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> 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

> 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.

Zak 5y ago
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.
james-skemp 5y ago
> "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.
542354234235 5y ago
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.

Zak 5y ago

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.

james-skemp 5y ago

> "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.

542354234235 5y ago

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.