are placed in such a way where they're basically impossible to get on the first try but if you feed in enough yen you can nudge the item and eventually get it, if you're skilled it takes less chances. Literally the first time I ever got a prize I actually wanted (stuffed Pokemon back when the Japan pretty much ignored the massive market of kids who wanted video game and anime branded memorabilia). It left feeling the arcade happy and brought back a few other people who also got items.
I assume the US machines aren't setup in such a way because they just don't want to have attendants. The bigger stuffed animal machines were constantly being refilled by employees after a prize was won. Better to rig the machine, never have to buy new toys nor hire anyone else. Who cares if the kids are happy and want to come back. Another reason arcades work in Japan and not the US.
Even with a parent, the draw is just too attractive for kids. I tried desperately to explain to my kid that these games were rigged against him. He didn't believe me, didn't care, told me all his friends said they won, got angry at me for trying to take away his fun... He gets it now at 15, but at 6 there was no convincing him.
At least the carnival midway games these days have mostly switched from rigged against the kids to everybody wins a crappy prize. But these arcade game types are straight up gambling for children.
I think there's a difference between a a game with a skill element and a random chance element that are always consistent, and one where the game arbitrarily decides that because someone won 200 tries ago nobody playing now is allowed to win.
I understand that with the claw machine the claw is unreliable, but the same claw is always equally unreliable and each time I play I could actually win, and my skill does affect that chance. With these games most of the time when you play there is a zero chance you could win, no mater how well you play.
> machines that are usually exempted from gambling laws
But that's besides the point. You don't need gambling laws to see that this is fraud, deceiving customers to pay in the expectation that the game is fair.
I guess I don't understand what "rigged" means in this context. I thought slot machines could essentially be "tuned" for payout by the owner (e.g. pay out 0.96x of what's put in on average), much like these toy machines.
Rigged in my mind means that the game cares about previous wins and losses. Slot machines do not, the 0.96 us just the statistical average and not something the game tries to enforce.
Yeah, I googled 'sega keymaster' to see what the game looked like and the first result was a 2014 video in which the person demonstrating the game described it as "pretty much luck" and "not due to pay out no matter how accurate you are."
I'd have thought it would be harder and more expensive to find an unused 10 year old iPad now than to just buy a new low-end one. Give it a few more years and that one in the machine will be a collector's item!
I imagine the losses are going to be far worse for those plush toy claw-grabbing machines if this case succeeds. Especially as they attach cash envelopes to them where I live. And those block stacking machines, too.
It’s clearly gambling for kids, I suspect when the first company got away with rigging the game everyone else just assumed it must be legal and ran with it. Now they’re literally everywhere.
The publicity alone will likely cause an EU ban. They don’t like to be seen as trailing on consumer protection law.
I wish modern arcades were banned. They’re nothing more than fruit machines that target kids. There’s no thought about enjoyment, it’s literally about the fastest way to hook a child.
I know the arcades of old weren’t exactly innocent either, with many being optimised to consume the players coins, but at least there was some game play involved. At least the player got something out of the experience.
I feel the ethical line has truly been crossed in terms of what kind of machine is suitable for children.
Alot of modern arcades actually have unlimited play models or "play as much as you want for X time". They make their money off food/drinks/alcohol.
At least the last few I have been too. I guess people for the most part had decided if you were gonna drop 50 bucks you might as well buy a new videogame and play it at home. The scummy part is the "ticket" games, where you have a chance to win below dollar store grade prizes and exist to waste your game time away from games that have actual game play in them. (ski ball is still fun even if its a ticket game)
Last one I went to it was kind of neat to finally be able to beat one of those old school 90s arcade games that in retrospect had their difficulty tuned to do nothing but eat all your quarters.....
Those arcades you mention (where you pay a flat rate and get unlimited playtime) are sadly the minority. What you see in most places these days are ticket machines, claws and other pseudo-gambling machines.
both Main Event and Dave and Busters have unlimited play cards that are popular? (you can't play the ticket games with the cards though) What big arcades are there still other than places like those?
Maybe this is a regional thing. In the U.K. have a few arcades like you describe but the vast majority of arcades are side businesses and populated with gambling machines. You see them in places like bowling alleys, sea side amusements, larger family camp sites, etc. Most of those places might throw in an air hockey and pool table or two but aside from that it’s just ticket machines.
Console games were so polluted with arcade bullshit design (see: Battletoads) that Super Mario World was instantly notable for being designed to be fair.
A lot of the problem is longevity. In the 8 bit, and to some extent the 16 bit era too, the memory constraints were so great that games were often pretty short. So the difficulty bar was set as a method of ensuring longevity.
There was an actual slang term for this used by western developers, the name of which I’ve forgotten, but it directly talks about how games should take longer to complete than your average rental loan.
Didnt the designers of popular rpgs like Dragonquest and Final Fantasy admit they added leveling grinds so customers would be outside the allowed return window if they beat it too soon?
Back when we had a claw machine with plush toys in nearly every grocery store, it was generally a well-known fact that it's a game of chance much more than it is a game of skill. When it didn't want you to win, it just didn't grip as hard as would be necessary to hold the toy. It would either not grab it at all, or it would but then would drop it due to an abrupt stop when it hits the top while lifting the claw.
The one or two times I tried one of those machines, the claw literally just re-opened on the way up no matter what I did. I pretty quickly figured they were rigged to only 'pay out' a certain percentage of plays in order to guarantee they stayed profitable.
It's not even luck. IIRC, most such machines are programmed not to pay out at all until they've taken in more revenue than the cost of a prize. So 99% of the time, your chances are nil, as opposed to infinitesimally nil.
So it sounds like skill + luck: key in the hole gives random chance of winning.
Honestly, these kind of lawsuits are ridiculous. People need to sue General Mills for false advertising instead because sugary cereals causing diabetes; or any other big-food company brainwashing children on YouTube kids.
No, that's now how it works, according to the article, which is going by what the manual shipped with the cabinet states.
The machine will not allow a win no matter what until a set number of losses has happened. The default shipped setting is to not allow a win until there has been 700 losses. Some other vendor in Arizona is noted as having been sued because he ran his games at a required 2200 losses to allow a payout.
Actual gambling devices are much more regulated and have much better payout odds most likely (depending on what's winnable), but more importantly are actually random.
These games are not chance, and they aren't skill, they're a scam that market themselves as a game of skill.
Fun fact: Actual Gambling machines are also audited on the reg.
A college friend works for my state's gaming commission. During a 'drinking talk' about digital signatures, she told me an interesting part of her job; not just going through the slot machines and validating the payout settings, but also checking the EEProms MD5 Hash* to make sure that it was in a list of 'approved' code hashes.
* - This was 15 years ago, I -really- hope they use something better nowadays.
Yeah, I've hear as much before. That's one of the things that makes this worse, these cabinets are (were?) a loophole that allows fleecing people without oversight. It's not like gambling is in your favor when you do it at a casino, but you can usually trust that the state has kept it from being egregiously unfair.
> checking the EEProms MD5 Hash* to make sure that it was in a list of 'approved' code hashes.
> This was 15 years ago, I -really- hope they use something better nowadays.
I dunno. If the hash is generated and displayed by the hardware on a separate LCD display (or a serial you attach) and maybe a bit of non-flashable code, that seems pretty good to me, especially that it's regularly spot checked in person. Something like that is far harder to fake and fool real people with successfully for an extended period, IMO.
"something better" was referring to the MD5 algorithm in particular. It'd be really easy today to make a fair firmware and a rigged firmware with identical MD5 hashes.
Ah, that's true. I was thinking less of the specific hashing used, but MD5 is problematic so that's likely what they meant. I thought they were referring to the process in general.
The lawsuit is not rediculous. These are marketed as being games of skill, which means there's always the ability to win on every turn. This is obviously false and people lose tons of money on this thinking it's fair.
> something is "ridiculous" because there are much worse cases to be taken care of
Yeah, same can be said about "brainwashing kids on YouTube" (whatever that's supposed to mean anyway) or "false advertising" of cereals ... what is your point?
It isn’t luck, because the game has a 0% chance of winning until X number of loses. That is like saying that getting heads on a coin toss is a game of luck, except they are actually using a double tails coin for 700 tosses. A game of luck or chance requires some chance that you could actually win on a given play.
It isn’t luck, because the game has a 0% chance of winning until X number of loses. That is like saying that getting heads on a coin toss is a game of luck, except they are actually using a double tails coin for 700 tosses. A game of luck or chance requires some chance that you could actually win on a given play.
Skill when the machine decides to let you win, no chance when the machine doesn't want you to. It's not at all like poker and very much like the well-known shell game with a pea.
Every winner will have made a skillful shot, hence a skillful shot is required to win. It's a combination of both therefore you obviously can't claim no skill is required at all. Nobody says that a slot machine is a game of skill because nobody considers having the coordination to pull a level to be a skillful attribute.
Moat losers will have made an equally skillful shot, and the ratio of losers to winners is >> 100 : 1 because that's what the device has been programmed to do.
Nobody said that skill was sufficient to win, I am simply pointing out the obvious fact that it's still required (in response to nkrisc who claimed that no skill was required at all, only luck).
It does matter. A person with skill has a higher probability of winning than someone without skill. There are two sequential checks... first, the check that the user is not in control of, the "will the game let you win" check, then the "did the player use enough skill to win?" check.
Let's say the game only allows 1/100 tries to have the chance to win. Player A has the skill to win 50% of the time, player B 25%.
Player A will end up winning 1/200 times, while player B will win 1/400.
Your "big" difference is useless and changes nothing to the topic at hand. Nkrisc claimed that no skill was required at all, only luck, which is clearly false. I was just pointing out this obvious fact. Nice strawman attempt though.
Okay, I can accept that. But poker is still considered gambling, and we wouldn't allow arcade owners to target poker games at children. Why should this be allowed?
I 100% think this is a gambling game and should be outlawed in places gambling is illegal.
I was only saying that there is skill involved. Gaming laws never classify gambling games as those that require zero skill. Otherwise, poker, blackjack, even craps wouldn't be gambling, because all bets do not have the same odds, and therefore skilled players do better than unskilled.
> It is one reason why some places, like California, have poker rooms.
No, that's because some instances of gambling involving betting against other players are sometimes selectively regulated differently than betting against the house. Its the same reason some places, like, again, California, that prohibit casino gambling allow parimutuel betting on horse races.
I remember a long time ago in the UK, around 2003 or so, there was a similar problem with Fruit Machines (Slot machines found in UK bars and pubs).
Through dumping the ROMs and emulating the machines, it was found that the machines were effectively forcing losses at certain points in gameplay; from the same memory state, you bet high and the machine goes low, or you bet low and the machine goes high, giving you zero chance of winning.
There was a campaign called Fairplay that I believe resulted in a fairly small print label being placed on the machines stating that they would at times give no chance of winning; not a great win, but at least it was being said somewhere - http://worldofstuart.excellentcontent.com/fairplay/fruit/bre...
The FairPlay site by Stuart Campbell is actually still up, although I remember first reading about it back in PC Zone personally. There's details on there about replicating the findings, but unfortunately the links are broken; http://www.worldofstuart.excellentcontent.com/fairplay/fruit...
Interesting. In Spain first the state takes a cut from the moment a coin goes in, and from the remainder they're bound to return 65% of the money collected, minumum. The machines have a government-certified black box to perform this accounting.
Now, the law doesn't say anything about prize structure, and it's common knowledge that big prizes tend to appear within 10 plays when it's "cooled down", because machines increasingly shut big prizes down when they notice they have a compulsive player on them.
In online gambling the games are never (or virtually never) rigged. Online slots also almost always pay out 96% or more. You make less money in the long runig you do not let your players win, but I assume small places like bars do not like that volatility.
It is still pointless to put in $1 and expect to receive an average of 96 cents. If you like speculation with less gambling, try call option debit or credit spreads on stocks or ETFs with a low bid/ask spread. It’s more sophisticated, more skill based, and has a higher EV.
And if you get good at it or are already good at it, let me know.
I remember seeing and playing this on a cruise ship.
It was a dollar per try, and I shoved in 5 bucks. By the 4th try it was NOTICEABLE that if you press the button at the "right time", there was a lag before it overshot it and you failed. I pretty much could guess that something like the article discusses was at work, and was simply more a game of luck.
Obviously I stopped after that, as a pure luck game is not as fun. If I had known that the default was 700 losses before payout as a default, I would have had a nice drink or 3 and counted the many people that tried it throughout the day
As a side note, saw one winner at the machine get a wrapped stack of 500, 1 dollar bills
Like with gambling devices, redemption games all seem to have operator-adjustable payout.
I recall playing "Stacker" for a little while in the 2000's. It used an LED dot display for gameplay, which was a simple timing game where you "built" a tower by stacking up the blocks, with it getting faster at each level.
What it did was exactly as you describe: it had a minor reward level that you could always win, and then a few levels above that where the game would cheat and instantly warp the block ahead to make you lose. I did get a win out of it once(and got an iPod mini), so I think I did come out ahead, but that was it.
Overall, it's better to be good at pinball(replay scores) or DDR(adoration of strangers).
Mark Rober also made a video about this for a machine that works similarly. Rober built a machine to play the game perfectly, and it still lost: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXBfwgwT1nQ
> Like with gambling devices, redemption games all seem to have operator-adjustable payout.
This isn’t really the same because most gambling devices are regulated so that, while you can adjust payout percentages, you cannot remove random chance. That any given play has some percent chance of winning, even if it is adjusted very low or dynamically adjusted. This game is simply forcing a certain number of guaranteed loses before considering a payout. That isn’t luck.
I played this in a cruise casino as well, knowing full well that the odds were stacked against me in international waters. I didn’t win. Near the end of the 10 day voyage the machine was mostly empty, I wonder if anyone actually won or they just removed the cash to make it look like it’s a winner.
My wife won a Nintendo DS on one (when they were new) on a cruise ship, we were absolutely convinced nobody ever won anything on them, but it's still fun to give it a shot... no different to casinos or any other gambling. That's the only time I've ever heard of anyone winning /anything/ on those games though.
In Japan the machines pay out a lot more often due to the strict laws against gambling, but the prizes are a lot smaller. You'll put ~$2 in and get a soft toy that probably cost 50c to make, but it still makes it feel a lot more fun than trying/failing to win bigger prizes.
Like any gambling, you always want people to see others winning. It makes people more likely to play. You just want to make sure that the payout is always some percentage of the take and no more.
Setup experience begins at 12:10. If you want to skip to win-threshold setup then 12:50. You can configure it per zone (up to 5,000 per win).
While interesting, I'd imagine this lawsuit also requires showing less clear-cut issues like if consumers were misled, and if they were misled if that is legally permissible.
The technicals on this one are maybe less interest than the legal/consumer rights/labelling side. Purely in terms of how the machine works it is a "gambling" machine with skill required to even give you the opportunity to gamble against the win-threshold/rng.
Guy builds a robot to time pressing the button to get the light to land on the winning sections and demonstrates it is not skill but a random number generator.
What? You aren't familiar with one random guy on the internet that maybe makes some videos in a very niche market that you may have never even heard of before? What? Do you have some sort of life of something preventing from crawling every single crevice on the interwebs?
Not quite as niche as you describe. He figured out how to fairly consistently hit youtube recommendations / top videos. If you use youtube, there's quite a good chance you've seen one of his videos on the frontpage or seen his name a few times, even if you never watched them or aren't interested in his content.
This may be something you haven't considered, but there are ways of using YT with never seeing the front page. Some people don't just "browse" YT, or watch video after video after video following some algorithmically chosen playlist. It is possible to watch a single specific video and then leave the site. Just like you can also read a single tweet without infinitely scrolling through the bedlam.
Exactly, isn't it a little hypocritical to say that twitter users are simply "infinitely scrolling through the bedlam", while posting on a website that requires scrolling for content discovery? I admit that Hacker News has magnitudes better content than twitter, but it's ironic nonetheless.
I mentioned recommendations and top videos. It doesn't matter if you visit the front page - there's a good chance you've seen Mark Robber's video thumbnail, whether you browse YT for content or not.
I have a bad news for you: youtube tailors their recommendations to each person. I know! It is difficult to belive.
Sarcasm aside I don’t know who this Mark person is. Never heard of him, never seen a video from him. And I’m quite okay with that. If you were to ask me what is trending on youtube I would tell you it is woodworking videos, zany snippets from musicals, and people discussing how a windpowered car can travel faster than the wind. But I also know that that tells more about my media habbits than youtube itself so I don’t generalise from this to everyone.
Try reading with a stronger interpretation. Of course I know recommendations are per-person - consider why I wrote that comment anyway. There's also a few videos digging into why Mark Robber's videos are consistently winning the popularity contest while others aren't.
I've been on youtube since the first day. I have no clue who Mark Roper is and have never watched one of his videos, never had them suggested to me. My feed is almost entirely cooking videos. The rest is random electronica.
You are picking a really dumb fight to be frank. It's ok if people have no clue who this Mark person is or what he does.
It's good that I'm not picking that fight then. I wrote "there's quite a good chance you've seen one of his videos". If you haven't, that's not unexpected and it doesn't change that he's a widely recognisable person in current zeitgeist.
I don’t know him by name but the porch pirate glitter bomb project video and subsequent controversy about the legitimacy of some of the footage was sort of front-page-of-the-web stuff for a time.
I also saw the timer arcade beating device prior. It was well done. He makes some cool stuff, but the former nasa thing and sort of YouTube pandering takes away from it for me.
Had an idea when I saw one of these on a cruise ship.
Every time we spent time within eyesight of the machine, I timed it and counted how many plays went in. After a couple of days, I had something resembling an average number of plays per hour. The machine was one where the prizes were visible, so you could tell how many had been won.
Now I had a bound on the number of plays per prize.
Estimate number of plays based on amount of time passed. Check if prize has been claimed. If not, it's due.
You don't have to be too accurate with your numbers. Just get within ~50% to beat the vig.
State gaming boards really need to investigate arcades in general. They are much worse than the casino with the same kinds of games, but a much worse payout. I once calculated it out when I was on a bus trip I would get back 70% of what I put in (n=$100). At the arcade you're lucky to get 5 cents back, and most of the time the games are not even fun.
We need to put together a team of experts to audit all of these machines.
I worked on a redemption device a long time ago, one of those "stop the lights" game for a large manufacturer.
There were a few jurisdictions, Iowa and New Jersey come to mind, that were already aware of the nature of these machines and required the manufacturers to have their software audited and validated by (state approved) third-party gaming labs identical to what the slot machine companies do when getting code approved for release.
The key point was that the probability of a win couldn't be adjusted on the fly to make the target payout percentage (kind of what the article says). The probabilities had to be fixed for every player on every game. Although the first method is a lot easier to write, software-wise. =)
For the rest of the jurisdictions, the default payout was 40% and anything was fair game to hit that number. Remember that the next time you're in a Chuck E Cheese.
The problem is not the payout probability being fixed or variable. The problem is a lot of these machines suggest they are skill-based when they are really skill and luck based.
I don't think you can call it luck when the machine is programmed to explicitly not give a win until a number of games. It's not luck, it's not odds. There's zero chance of a win until the condition is reached.
The operator-set percentage and payout was always local to the machine. There's no way to network these things, and even when do you see networked progressive slot machines (e.g. IGT's Megabucks), the RNG and payout is always local to that machine.
In the arcade, you get exactly 0% of your money back. You may get a prize though.
It is the thing that makes it not gambling. In a casino, there is the risk of spending more than your disposable income, hoping to get your money back. In an arcade, you know that once the money is in the machine, it is gone, less chance to overspend. The main point of anti-gambling laws is to prevent addicts from ruining themselves, not to prevent you from spending some money to have fun at the casino, and not to save your disposable income.
The line is blurred when the prize has resale value, and in fact, a common way to disguise gambling is for the machine to give out prizes that the shop next door conveniently buys for a good price.
Not just arcades, but all video games, especially on mobile but aaa is really trying to catch up on desktop with loot boxes and skinners box “progression” systems
Gambling should be a compulsory subject in primary school.
By the time they reach high school:
- Every kid should know how to play blackjack and poker.
- Every kid must know how to compute the odds of winning.
- Every kid should know how to verify the odds presented to them.
- Every kid should know at least three ways of cheating and being cheated
This might make the earth population a bit more resistant to panic and overreaction in times of uncertainty.
Hopefully, fewer people will drink chlorine, stockpile toilet paper, participate in ponzi schemes, go to a real war against a fictitious enemy.
> By the time they reach high school: Every kid should know [statistics]
Maybe things have changed. But when I was in highschool in America in the early 00s, statistics was an optional math class offered to juniors. Nobody had taken stats before reaching highschool, which is what the GP calls for, and kids in the "artistic track" weren't required to take stats at all.
I'm a 90s kid and probability and statistics were like a one day throw away lesson.
I've unironically thought the same thing as the top post. Unless you're going into STEM you probably don't need more than the most basic conceptual understanding of calc or trig. But understanding how probabilities work is a huge benefit in every day life.
Then top level comment is right, they should, that should change (assuming what you're saying is accurate).
Perhaps GP is not from the US. In the UK, statistics is not separate to mathematics, and is first met in primary school (even in three-school areas more analogue to the US) getting progressively more advanced up to and through (compulsorily until sixth form - the two years prior to university) 'high school'.
Then you'll just have people invent more smoke to hide the fact it's gambling. Trading card games are a good example. The game is, to a limit, one of skill, but you are gated by the cards you open in your scratch off ticke- I mean pack.
Plenty of people have fun playing trading card games by just making the best of the cards they get and, of course, trading. Most people I know who play or played them (including myself) were like that.
Of course, you can get obsessed with getting the best cards and end up wasting unhealthy amounts of money, but it's not the most common behavior. While I see the point that those games can be seen as having a gambling component, I don't think it's fair to group them together with pure gambling where there is no or almost no motivation to the game other than the possibility of winning a prize, like slot machines, roulette, or the game in this article.
I went to an arcade this month for the first time in years and it shocked me just how many games of “luck” they had. It was easily the majority of games there. Felt like I was in a kids casino with no regulations. Also felt like a sucker because you had to pre-pay for a card with credits, and there wasn’t any games that took more than a minute to play so I ended up playing them.
I had pretty much the exact same experience recently.
What also annoyed me when our child was much younger was how many of the toys people bought him were cheap plastic with flashing lights and sounds and how much these reminded me of slot machines.
> People love all kinds shit that is objectively bad for them... sugar, heroin, gambling, cryptocurrency.
What's not on this list is... toys with flashing lights :).
That is to say, just because casinos use flashing lights and loud sounds too, doesn't mean it's bad per se. And, as I understand it, lights and sounds in casinos are more intense - perhaps they're aiming for light sensory overload.
And personally, I prefer my kid play with that one educational sound/lightboard we got (and that I keep repeatedly fixing after she breaks it), rather than do what many parents I know do - give their 1+ y.o.'s smartphones with videos to play with.
Sugar isn't "objectively bad" in moderation. Gambling might be bad if you only look at the expected (monetary) value, but if you factor entertainment value it might be okay.
Can't the same be said of heroin, which in the UK is prescribed as a medication under the name diamorphine? Both of these substances can be safe in limited quantities, and both of them exploit vulnerabilities in human physiology or psychology that results in over-consumption being a very common outcome. One of them is strictly regulated when not banned outright, but the other is freely given to any kid who has spare pocket change, no questions asked.
>Felt like I was in a kids casino with no regulations.
Exactly. At least casinos are regulated so that, even if the odds are bad, they still have to be “random chance”. If I put my money in a slot machine, there is some percent, no matter how low, that I could win on any play. With this machine, and likely many others, its literally a 0% chance for some ridiculous number of plays. That is the difference between a game of luck and a scam. And that’s not even getting into that the game is pretending to be a game of skill, while actually being a scam of a game of chance.
IIRC the argument that they use for "rigged" machines like this (including most claw machines, Stacker, Key Master, etc.) is that it's not technically random. But for all practical purposes it is random for the average player who walks up to the machine (or worse if non-sucker players are exploiting the machine's algorithm) so such machines really should:
1) be advertised and regulated as games of chance (e.g. being required to disclose the odds of winning, etc.)
2) be subject to FTC rules about deceptive advertising
I think they are currently subject to FTC rules against deceptive advertising -- isn't that the basis of this lawsuit? However, FTC rules are only enforced civilly by damaged parties, IIRC. I don't think the agency engages in any proactive enforcement of false advertising laws. But someone please correct me if I'm wrong.
Is it even possible for a "game of skill" arcade machine that dispenses high value prizes to be profitable? Seems like any such game would just breed expert players that clean house and win all the iPads with their skill. If not, surely it would invite some hacker or tinkerer to invent a device to augment their skill and (again) clean house and get a bunch of cheap iPads.
Maybe you could have arcade machines where you:
- play AlphaGo/Stockfish
- factor a huge prime
- Some other "hard" feat
and if you succeed you get an iPad. Those are the only "games of skill" that wouldn't get you bankrupted by expert players
For example the game where the lights go around a circle and you try to land in front of you for the most tickets could instead have you land the light somewhere and then dice are rolled to determine your actual landing spot.
I'm sure a real game designer could think of something more fun where your skill at the game increases your chances but ultimately luck at the RNG determines your prize.
Unless you're Jonathan Schrantz, who famously beat stockfish on the hardest difficulty as black by playing the Stafford gambit. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27829913 That being said it doesn't work with Stockfish 12.
But yeah dressing what is essentially a pure con (I don't think these even count as games of luck given the payout is not fair from game to game) as a game o skill is terrible.
It wouldn’t be so bad if the operator were required to print the winning odds on the machine somewhere. I think it’s just that the odds are secret that makes it problematic.
The claw machines are also rigged. I saw manuals for one where it offers a way to configure pressures in the pneumatic mechanism that closes the claw, and there was a brilliant paragraph of advice not to set the win probability too low in order to keep the customers happy :)
> In 2015, Sega and another angry player reached a class action settlement, but the settlement was rejected by the judge due to administrative reasons, like a high attorney’s fee and failing to identify and paying affected class members.
You can take advantage of people as long as it's impractical to identify them.
The last time I was in Atlantic City it was quite depressing. I saw some desperate drunk get thrown out after he put his fist through one of the game machine screens.
It's the regulated kind that always seems like a sleazy stealth tax on the poor. I'm okay with people playing poker privately for stakes, it's the casinos that I can't stand.
The stacker game with the moving blocks always frustrated me, I spent way too much money trying to win that one and got quite good at everything but the last round. I wonder if that one is rigged too.
It's definitely rigged, and even allows the owner to choose how difficult it is just like the one in the article.
Where I grew up there was two places next door to each other which both happened to have stackers. One had junky prizes like cheap earbuds, and the other had great prizes like a gameboy or mp3 player. Sure enough the later was more popular, but no one ever won. Once you got good at the game the one with the junk would 'allow' you to win pretty reliably every dozen or so attempts.
At this point, I just assume any commercially successful software game is optimized to extract every last cent out of the target audience through subtle psychological brutalization.
Surely there are exceptions, but it's like buying from Amazon: it takes too much work to sort through the ripoffs. The fun is spoiled because it requires constant vigilance and active resistance to avoid spending too much money.
"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play." — War Games (1983)
Ratings anywhere can't be trusted. The higher the profile of a critic, the more incentive there is to corrupt them, and the more likely it is that their published opinions are just shilling for the commercial entities that own them.
I doubt very many are directly on the take, but I think there's a lot of semi-conscious self-censorship and score / review disconnect that goes on at the well known sites, for all the talk of a hard wall between editorial and advertising. And there's a lot of "content" that is just very thinly veiled PR for an upcoming release. I also think there's a good deal of corruption and nepotism around stuff like the IGF and IndieCade, from my experience swimming in those circles (I did an MFA game design at NYU)
I was mostly just joking around, but I do think there are reliable ways of finding good games:
-look at player scores/reviews on Metacritic
-look for games with many reviews on Steam that have Very Positive or Overwhelmingly Positive ratings but that you've never heard of
-Tim Rogers (look, I kinda hate the guy too, but he's the real deal)
-More seriously (and this is the best option), blogs / Discord communities / Twitter walls of good indie devs like Michael Brough, Zach Gage, Terry Cavanagh, Stephen Lavelle, etc. Like, check out freeindiegam.es, or join Brough's Discord. I am old so I don't know the new waves but you could scroll through a few hundred listings on Itch, look up some Twitter accounts from there, and find them. Most of the very best stuff is of course not on consoles at all but on PC, web, and mobile
>At this point, I just assume any commercially successful software game is optimized to extract every last cent out of the target audience through subtle psychological brutalization.
Is your idea of "commercially successful software game" the top charts on app store or something? There are plenty of games on PC/consoles that are successful and not microtransaction laden.
Basically it would delay the release to just miss if you happen to time it perfectly.
I complained to the Metreon theater in SF and they had the machine removed the next day. I also read of lawsuits years ago so I’m surprised I still see this machine worldwide.
You know the horribly irony is that wagering machines that are 100% skill based are illegal. The only exception, I've seen "The Fishing Game" in a texas bar. It's a 2D game where you shoot fish in a pool table like screen. Bullets cost money, fish death pays out.
Are they illegal or just uncommon because they could be abusable? As if they were illegal wouldn't things like rewards for a hole in one, or "guess" how many the beans in a jar would be illegal? Plus aren't most carnival games technically 100% skill?
I don't think the "Fish game" is skill based exactly--from what I understand the end payout depends largely on what fish the inner workings of the game decides to throw your way
As an aside, I had no idea Sega were still making "old fashioned" mechanical games, which is how they started with slot machines and jukeboxes in the 1940s. I thought they had long since become a mobile game and IP licensing company (i.e. Sonic the Hedgehog)
Sega also runs Sega-branded arcades in Japan. They even have virtual horse-racing games where the patrons can game real money and watch the "races" on a huge screen. Actual video games are about 50% of all the machines in there, the rest is all gambling-related, like electronic versions of slot machines and also the ubiquitous rigged "UFO-Catcher" games (where you move an arm to grab a prize).
But here's the thing: Once you step into an arcade in Japan, it's absolutely obvious that you've entered a shady business run by shady people (so in Japan - the Yakuza). It's a dark, smoke-filled room with no windows, and always in the shadier parts of the city next to massage parlours and hooker bars.
There were some shady arcades in over a decade ago, but now usually not shady (unless you choose shady area like where massage parlours and hooker bars exists, arcades are ubiquitous). Every young people visit there to play games, get items, and shot photos.
I'm not familiar with those games. My personal Sega saga began in the 80s with the Master System, and ended with the Genesis and Game Gear (which I still own!), and which I credit with sparking my original interest in computing technology.
I did of course play plenty of Sega arcade games, but I didn't know until much later that they started out supplying coin-op slot machines and amusements to military bases in the 1940s and 1950s.
It seems like the company went through 3 or 4 lifespans before they entered my awareness in the 80s.
Sega makes all sorts of arcade games, not just PC and console compatible ones but those ones at arcades (or barcades, bowling alleys, etc.) where you sit on a plastic motorbike or fake skis or rumbling carseats with steering wheels, those are usually Sega.
When I lived in Japan, I was really surprised what the average Japanese person thought about Arcades. There are Sega-, Taito-, Konami- and other branded Arcades in the bigger cities, but "normal" people wouldn't go near them, because they are run by the Yakuza or Yakuza-owned front businesses.
With the ongoing rumours that Konami itself is a Yakuza company (see the news around the Hideo Kojima firing scandal) and Nintendo having started as a supplier for Yakuza gambling parlours, I wonder if video game arcades in Japan are simply the modern version of those gambling parlours.
So if there are rigged arcade machines, I am not surprised.
Guru Larry's channel covered one such rumor that "A certain Japanese game publisher" hired the yakuza to kidnap a developer's sister[0]. Covered in "The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers Vol. 2."
It reminds me of this documents[1] I saw a few years ago about how a Black Tie crane (claw) machine works, how the machine will automatically calculate when to win.
Just last week my son told me they tried Key Master at a bowling alley. I told him those games all have switches to control the win rate. He didn't believe/understand me, so it was nice to have screenshots of the manual literally saying "these are the switches that control the win rate".
and the conversion kit (which “allows an operator of a Key Master game to convert the game” to a skill-based one)
I wonder what the "conversion kit" contains, since any one with a software background probably knows that it may take nothing more than patching out a single "don't let player win yet" conditional jump in the software/firmware. Indeed, the code skill-based game would be simpler from that perspective, since it does not have to behave randomly or track the payouts. Of course, setting the number of attempts to 1 (assuming there's no lower limit) could have the same effect.
I'm gonna guess the "kit" is a jumper, and a piece of paper telling you where to plug it, and the code has the payout-tracking mechanism gated with a conditional checking voltage on a pin that's bridged by that jumper.
Normally, you need three items for the device to be a gambling device, chance, consideration, and reward. There must be payment for consideration to win, and you need a chance to win.
Since the device has controls for the rention percentage, that leans towards these are not gambling devices, since jurisdictions can differ. However, it is not exactly a skill device, either. There is an option to convert it to skill based, but I doubt an operator anywhere used that option. That is also why the manufacturer put the effort for that on the operator to install, so that it likely wouldn't get installed.
Claw machines are rigged as well. Not with a count of 700 but still there's a counter. Performing the equivalent of "card counting" on these types of machines are a hobby for some.
At least in Japan for their UFO Catcher and similar games, it's still pretty fun because you tend to be able to get childhood memory goods (pokemon/digimon/etc. stuffed animals).
Plus while there can be a rigged factor to the machines, you can still pick up some mechanics that help you shortcut to getting the item to drop. Of course it costs money and you don't always "win" but if you can pick up the pattern, it does become a bit of a fun challenge.
What’s ironic is that when I visited Tokyo a couple years ago I didn’t play any of these games because I assumed they were rigged like in the US. Now that I know the payouts are more favorable maybe I will give them a try next time
They are definitely still rigged. It's just that IMO the prizes and challenge still make it decently entertaining for me. But don't get me wrong, many 100y coins are lost in the pursuit of trying to win.
I've played it before at a movie theater, I remember there was a noticeable latency between the time when you pressed the button and the machine responded (felt like 250-400ms). I watched some other people play it while I waited for the film to start, and it almost appeared to be buffering inputs at an extremely low polling rate, such that it might be impossible to even line it up in the first place. Very strange game, I guess I'm not really surprised.
It’s funny, I was just thinking today about House of the Dead and if it was actually possible to beat the game on one credit. It seems like there’s a lot of sections that a player could not possibly aim and shoot fast enough to get through. I realize there’s no actual prize in those games like the key master games, but I still think it should be possible to beat an arcade game on one credit if you’re skilled enough.
Here in Asia/Taiwan, the claw machines by-law must display the money required to be spent to Win the prize. These are a good example because they are also skill+gambling.
All claw machines Trigger a win if X dollars a spent in a certain duration. I suspect these key machines are based on a similar logic. AFAIK Poker Machines in Australia at licensed venues aren't required to display winning odds :/
While I think Sega has effectively sold a gambling machine I'm not sure if they should be liable in these lawsuits. They sold a tool that could have been configured correctly to comply with local regulations.
The owners manual explains to the operator that they can configure this probability, which they could simply set to 1 to bypass the entire gambling mechanic.
There is a local place that has an arcade with machines that give tickets. My kids loves it. I figured out which games work best just by watching other people, over many visits. I became friendly with one of the staff and he told me the top 3 payout games. Now the kids win all the time. We definitely avoid machines like the key blaster.
