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Comment by rubyn00bie | Hacker News Reader

Oh, I thought this was known. I'm not even joking... A few years ago, I was at a local comic shop, and I watched someone (a kid) play the machine and appear to get a "perfect" shot, key went exactly into the fucking hole... but then it just pulled back. No prize! I was stunned when the kid asked an employee essentially "WTF?" and the employee replied "there's a chance the key may not turn even though it's lined up." So... it's a game of luck and not a game of skill. All I could think was "doesn't that make it straight up gambling then?" Who would be liable for changing the mode of operation? Regardless, it's fucking sketchy and all around pretty awful to take advantage of people like this... $5 million is a bullshit fine for literally stealing from kids. I still feel bad for that kid, it was like a Nintendo Switch or something fucking cool he, IMHO, had stolen from him...

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It is simply gambling for kids. These 'games' are much more profitable than traditional arcade games (street fighter/mario kart/pacman/etc/etc), and when you boil them down it's because they're essentially slot machines.

I wonder why class action lawsuit then. Shouldn't this be prosecuted as a crime?

They're certainly scummy but, I mean, this isn't any different from the claw crane machines that are usually exempted from gambling laws under certain conditions (win chance, prize value, where they're located, etc); machines that nobody expects to be fair.

> machines that nobody expects to be fair

I for sure did. In fact, on my long list of "someday/maybe" projects, there was this one entry sitting for some 15 years now: build a little machine for the claw crane game, that would time a button press perfectly. I just saw the video where Mark Rober does this to another arcade game[0], so I won't bother anymore - I can already guess the outcome.

I also don't know anyone else in my circles who thought the claw crane was a game of chance. It looks like a game of skill, it behaves like one. And sure, maybe the crane wasn't oiled in a while, but nobody tells you that in the end, it also rolls a dice to determine whether to allow you to win.

It's a big deal to me, and I think it should be a big deal for everyone. It's yet another violation of trust in society. Yet another seemingly legit business out there to scam you.

When I grew up, we saw arcades as fun places to be with friends, and if we lost on what looked like a game of chance, we assumed we just sucked and need to keep playing to get better (or rather, until all our sources of coin money go dry). We didn't know the cake was a lie.

When my kid grows older and I take her to an arcade, I'm going to tell her up front - you can have fun here, but these games and these people are out there to scam you. Your joy is your own - you have to take it in spite of, not thanks to, this place. I don't want to be telling her such things. I would like for her to live in a world where she can default to trusting businesses and taking their offers as good-spirited attempts of mutually beneficial transactions - not to be constantly on the guard from technically legitimate businesses trying to scam her.

So, I'd very much like to see every single one of these arcades to be investigated, dragged to court for selling illegal gambling services to children, and the entire industry to be beaten up with criminal code, until every such game is either banned or has its exact rules posted on it, in a clear and unambiguous form. Fuck caveat emptor - the measure of civilization is in the things you don't have to actively worry about.

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27841623

> 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.

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.

> "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.

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.

Is random claw machines a recent scam?

About 30 years ago, my siblings and I went through a claw machine mania phase. We sampled every machine in a 30 mile radius, and found that the ones that slipped, always slipped. And the ones that gripped, gripped pretty frequently. Once we figured out which claws would actually grab, we won constantly. We collected around 50 stuffed animals over the course of a year.

Or maybe we were being superstitious. At any rate, we felt quite claw-machine-rich.

I’d assume so. Back in primary school I got a friend who was pretty much perfect at claw machines (and at Tekken). Later I’ve noticed they made it more difficult (shorter timelimit, limited number of moves, etc.), but never expected they would turn this into a vulgar scam.

Most machines I've seen can be configured at least on 3 parameters (names might be diferent):

-Base grip power

-Improved grip power

-Probability of improved grip.

Some have two actuators with different powers, some actually introduce a delay in the grip with a single actuator, and so on, so it might be not exactly like that.

What I mean, they're set up according to the wishes of the operator. Sometimes it's the same as the owner of the venue, sometimes the venue rents the space to the operator.

So it's totally normal to find some that are more skill-based than others, even within the same manufacturer and model.

Story time: a friend worked in an arcade/bowling venue in the early 2000s, they had 3 machines, and changed the settings weekly to extract more money. Basically one of the machines had higher probabilities just at the level of breaking even, but that was enough to have someone stick around for longer and attract other customers to the other two. The week after those who had "luck" that came back would stick to the same to show off (and fail). Occasionally short queues for certain machines appeared.

Seeing this as a kid/teenager who spent a lot of time in arcades between 1985-2000 or so was really eye-opening.

My uncle managed the local Aladdin's Castle and was constantly tweaking the claws when people would win too much. Also the games where a light spins and you stop it- I saw many times where it landed square on jackpot and stalled a half second then moved to the next slot, and this was just for tickets and $.10 plush toys.

Now as an adult having seen this and having been in software so long, I knew instantly these new 'fish games' were totally rigged. People play quarters on a table top arcade game that shoots at fish,like a top down Duck Hunt. I have some family members/friends for whom this is super addicting. They spend hundreds/thousands over time but don't see it because of that time they won $200.

When I try to explain how weights work, how video slot machine games are rigged too...they never believe me.

Why?

It would be illegal if they did that, so I must clearly be wrong.

Last time we went to vegas my friends got mad that I only played a few hands of blackjack for the experience. To me it's all just giving money away.

I knew right away, so maybe it's regional.

I was told the machines are programmed with a certain value above which they'll pay out, (e.g. once the machine has taken £200, allow a win, then repeat).

If the machine is not ready to pay out then the claw just releases on the way back up to make it look like you came close to winning.

Likewise block-stacking machines - it's a little harder to tell with those though as you need to get all the way to the top before you'll know. The block very clearly jumps to the next space on the top row if you time it correctly and it's not ready to pay out.

In America I've never actually won anything from a claw machine I'd ever want and always just thought the arms were purposefully under powered so you can't actually win.

In Japan the items in the game are placed in such a way where they're basically impossible to get on the first try but if you feed in enough yen you can nudge the item and eventually get it, if you're skilled it takes less chances. Literally the first time I ever got a prize I actually wanted (stuffed Pokemon back when the Japan pretty much ignored the massive market of kids who wanted video game and anime branded memorabilia). It left feeling the arcade happy and brought back a few other people who also got items.

I assume the US machines aren't setup in such a way because they just don't want to have attendants. The bigger stuffed animal machines were constantly being refilled by employees after a prize was won. Better to rig the machine, never have to buy new toys nor hire anyone else. Who cares if the kids are happy and want to come back. Another reason arcades work in Japan and not the US.

I think some people (especially kids) do assume they're fair, and nobody around is inclined to disabuse them of that notion.

The parents/guardians?

How would they know? I'm a parent, I didn't know until this thread. It's not like the arcade tells you that.

Just worldly experience, and observation that approximately nobody wins anything ever while approximately everybody has an Oooh so close catch?

Even with a parent, the draw is just too attractive for kids. I tried desperately to explain to my kid that these games were rigged against him. He didn't believe me, didn't care, told me all his friends said they won, got angry at me for trying to take away his fun... He gets it now at 15, but at 6 there was no convincing him.

At least the carnival midway games these days have mostly switched from rigged against the kids to everybody wins a crappy prize. But these arcade game types are straight up gambling for children.

I think there's a difference between a a game with a skill element and a random chance element that are always consistent, and one where the game arbitrarily decides that because someone won 200 tries ago nobody playing now is allowed to win.

I understand that with the claw machine the claw is unreliable, but the same claw is always equally unreliable and each time I play I could actually win, and my skill does affect that chance. With these games most of the time when you play there is a zero chance you could win, no mater how well you play.

You can adjust the strength of the grip of the claw machine.

A friend of mine worked at an arcade.

He made the grip tighter whenever he had a surplus of prizes that nobody wanted and looser when he had good new stuff.

He wasn't even coy about it. He would tell the kids who always hung out at the arcade when he was doing it so they could go nuts.

> machines that are usually exempted from gambling laws

But that's besides the point. You don't need gambling laws to see that this is fraud, deceiving customers to pay in the expectation that the game is fair.

It is not even gambling. Slot machines are regulated and not allowed to be rigged.

> not allowed to be rigged

I guess I don't understand what "rigged" means in this context. I thought slot machines could essentially be "tuned" for payout by the owner (e.g. pay out 0.96x of what's put in on average), much like these toy machines.

Rigged in my mind means that the game cares about previous wins and losses. Slot machines do not, the 0.96 us just the statistical average and not something the game tries to enforce.

Do you work on slot machine software? How do you know they don't increase the odds of an early win to entice the user to keep feeding it?

Yeah, I googled 'sega keymaster' to see what the game looked like and the first result was a 2014 video in which the person demonstrating the game described it as "pretty much luck" and "not due to pay out no matter how accurate you are."

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iczyli1Uo1w

They loosened up the rules on this stuff awhile back. It’s bullshit — unregulated gambling.

There’s one machine like this I saw on a mass pike rest stop… there’s a 10 year old iPad fading away in there, but people are always playing it.

It could be the other way around: people win it so frequently that they can only afford to stock it with obsolete computer hardware…

I'd have thought it would be harder and more expensive to find an unused 10 year old iPad now than to just buy a new low-end one. Give it a few more years and that one in the machine will be a collector's item!

> Give it a few more years and that one in the machine will be a collector's item!

Just drive-off with the entire machine in the back of yer truck, heh

I thought this was known, too.

I imagine the losses are going to be far worse for those plush toy claw-grabbing machines if this case succeeds. Especially as they attach cash envelopes to them where I live. And those block stacking machines, too.

It’s clearly gambling for kids, I suspect when the first company got away with rigging the game everyone else just assumed it must be legal and ran with it. Now they’re literally everywhere.

The publicity alone will likely cause an EU ban. They don’t like to be seen as trailing on consumer protection law.

I wish modern arcades were banned. They’re nothing more than fruit machines that target kids. There’s no thought about enjoyment, it’s literally about the fastest way to hook a child.

I know the arcades of old weren’t exactly innocent either, with many being optimised to consume the players coins, but at least there was some game play involved. At least the player got something out of the experience.

I feel the ethical line has truly been crossed in terms of what kind of machine is suitable for children.

Alot of modern arcades actually have unlimited play models or "play as much as you want for X time". They make their money off food/drinks/alcohol.

At least the last few I have been too. I guess people for the most part had decided if you were gonna drop 50 bucks you might as well buy a new videogame and play it at home. The scummy part is the "ticket" games, where you have a chance to win below dollar store grade prizes and exist to waste your game time away from games that have actual game play in them. (ski ball is still fun even if its a ticket game)

Last one I went to it was kind of neat to finally be able to beat one of those old school 90s arcade games that in retrospect had their difficulty tuned to do nothing but eat all your quarters.....

Those arcades you mention (where you pay a flat rate and get unlimited playtime) are sadly the minority. What you see in most places these days are ticket machines, claws and other pseudo-gambling machines.

both Main Event and Dave and Busters have unlimited play cards that are popular? (you can't play the ticket games with the cards though) What big arcades are there still other than places like those?

Maybe this is a regional thing. In the U.K. have a few arcades like you describe but the vast majority of arcades are side businesses and populated with gambling machines. You see them in places like bowling alleys, sea side amusements, larger family camp sites, etc. Most of those places might throw in an air hockey and pool table or two but aside from that it’s just ticket machines.

Yeah, even in American bowling alleys seem to have "play as much as you want for an hour!" cards. At least the last one i went to did for its arcade.

Bowling alleys make their money off the alcohol and overpriced appetizers in any case. The other stuff is just to get you inside the door.

Console games were so polluted with arcade bullshit design (see: Battletoads) that Super Mario World was instantly notable for being designed to be fair.

A lot of the problem is longevity. In the 8 bit, and to some extent the 16 bit era too, the memory constraints were so great that games were often pretty short. So the difficulty bar was set as a method of ensuring longevity.

There was an actual slang term for this used by western developers, the name of which I’ve forgotten, but it directly talks about how games should take longer to complete than your average rental loan.

Didnt the designers of popular rpgs like Dragonquest and Final Fantasy admit they added leveling grinds so customers would be outside the allowed return window if they beat it too soon?

Back when we had a claw machine with plush toys in nearly every grocery store, it was generally a well-known fact that it's a game of chance much more than it is a game of skill. When it didn't want you to win, it just didn't grip as hard as would be necessary to hold the toy. It would either not grab it at all, or it would but then would drop it due to an abrupt stop when it hits the top while lifting the claw.

The one or two times I tried one of those machines, the claw literally just re-opened on the way up no matter what I did. I pretty quickly figured they were rigged to only 'pay out' a certain percentage of plays in order to guarantee they stayed profitable.

It's not even luck. IIRC, most such machines are programmed not to pay out at all until they've taken in more revenue than the cost of a prize. So 99% of the time, your chances are nil, as opposed to infinitesimally nil.

Mark Roper actually did a video on this and found the exact frequency at which people are allowed to win.

It's also in the article...

Gambling is illegal in Japan so there are many forms of gambling disguised as other stuff.

Notably pachinko parlors, gashapon, trading card games, loot boxes in video games.

https://www.serkantoto.com/2012/05/05/japan-social-games-reg...

And other than gambling, there are auctions... for the weirdest stuff... koi fish, mango, etc.

https://www.kodamakoifarm.com/shop/live-koi/auction/

So, what's the business model of koi auctions? I mean, ok, for the seller side it's obvious, for the buyer one, not so much.

Some koi patterns are culturally more desirable and rarer. The koi auction is a way for people to acquire a rare koi.

Who wouldn’t want a sweet Koi?

The claw machines doing this as well now. If it's not your turn to win the grabber is weaker than normal.

Shh. Don't tell anyone. -- Dad who like to count plays on the claw machine and tell my kids... "Play that one. I have a good feeling about it"

So it sounds like skill + luck: key in the hole gives random chance of winning.

Honestly, these kind of lawsuits are ridiculous. People need to sue General Mills for false advertising instead because sugary cereals causing diabetes; or any other big-food company brainwashing children on YouTube kids.

No, that's now how it works, according to the article, which is going by what the manual shipped with the cabinet states.

The machine will not allow a win no matter what until a set number of losses has happened. The default shipped setting is to not allow a win until there has been 700 losses. Some other vendor in Arizona is noted as having been sued because he ran his games at a required 2200 losses to allow a payout.

Actual gambling devices are much more regulated and have much better payout odds most likely (depending on what's winnable), but more importantly are actually random.

These games are not chance, and they aren't skill, they're a scam that market themselves as a game of skill.

Fun fact: Actual Gambling machines are also audited on the reg.

A college friend works for my state's gaming commission. During a 'drinking talk' about digital signatures, she told me an interesting part of her job; not just going through the slot machines and validating the payout settings, but also checking the EEProms MD5 Hash* to make sure that it was in a list of 'approved' code hashes.

* - This was 15 years ago, I -really- hope they use something better nowadays.

Yeah, I've hear as much before. That's one of the things that makes this worse, these cabinets are (were?) a loophole that allows fleecing people without oversight. It's not like gambling is in your favor when you do it at a casino, but you can usually trust that the state has kept it from being egregiously unfair.

> checking the EEProms MD5 Hash* to make sure that it was in a list of 'approved' code hashes.

> This was 15 years ago, I -really- hope they use something better nowadays.

I dunno. If the hash is generated and displayed by the hardware on a separate LCD display (or a serial you attach) and maybe a bit of non-flashable code, that seems pretty good to me, especially that it's regularly spot checked in person. Something like that is far harder to fake and fool real people with successfully for an extended period, IMO.

"something better" was referring to the MD5 algorithm in particular. It'd be really easy today to make a fair firmware and a rigged firmware with identical MD5 hashes.

Ah, that's true. I was thinking less of the specific hashing used, but MD5 is problematic so that's likely what they meant. I thought they were referring to the process in general.

The lawsuit is not rediculous. These are marketed as being games of skill, which means there's always the ability to win on every turn. This is obviously false and people lose tons of money on this thinking it's fair.

> something is "ridiculous" because there are much worse cases to be taken care of

Yeah, same can be said about "brainwashing kids on YouTube" (whatever that's supposed to mean anyway) or "false advertising" of cereals ... what is your point?

It isn’t luck, because the game has a 0% chance of winning until X number of loses. That is like saying that getting heads on a coin toss is a game of luck, except they are actually using a double tails coin for 700 tosses. A game of luck or chance requires some chance that you could actually win on a given play.

That’s just luck.

No, because if you really suck, you can’t win at all.

It is like poker, which is a combination of skill and luck.

Skill when the machine decides to let you win, no chance when the machine doesn't want you to. It's not at all like poker and very much like the well-known shell game with a pea.

It is like poker.... you can play the correct 'skill' move and still lose the hand because of bad luck (losing in the river, for example)

The machine can only "decide to let you win" if you have the skill to get close, otherwise no chance.

If the very last step of the process is that the machine decides if you won or not, it's not a game of skill.

It takes a degree of skill and coordination to pull the lever on the slot machine, yet we don't call them a game of skill because of that.

If you're 100% accurate and you still lose, it's a game of chance.

Every winner will have made a skillful shot, hence a skillful shot is required to win. It's a combination of both therefore you obviously can't claim no skill is required at all. Nobody says that a slot machine is a game of skill because nobody considers having the coordination to pull a level to be a skillful attribute.

Moat losers will have made an equally skillful shot, and the ratio of losers to winners is >> 100 : 1 because that's what the device has been programmed to do.

Nobody said that skill was sufficient to win, I am simply pointing out the obvious fact that it's still required (in response to nkrisc who claimed that no skill was required at all, only luck).

My point is the skill component doesn’t matter if it’s ultimately down to luck.

It does matter. A person with skill has a higher probability of winning than someone without skill. There are two sequential checks... first, the check that the user is not in control of, the "will the game let you win" check, then the "did the player use enough skill to win?" check.

Let's say the game only allows 1/100 tries to have the chance to win. Player A has the skill to win 50% of the time, player B 25%.

Player A will end up winning 1/200 times, while player B will win 1/400.

Skill matters.

One gives you a chance to win when you are skillful. If you are skillful enough, you will win eventually just by chance.

The other may never pay out even if you are 100% accurate.

This is a big difference.

Your "big" difference is useless and changes nothing to the topic at hand. Nkrisc claimed that no skill was required at all, only luck, which is clearly false. I was just pointing out this obvious fact. Nice strawman attempt though.

Okay, I can accept that. But poker is still considered gambling, and we wouldn't allow arcade owners to target poker games at children. Why should this be allowed?

I 100% think this is a gambling game and should be outlawed in places gambling is illegal.

I was only saying that there is skill involved. Gaming laws never classify gambling games as those that require zero skill. Otherwise, poker, blackjack, even craps wouldn't be gambling, because all bets do not have the same odds, and therefore skilled players do better than unskilled.

Poker isn't necessarily considered gambling. It is one reason why some places, like California, have poker rooms.

> Poker isn't necessarily considered gambling

Yes it is.

> It is one reason why some places, like California, have poker rooms.

No, that's because some instances of gambling involving betting against other players are sometimes selectively regulated differently than betting against the house. Its the same reason some places, like, again, California, that prohibit casino gambling allow parimutuel betting on horse races.

California also has legal poker rooms.

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