Comment by phkahler
3 years ago
Two minutes would be a holdover from 1980's arcade games. That's about how long you'd play on a quarter. Maybe 3 minutes.
3 years ago
Two minutes would be a holdover from 1980's arcade games. That's about how long you'd play on a quarter. Maybe 3 minutes.
And most of them were tuned for profit too, so it's not like this is a new concept. It does feel like a lot of the mobile and F2P monetization folks are the same ones that enjoyed profiting from arcade games and see them as being similar to slot machines (except better, because they only pay out in neurochemicals, not money!).
There's been a quiet war for decades between people who want to design games as art, and people who want to design them as a predictable recurring revenue stream. I'm not sure what iteration we're up to now.
Comparing arcade machines to gambling is a sore spot, especially for pinball. Ostensibly arcade machines are skill based. They are not random. You may be able to win an award or prize but that will be based on some objective measure of performance with little to no randomization. This is important because arcades operate where gambling is illegal, so suggesting they are anything like gambling threatens the security of those businesses.
Roger Sharpe [1] saved pinball by demonstrating it is a game of skill.
RE: art vs profit I think there is room for both. Games are probably the best example of that. Game designers are very much artists but they are also engineers and business people.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Sharpe_(pinball)
You are factually correct, but the intentions are a bit murkier. The explosion of video arcades in the 70s and 80s was due to how lucrative the machines were as an investment, not due to any passion on the part of the owners. The value proposition for arcades at the time was basically like gambling, but not illegal. While arcade games have always been skill-based, that's not the same as "fair," at least in the modern game design sense.
Yes, with repetition, you can eventually learn to beat Ghosts and Goblins on a single quarter, but the game is not going to just let you do that on the first try. Games of that era are designed to lure you in, then kill you with something completely out of nowhere after your 3 minutes are up and it's time for the next person in line to put in their money. This self-reinforced when you saw someone who had put in the reps getting really far on one credit, so you would think you can do that. But no, you can't. You die at the end of the first stage like everyone else.
It's not gambling, but it's still designed to extract money as efficiently as possible.
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>Ostensibly arcade machines are skill based.
That's also a slippery slope of an argument. Poker players claim that they are not gambling. Early stage addicts claim they are not addicts and can stop any time. Gaming, whether the player is earning money or points, all keys in on the same addictive traits of their players. Some game devs go all in on that because it is fish in a barrel stakes for making money.
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My pinball machines actually track average ball times in the audits. It’s a KPI for operators. Machine setups will be changed to increase difficulty if necessary.
Have any pinball machines ever been designed to change the difficulty during game play. Some sort of algo to make the bumpers less bumpery, restrict the movement of the flippers, adjust the angles of things, etc?
Not to my knowledge. It would be antithetical to the game. Games do scale difficulty based on progress but this is the same for everyone. Some games do reverse flipper sides or direction but again, it is based on progress, not a more complex playtime targeting algorithm.
An example of this is multiballs. The first one (per player) can start with say three shots. The next one might require six and then the third nine. This is oversimplified but the point is the progress is consistent.
The only dynamically-scaling feature I am aware of is the replay score which (can) set a starting score based on recent plays but will also scale up rapidly when it is reached (say, +50%) until it isn’t reached, at which point it resets to the starting score. But this has no actual in-game effect.