4 ms·

Bushnell suggests the opposite near the top of this interview, that part of a coin-op game was exactly that you did need to let people plop a quarter in and jus

Bushnell suggests the opposite near the top of this interview, that part of a coin-op game was exactly that you did need to let people plop a quarter in and just start playing! > Nolan Bushnell: A little bit. Remember that Atari was founded as a coin-op company. And coin-op has this requirement that a newbie has to get into the game almost instantly without reading instructions. So the simplicity of onboarding is lost by a lot of people right now. Which makes sense to me, of COURSE you have to be able to "just start playing" if you wanted to get someone to put a quarter into a machine they hadn't played before!

Waterluvian 4y ago
My guess is that this was an era where an engineer did everything and so game design (the act of worrying about making a game fair, fun, intuitive, challenging, all in the right balances) probably suffered (and perhaps didn’t really exist as a discipline for interactive digital games.)
Natsu 4y ago
The older arcade cabinets had instructions printed on the cabinet itself and the game would generally show a sort of demo screen giving you an idea of what you were doing with a little bit of tutorial on them.
- pixl97 4y ago
  Yea, but in general that's 3 or 4 lines of simple text. Some of the RTS/simulation stuff I play these days have an hour or two of tutorials to explain all the complicated underpinnings of things occurring.
  - Natsu 4y ago
    Agreed, I'm just pointing out that not only were they generally simple, they had controls & instructions on the cabinets.
rufus_foreman 4y ago
The people who designed Williams arcade games apparently had a different philosophy.
- ddingus 4y ago
  Eugene Jarvis: Crush, punish, kick the players ass! Defender is a play on sight title because of that idea. Love that game and it is hard! But if you put out, really try, you are richly rewarded. When one gets I to the zone, or flow on that game, the world goes away, and it is amazing. Addictive. I am building a cabinet for that one. Got my perfect low hour CRT and need to cut some wood, and yeah! Can't wait.
phkahler 4y ago
Yeah, they really missed that with I,Robot which made you choose between the game and the ungame. If you just pressed a button and oops!
TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
There have been studies. On one axis the perfect coin-op is trivially easy to get into but almost impossibly hard to master. On a related axis you trade off progress/satisfaction vs frustration. In a perfect game frustration at failure motivates the desire to make progress. The game produces just enough satisfaction - likely with intermittent reward - to keep players coming back. Too much frustration and players give up. Too little and they master the game and their quarter lasts for half an hour. The original PacMan is pretty close to ideal. It's immediately obvious what the goal is, and then you slowly understand how the game is designed and start to master each level. Battlezone was a failure, because once you worked out (or were shown) the one trick - dealing with the saucer and missiles by staying in reverse - the game became too easy.
- ddingus 4y ago
  Having the deterministic patterns helped a lot. People could strategize and would drop coins and see progress!
ddingus 4y ago
I feel that way. Drop the quarter and have enough of an experience to really want more.

Waterluvian 4y ago

My guess is that this was an era where an engineer did everything and so game design (the act of worrying about making a game fair, fun, intuitive, challenging, all in the right balances) probably suffered (and perhaps didn’t really exist as a discipline for interactive digital games.)

Natsu 4y ago

The older arcade cabinets had instructions printed on the cabinet itself and the game would generally show a sort of demo screen giving you an idea of what you were doing with a little bit of tutorial on them.

pixl97 4y ago
Yea, but in general that's 3 or 4 lines of simple text. Some of the RTS/simulation stuff I play these days have an hour or two of tutorials to explain all the complicated underpinnings of things occurring.
- Natsu 4y ago
  Agreed, I'm just pointing out that not only were they generally simple, they had controls & instructions on the cabinets.

rufus_foreman 4y ago

The people who designed Williams arcade games apparently had a different philosophy.

ddingus 4y ago
Eugene Jarvis: Crush, punish, kick the players ass! Defender is a play on sight title because of that idea. Love that game and it is hard! But if you put out, really try, you are richly rewarded. When one gets I to the zone, or flow on that game, the world goes away, and it is amazing. Addictive. I am building a cabinet for that one. Got my perfect low hour CRT and need to cut some wood, and yeah! Can't wait.

phkahler 4y ago

Yeah, they really missed that with I,Robot which made you choose between the game and the ungame. If you just pressed a button and oops!

TheOtherHobbes 4y ago

There have been studies. On one axis the perfect coin-op is trivially easy to get into but almost impossibly hard to master. On a related axis you trade off progress/satisfaction vs frustration. In a perfect game frustration at failure motivates the desire to make progress. The game produces just enough satisfaction - likely with intermittent reward - to keep players coming back. Too much frustration and players give up. Too little and they master the game and their quarter lasts for half an hour. The original PacMan is pretty close to ideal. It's immediately obvious what the goal is, and then you slowly understand how the game is designed and start to master each level. Battlezone was a failure, because once you worked out (or were shown) the one trick - dealing with the saucer and missiles by staying in reverse - the game became too easy.

ddingus 4y ago
Having the deterministic patterns helped a lot. People could strategize and would drop coins and see progress!

ddingus 4y ago

I feel that way. Drop the quarter and have enough of an experience to really want more.