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NEWS: KanColle Arcade Credited With Returning Sega Machines to Profitability

And it worked, for a while. The thing that I find interesting is that it continues to be like that in Japan, and by the looks of things, solely in Japan. Arcades were swiftly dropped from teenage hangout spots, at least in the United States, while most of the other locations kept that status (restaurants, parks, friends’ houses, shopping malls—though shopping malls are on a decline too).

My impression is that the parents pay for the games and platforms to play them on. It’s why the ESRB is such a big deal: It’s there to provide parents in these stores a quick way to be aware of what’s in these games they’re buying for their kids. Whereas arcade games were typically paid for by the kids’ own money: They might get 5 bucks a week, and that’d be enough for a few games each day coming back from school.

Which brings me to the next point in that there has been a gradual (but definitely confirmed) increase of protectionism among parents in western cultures over the past few decades. The average distance a kid is allowed to walk by themselves has been decreasing, and helicopter parenting is on a rapid rise. This would become inherently incompatible with arcades, places where kids would be by their lonesome for extended periods of time.

And Pac-Man Battle Royale is also quite a sight to behold, and they seem to be good earners. As a pinball fan, I must also point out the machines made by Jersey Jack Pinball, which have bright 40-inch monitors in place of backboxes and a good example of how pinball looks like in the 21st century. They are also good earners (but you won’t see many of them because they literally cost ten grand each).

Well, I grew up in schools with strong cliques, and even in the arcades I sometimes visited when I was little, there were cliques there, similar to modern gaming’s clans. This system seems to have spread, where kids form small but very tight groups with varying levels of acceptance of newcomers, no doubt influenced by the rise of social media allowing them to stay in touch 24/7. From what I heard, the cliques I found in arcades are not common elsewhere, however.

Still frustrated me to no end because they rendered me unable to play on any of “their” games, and they resorted to every tactic in the book to intimidate and bully outsiders who wanted to play on those games or directly against them. Not that I could really play on many games anyhow, as my father, who didn’t understand the appeal of playing games (any sort of game, not just arcade games—he had an equally low opinion of sports), figured I could be entertained by just watching, so he’d sometimes drop me off at arcades with no money. Sometimes, I could sneak in a dollar or so, and that’s when I’d run into those mean big kids.

Quote:

[quote="StudioToledo"] Let's see you try to convince potential taxpayers on wanting to pull that here in the US. Most can't even comprehend not having a car anymore it seems. Rather we went back to interurban trolleys personally. http://www.toledoblade.com/frontpage/2007/05/27/Toledo-was-hub-of-interurban-100-years-ago.html

Railfans cry at the increasing opposition to the existence of the California High Speed Rail. But we Americans are proud of our automobile culture. Americans like to be in control, hence the phrase “in the driver’s seat.” It’s a shame that a side-effect of this is the lack of good public transportation in most of the country (though I know it’d be extremely expensive).

It’s all about convenience. Some retailers are having trouble now because they can’t compete with online shopping. We have the rise of services like Uber Eats and Eat24, where people are hired to pick up food and deliver it to people’s houses (that is, they’re willing to pay more so they don’t have to leave the house). But most of all, mobile gaming allows people to play games to pass the time wherever they are. I feel of all the things that’s the biggest threat to whatever’s left of arcade gaming, it’s mobile gaming, as it fulfills the same basic desires in a more convenient and less expensive way (unless you’re a whale). It’s why I think…I forgot the name of the company…but they’re going in the right direction in providing a large, grand experience, adapting these mobile games no less, that cannot be replicated on a handheld phone or even an HD tablet.

Another issue that has popped up recently is that a lot of people simply do not carry cash on them. For them to play these machines, there needs to be both an ATM and a change machine nearby, which not every place does. Some companies have rectified that as of late though, installing credit/debit card readers onto them.

There is an arcade near downtown Los Angeles I would sometimes visit called the Family Amusement Corporation. The main thing they do is rent out machines for events like birthday parties, weddings, conventions, and such, but they have a permanent arcade there. I saw this phenomenon firsthand in that the man assigned to fix these machines is also their janitor. He's a sweet old man and the nicest guy in the whole block, and while he always seems to be there whenever I'm visiting, he does know the finer works of these machines--really obvious stuff like random objects stuffed in the coin slot he can fix, but tell him something more technical than "this button is jammed" and he won't know what you're talking about. The World Poker Tour pinball machine has had its "Ace in the Hole" sensor broken at least since 2013, and it still gets a lot of play anyway because I seem to be the only patron there who knows the ball is supposed to be held there to start a multiball mode. Everyone else just thinks the little chamber does nothing.

Of course I wish Drive-Ins were still a thing. I see no point in parks.

Unless they had paper routes like I did.

And yet, I keep telling people using video monitors in pinball machines should be a standard. If Pachinko can do it, so can they!

I suppose I was too young in the 80's to have noticed that, but I barely ever found a clique to being in high school since nobody seemed really that interested in what I was into anyway (which wasn't even on the curriculum so I had to make due with being alone with my interests I suppose, but that's what you get for being a midwestern 'burb).

The irony there though is the increasing interest in computer-controlled vehicles that could take the "human control" out of driving anyway. I laugh at that!

It has started to become a card society these days (or NFC if you're into that crap). I still know a few places that want cash though. I suppose it could kill the ice cream man any day now.

At least you know. A shame when such knowledge gets lost like that though.

StudioToledo wrote:

Unless they had paper routes like I did.

By my time growing up, most kids weren't allowed to taker jobs for money. Many reasons behind it, but it was part of the process of that increased protectionism.

StudioToledo wrote:

And yet, I keep telling people using video monitors in pinball machines should be a standard. If Pachinko can do it, so can they!

It actually is in the process of becoming a standard, after Jersey Jack's machines were proven very high earners. Stern's latest machines, beginning with 2016's Batman game, have monitors instead of dot-matrix displays, and startups Heighway Pinball, Quetzal Pinball, and John Popadiuk's ever-changing company are all strictly monitors. Dutch Pinball and Spooky Pinball are doing some weird middle ground, where they have monitors, but in the size and shape of dot matrix displays and with dot matrix display pixelation (though in full color). That middle ground highlights the mistrust many pinheads currently have with monitor displays--they're very attached to the DMDs, which they consider as much a part of pinball as the flippers, and it's why the transition to monitors have been so slow. (Attempts to have monitors on pinball machines happened at least as early as Baby Pac-Man in 1981, became a hit with Revenge from Mars in 2000 but fell victim to Williams leaving the industry, and there were flat-screen monitors embedded in the backbox at least as early as New Canasta in 2008, but it was 2012's The Wizard of Oz by Jersey Jack and its success that monitors started gaining real traction.)

StudioToledo wrote:

The irony there though is the increasing interest in computer-controlled vehicles that could take the "human control" out of driving anyway. I laugh at that!

Yeah, it's kind of weird side by side. But I know there is already fierce opposition to self-driving cars. Just not as fierce as there is to trains or subways because they'll be using the same roads, traffic lights, and such that these car purists want the taxpayer money to go to instead of tracks or stations.

Not if the ice cream man gets a card reader! But yeah, it means the old arcade machines, and some of the new ones, need to get card readers installed into them. In the case of the old mechanical ones, it might not even be possible. Which is a bummer because I do like some of those old mechanical games. I got to play one at Arcade Expo where you fly a helicopter in a large glass box and make it land on certain spots for points, and another one that resembled slot-car racing at Musée Mechanique in San Francisco. These have purely mechanical coin slots, and I don't see how you can install a card reader onto it (and, in addition, they'll stick out like sore thumbs). And, of course, there are the old "wedgehead" pinball machines from around the WWII era.

Still, good news the same, this is the sort of direction I've dreamed about for decades.

And yet I'm thinking of the pre-flipper era of pinball games where you had no control of the ball unless you 'nudged' the machine to the right hole.

Ah, you mean the ones made during the transition from the bagatelles. The WWII-era woodrails I'm thinking of was around when the flipper was made (Humpty Dumpty in 1948), though prior to that, it was a lot like pachinko where you launch a ball up and try to get it to bounce off of various things before reaching its final destination. This was the era when the "pinball gag" became popular in western animation like Looney Tunes, where a character bounces around a bunch of stuff and you see "TILT" onscreen when they stop.