7 ms·

This is a good read, but I question this line: > Video games, at their best, offer everyone an equal chance to overcome the same challenges on an equal playing

• digi_owl 8y ago
  But it also allowed skill with the game to shine by getting further on a single quarter.
  • bitwize 8y ago
    But skill with the game doesn't come from nowhere. You build skill by playing, and with arcade games, you have to pay to play. Granted, paying for a chance to test and improve your skill sounds a lot more fair than paying to win.
  • ryandrake 8y ago
    Yea, I recall fondly playing Mortal Kombat in the arcade for literally hours with one quarter vs. a line of people each putting their own quarters in. As long as you won the match it let the winner continue playing without adding more money. An afternoon of entertainment could be had for <$1.
• dfxm12 8y ago
  You don't get to enter your initials into the machine based on how far you get. Only your score matters, and your score resets when you continue. You don't "beat" Pac-Man when you get to the kill screen, you beat Pac-Man when you get a perfect score.
  • Andrex 8y ago
    True! And I forgot that aspect of the scoring system.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • piker 8y ago
    ...and how does one practice to "beat" Pac-Man with a perfect score?
    • jandrese 8y ago
      Getting to the kill screen seems like it should count as a victory. Getting your initials on the top of the high score screen counts too, if perhaps only briefly. The idea that you can't say you've won unless you've played a completely perfect game is a mindset for insane people who will never be happy.
      • jakelazaroff 8y ago
        I think GP's point was, if every practice run costs a quarter, there's likely a correlation between wealth/resources and practice/skill.
      • pasquinelli 8y ago
        that's if you're stuck on the idea of beating a game of skill. if you need that idea, then you have to be able to beat pacman, and so you feed quarters to get to the game ending bug. if you dispense with that idea then you play for your best score, and feeding quarters to get to the kill screen becomes a waste of time.
    • TuringTest 8y ago
      Practicing the game is not pay-to-win, is pay-to-practice. It still requires skill to win.
  • gowld 8y ago
    High score resets whenever the machine is unplugged. Score isn't the only measure of success in Pac-man or other arcade games.
• GunwaleHamilton 8y ago
  Remind me, I don't remember if you could continue or if you had to Start again from the beginning when you died in Pac-Man. I know later Arcade Games allowed you to continue but I'm not sure about Pac-Man
  • pwg 8y ago
    I believe the arcade Pac-Man fell into the camp of "when you die, your current game is over". I believe the "you have 30 seconds to add more money to continue your game from where you just died" came about much later in the arcades than the date of Pac-Man's reign.
• notahacker 8y ago
  Yeah, the irony is the article talks about Pay to Win games, which a good percentage of gamers don't bother with at all because you can have very good (arguably much better) experiences with a fixed price, several year old games that run on your ordinary computer, and yet harks back to an era when people did have a choice of pay per play or relatively expensive specialised hardware. No, really the decline of hardware as a proportion of gaming spend isn't bad news for people with a lot of time to play games and no money. It's similarly lacking in awareness when it advocates one route to levelling playing fields being a model where everybody receives micropayments from any commercial entity that uses their data (interesting in theory) apparently without realising that data regarding people with money is usually a lot more valuable than data on people without it (before we even start to consider other issues like implications for deanonymisation). That's after moaning that Twitch separates people into "haves and have nots" because some people earn considerably more money from their streams than others based mainly on things other than their spending power. And anyone that thinks "government employed Twitch stars tasked with building communities for the marginalised and estranged" is going to equal things out has never been through a process where government bodies evaluate who to fund...
• emodendroket 8y ago
  NES-era games juiced the difficulty so you couldn't beat them on rental. Not quite the same but if I were going to pick a "golden age" of relatively not-exploitative gaming it might go from SNES-PS2 or so.
  • gowld 8y ago
    Isn't the golden age now, where difficulty is customizable?
    • emodendroket 8y ago
      Well, no, because the axis we're looking at isn't difficulty. And customizable difficult is not a recent idea.
    • annabellish 8y ago
      Absolutely not. Difficulty is customisable, but we still live in a world where massive AAA titles lock things which in previous generations were relatively easily attainable behind grinding measured in weeks, not days, with no regard for any difficulty setting you might have, while constantly suggesting both explicitly and by implication that you could skip the grind by just giving them more money. I think a lot of the indie and AA space is still very good, though.
      • kazagistar 8y ago
        The reason the golden age is now is specifically because you have all those options. Just because AAA games exist doesn't invalidate the fact that if you are looking for a specific type of more traditional game experience, you can find it much easier then ever before.
        • emodendroket 8y ago
          The "Golden Age" usually refers to when the great works were produced; otherwise we'd always simultaneously be in every golden age that ever occurred (barring the works in question being destroyed), making the term kind of meaningless.
• brixon 8y ago
  Maybe not Pac-Man, but a lot of the arcade games in the mall from my generation (40yr old) had the "Continue" option and there was no way to win the game on one quarter. It was cheap to play but expensive to win.
• bambataa 8y ago
  This is slightly off topic, but are modern arcade games more extortionate than they used to be? If you play e.g. Mario Kart you have to keep putting in coins after each race. Maybe if you come first it lets you continue but it seems a total rip off.
  • mrguyorama 8y ago
    Atari aimed for a playtime per quarter of 2-3 minutes back in the day
    • bambataa 8y ago
      Wow, maybe not that different then when you account for inflation (though I might be way off). Who were these kids then who had rolls of quarters to throw into machines?
      • nitrogen 8y ago
        Sadly, sometimes they were the kids who stole money and possessions from their siblings to convert to play time.
• chillingeffect 8y ago
  > If you had more quarters to spare in Pac-Man, Definitely. And just to dilute simplistic points of view, there were also books published designed to teach the secrets to beating these games in part to spend less money on them. [1] One was even published by Consumer Reports.. [1] http://allincolorforaquarter.blogspot.com/2012/12/golden-age-arcade-video-game-books.html http://allincolorforaquarter.blogspot.com/2012/12/golden-age... But the author has already bought into the frame that playing the game according to implicit rules and achieving progress is the dominant form of the game. This overlooks many other social aspects of the game, such as roles like watching, reviewing, finding secret levels, using games as a social space to meet others, etc. In short, the author is caught by surprise by the fact that humans will project their social relations into the video game world which they have imagined to be hyper-egalitarian. In fact, the mere invention of the games was an extension of our social relations into the digital field, so as soon as they appeared it was too late to sustain the author's idealistic viewpoint. Perhaps the author would have made a stronger point arguing for the emergence of a hypercapitalist congeries of video games which are actually a precession of Baudrillardian simulacra. In the first stage, the dynamics of human experience are projected digitally into a virtual, lithographic field, e.g. instead of battles in space, we use electronic computers to simulate game play In the second stage, e.g. games on disks and CDs from the 80s-2000, capital was used to design a product which must be recovered through sales of the game software. In the third stage, it is the simulacra of a game which is sold. It must be so technically dazzling that the capital required to produce it can not be recovered from the sales of the game itself. The game must be reconfigured so that it is not merely a game any more, but an addictive object whose main purpose is no longer leisure, but to recover the hypercapital outlay to reproduce it through gacha.
• Noos 8y ago
  That's not pay per win. Yes, you could spend more quarters and put more time in front of the screen, but in the end it was your own personal skill that determined how far you went in many games. Just putting in money and time alone wasn't enough. The harder games you'd hit the wall anyways; Sinistar or Robotron 2084 are good examples of how you really needed skill in games. Pay to win means putting more money in to the game will give you a direct advantage no matter your skill level. It might be possible to compensate for it, many times its not. Reddit had a thread where they talked about that, and an example was one person in Black Desert or Archeage killing an entire guild of players. Edit: the main pay to win aspect in arcade games were continuing and energy or timer systems. Continuing is, but the player's goal always was to reduce the amount of continues by skillful play. Very few games i feel were impossible to do so with. Timers are hit points counting down to eventually end the game. Gauntlet was the first big game to use it, as was Rampage.Nintendo's playchoice 10 used a literal timer, where once it counted down, the game stopped letting you play. Usually though these weren't considered pay to win...the term we used was "quarter munchers" and many of those games were co-operative so pay to win aspects didn't harm other players.