Meanwhile at the Arcade

I ended up at a Dave & Busters arcade yesterday for my brother's 51st birthday, along with his son who is about 8.  Considering it's a huge room full of gaming machines, I expected to have a lot to say from a game perspective.  Sure, there were big machines with short versions of Frogger, Monopoly, Crossy Road, Wheel of Fortune, machines branded with Star Trek, Ghostbusters, various zombie franchises, games where you can fish, bowl, shoot hoops for points ... a huge variety.  But it was a sensory overload and I can't think of a useful way to discuss any of it.  I suppose for the few games we spent more than a minute playing, there were these:

There was a 6-player jumbo Pac-Man table with some strange add-ons to the original.  This was a lot of fun.  You can try to eat the dots or just chase each other around and get ghosted when you're not paying attention.  Trouble is, the games were not designed for long play times.  They tease for a minute or less and then you almost mindlessly swipe your card again to keep playing.  The games cost weird numbers like 7.8 credits or 10.7 credits, which matches some of the shifty bonus pricing schemes in app games that I have discussed previously.  The goal is to always leave some little balance on the cards so that a certain percentage of players will go refill the card to keep playing.

There was a bowling game which was setup like a skee-ball track.  You roll the big ball up toward the center and it cleverly goes down a chute while a digital ball continues almost seamlessly onto a big video screen.  This one actually had some play time, since you get three full frames and a weird bonus round with about 30 golden pins.  Flashy lights, points, bells and whistles.

The ice hockey table was never available.  That's a personal favorite but the family groups that did get to play were having so much fun.  My older instinct almost drove me to put some quarters down on the rail, you know, the way we used to signal "dibs", that we were up next.  I spent a lot of time in arcades as a kid, now I had no idea how they work, what the etiquettes were.

Our main amusement was a big-screen 3-player version of Centipede.  Two levels then a boss, fun playing with my brother and his son on this one.  Level X was a giant spider boss which must have been 3 feet across on this screen, and the darn thing gobbled up the last of my credits before snagging everyone else with little webs.

The variety of human interfaces was impressive.  There was Guitar Hero with the fake guitar that people can't help make cool moves with, next to a football simulator (Gridiron, I think) where you stomp on two big floor pads to juke left or right on the screen.  There was a fishing game on a 10-foot screen where four people can step up and physically throw and reel.  We did one game of Hungry Hippos where you get to sit on the hippo and pull the 3-pound head up and down with a sweaty handle.  One game had a VR headset where a guy was flailing around with an imaginary sword -- I almost got an elbow in the head as I rounded that corner.  There were booths with seats, some of them that jerk around to the simulated action.  Other games had you rolling balls, throwing bean bags or tossing basketballs.  There were 7 or 8 claw grabbers of various sizes and various "prizes", coin pushers, even an actual slot machine for kids.  It was exhausting and sweaty.

It was also way too loud.  That level of noise makes me disoriented and slightly dizzy.  They even blared music on top of the noise.  I beared with it, and my little $25 card was gone soon enough.  Interesting experience.  I wouldn't recommend it with a bad back -- a population I am now a part of.  But it was also a gold mine for people watching: the couples and families who were having a blast, other couples who were not doing so well, and huge range of outfits and a host of spoiled kids.

So, while I can't do a detailed analysis of the place, I did find a few machines to focus on and see a few points worth noting.  I can say it would be easy to blow $100 in under two hours here.  But if I was on my own, some of my casino instincts would kick in and I would find the machines that give the most play per coin and stick with those.

There was the meta-game of going to the central "shop" to trade in all those tokens you won.  Each machine just credits those back to your card in some database.  I think we had 798, 720 and my 250 tokens.  There were a few card games and board games available as prizes -- I saw Exploding Kittens for 750 and Star Wars Monopoly for 3000, can't remember the others.  There were stuffed animals (of course) and even a few little science kits (grow your own crystals).

As we were headed out, my brother told me of the meta-meta-game of why the whole building ended up beneath a huge highway exchange of a dozen curving bridges in Mission Valley, something about how arcades got grouped as a kind of gambling and were zoned out of every neighborhood in the area, and likely had similar fates across the country.  So, that unnatural chunk of land surrounded by loud traffic in every direction was the only place left to go.  And I mean every direction in THREE dimensions.  It was loud to the left and right, and behind where we parked, and sixty feet up, too.  And yes, there is a high risk of feeding addictive behavior here, and losing money chasing those blinky lights and thrills.

One more layer of meta-game appeared unexpectedly when I looked at the one photo I took.  I didn't take a lot of pics because every shot was going to be filled with people and be unusable due to personal rights.  But this one moment was fairly private, and I was able to crop out the few people there.  So here was that big Centipede game we played.  On my tiny phone screen I thought was funny that the explosion looked a bit like a Ghostbusters logo, but up close it really WAS a Ghostbusters logo.  And I don't remember seeing any such thing while playing the game in the moment, so it tells me this was some kind of subliminal advertising (a Blip-Vert) (does anyone remember Max Headroom?), some kind of image that only appears for a frame of two, a fraction of a second, and is gone before we can focus on it.  Except that i always click two shots: a main shot and one for good luck a half second later, and this thing was in both images.  So why did we not see it during the actual game play?