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Answerman - What Is Gambling Like In Japan?


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Hiroki not Takuya



Joined: 17 Apr 2012
Posts: 2501
PostPosted: Thu Feb 22, 2018 2:13 am Reply with quote
EricJ2 wrote:
...I've always been curious to try Pachinko to see what the appeal and "stigma" of it is...
Appeal- Some interesting studies of gambling behavior have found that the subset of individuals who play slots and the like derive mild pleasure from the colored flashing lights, soft "bong" tones and/or "tinkling bell" sounds and small areas of movement much as infants do. While parlors can be very noisy, players are highly fixated on the stimuli from "thier" machine so the ambient noise is filtered and can produce a comforting feeling of familiarity. Add operant conditioning and variable rewards (see "Hook" model).

Stigma-Have you seen a Pachinko Parlor? I daresay the majority are small and cramped, many times dirty and smoky quarters where denizens with non-happy expressions sit hour upon hour feeding Yen into the machines and mindlessly flipping the lever to send said coins on their way. If someone had anything even remotely worthwhile to do, why would they want to be associated with that?
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leafy sea dragon



Joined: 27 Oct 2009
Posts: 7163
Location: Another Kingdom
PostPosted: Fri Feb 23, 2018 12:45 am Reply with quote
Something I want to point out, as I am a pinball fan and have studied its history: While pachinko and pinball are part of the same family of games, it is more closely related to bagatelles, which originated in France, than pinball as we know it today, which originated in the United States. (In turn, pool, snookers, billiards, bocci, bowling, and golf all share a common ancestor with these three.) Bagatelles WERE the direct ancestor of both, just that pachinko and pinball diverged pretty early on, before pinball machines even had flippers.

That being said, the earliest pinball machines were very similar to pachinko. For instance, here is Baffle Ball from 1931:



Then again, the modern pinball machines don't look much like modern pachinko, as can be seen in, say, Guardians of the Galaxy from 2017:



I still find the history of pachinko to be interesting, as aside from the choice to focus gameplay on the plunger rather than the flippers and pachinko never leaving the realm of gambling games, they evolved roughly in parallel with each other: Both moved to solid state systems at about the same time (1977 for pachinko, 1978 for pinball), both became reliant on licensed themes at about the same time (late 80's for both), and both started integrating monitors onto their playfields on a wide scale at about the same time (about 1999 to 2001 for both, depending on how you see it).

MarshalBanana wrote:
I tried playing Pachinko in Yakuza, but couldn't work out if I was winning or loosing.


In general, the idea behind a pachinko machine is that it will dispense small round balls as you play, something like ball bearings. These are to then be redeemed at a prize counter within the building or in a building next door. If you've ever played any of the Pokémon games with a Game Corner mini-game, that's essentially what you do in a pachinko parlor.

I have never played any of the Yakuza games, but I would guess that, if it's going for authenticity (and they usually do), you'll be able to tell if you're winning or not based on your output of those little balls. If you're getting a lot of them, you're doing well. If you aren't, of course, you're doing not so well.

Utsuro no Hako wrote:
In fact, early pinball machines were used for gambling, and like pachinko machines they didn't have flippers or any other way for the user to control the balls. But then states started banning the machines as games of chance. Manufacturers decided to get around that by adding flippers, but it quickly became apparent that (A) it was possible for people to get extremely good at the game, and (B) people would play even if there wasn't money on the line, so the gambling aspect was removed completely.


Actually, what happened was a bit more complicated: The pinball industry chose to loophole around those anti-gambling laws in a similar way as pachinko did, which is to give out non-monetary prizes that could then be redeemed for things. For the most part, the only such "prize" were free games, known as Specials (and are still called Specials by manufacturers to this day). A little wheel of numbers embedded in the backbox (which is the term for the...box at the back) would indicate how many credits you have, which would increase by 1 each time you earned a Special and decrease by 1 each time you began a new game. Should the number get high enough, you can then notify someone with the keys to the machine, who will then reset the counter back to 0 and give you free stuff (sometimes money, but since these were typically in bars, they'd give free drinks, though places in establishments with a lot of children and teenagers, like ice cream shops and movie theaters, either refrained from giving out prizes or would give toys, food, and movie tickets--and now you know where Nolan Bushnell got the idea for Chuck E. Cheese's).

Here is the backglass (the artwork on the backbox) of Dragon, from 1978, with the little counter circled in pink on the bottom right. I chose this machine to show how enduring this practice was, well after the crackdown on pinball as gambling machines:



In addition, the labeling of pinball machines is what led to those "FOR AMUSEMENT ONLY" labels, which were also present on cabinets for arcade video games. A lot of people in the 80's and onward wondered what these labels were for--it's to identify them as non-gambling games. Here is that three-word phrase printed on X's and O's (1982):



That being said, it was tougher in the UK, as they didn't have Roger Sharpe to perform the now-legendary courtroom demonstration that pinball is a game of skill (essentially, he played on a machine, in court, in which he announced what he would hit with the ball, then proceeded to immediately do that, and kept doing it until the judge and everyone on the jury was convinced). As a result, games shipped to the UK had to have this thing where a little stopper would pop up on the center drain, the idea being that a skilled player can prevent the drain. In practice, they were disabled by default and few operators actually used the stopper. Here's the one in Harley-Davidson (2002):



The white circle in the middle is the stopper--by pushing a button next to the right flipper button, you could pop up the stopper and prevent the ball from falling down between the flippers.

Sakagami Tomoyo wrote:
Gambling is extremely popular just about everywhere, but you can make a case for it being more so in Asia than elsewhere. The article mentions mahjongg; I'm told that in many places family gatherings usually involve playing mahjongg with bets placed and getting very competitive about it. I've also heard stories of people with a sports game on a console, rather than playing each other at it, setting both teams to computer control and betting on the outcome.
My dad sometimes comments that people from most Asian countries would bet on two flies crawling up the wall... but then again, Australia's big contribution to the world of gambling is throwing two coins in the air and betting on the outcome, so who are we to talk?


I had an uncle who was not only a compulsive gambler and proud of it, but he had a group of friends who were arguably worse than he was. They'd find any excuse to bet on things in private. Such as a spelling bee I entered when I was 9. Turns out they were betting thousands of dollars at a time for these things too.

Hiroki not Takuya wrote:
Appeal- Some interesting studies of gambling behavior have found that the subset of individuals who play slots and the like derive mild pleasure from the colored flashing lights, soft "bong" tones and/or "tinkling bell" sounds and small areas of movement much as infants do. While parlors can be very noisy, players are highly fixated on the stimuli from "thier" machine so the ambient noise is filtered and can produce a comforting feeling of familiarity. Add operant conditioning and variable rewards (see "Hook" model).

Stigma-Have you seen a Pachinko Parlor? I daresay the majority are small and cramped, many times dirty and smoky quarters where denizens with non-happy expressions sit hour upon hour feeding Yen into the machines and mindlessly flipping the lever to send said coins on their way. If someone had anything even remotely worthwhile to do, why would they want to be associated with that?


I'd like to see those guys studying gambling mahcines study pinball too--it's no longer considered gambling in most countries, but it DOES have those famous colored flashing lights, tones, and bell sounds. And modern ones now make extensive use of tri-color LEDs and monitors (some of which even have seizure warnings).

I've also definitely heard about the smoky, dingy conditions pachinko parlors are typically in. Definitely not my idea of a good time. They do sound much like the lower-budget casinos I've gone into though, right down to the people sitting at the machines, blankly staring forward, looking almost like zombies.

I still find it weird that there hasn't really been much of a push for the skill element of pachinko. But I guess that's something the Yakuza would prefer not to make more well known.
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