By Nelson Schneider - 04/26/15 at 02:58 PM CT
Gamers who grew up during the late ‘70s, the ‘80s, or the early ‘90s no doubt remember at least something about the precursors to home game consoles. Arcade machines stood as location-based gaming attractions that required repeated, small payments in order to partake in the experience.
When PCs started to become more common in the home and when the home videogame console market took off in the 3rd Generation with Nintendo’s NES, the arcade began to suffer. It seemed that more people who were interested in playing videogames would rather plunk down a larger sum of money for ownership of a game machine and discreet pieces of software than travel to a destination and continually feed coins to a number of arcade boxes.
Unfortunately, even with the waning popularity of arcades and the booming popularity of in-the-home videogame entertainment, the game developers themselves had a very hard time shaking an ‘Arcade Mentality’ when designing their games. The reason so many old 8-bit games were crushingly difficult was because arcade games were built from the ground up to kill the players’ characters as often and as cheaply as possible, forcing players to feed more quarters to the arcade owner’s bottom line in order to keep playing. Profitable machines that killed players repeatedly while still keeping them hooked on the gameplay would naturally move more units, thus making the developers and manufacturers happy. It didn’t matter that there was no continuing revenue stream from PC or console games being brutally and punishingly difficult – developers simply didn’t bother to think outside the box when porting arcade games to home platforms or when building content exclusively for home platforms. The result was ‘Nintendo-Hard’ games that are really only memorable due to the amount of frustration they generated among their young audience.
The core of the Arcade Mentality is the ‘Lives’ system, in which a player is given a limited number of tries to complete a game’s content before being booted back to the title screen. While arcades allowed for unlimited Lives via extra quarters, home gaming platforms didn’t have coin slots, so the ability to continue past the original allotment of lives was typically stripped away. Tough Beat ‘em Ups like “Final Fight” and SHMUPs like “Contra” were perfectly playable in the arcade, but became difficult to the point of aggravation at home due to this oversight.
Fortunately, as the popular genres shifted from the types of games found in arcades to RPGs in the 1990s, the Lives system was replaced with a ‘Save’ system, wherein a player’s character typically only had one life, but the player was allowed to save their progress in the game and resume (or retry) from their existing save(s) as often as desired. Early forms of the Save system even existed alongside the Lives system via passwords in games like “Mega Man.” These games even began to allow unlimited continues.
In the modern era, the Arcade Mentality is all but dead. Most games support saving, provide reasonably-spaced checkpoints, and have abandoned the idea of the Lives system. Modern games place importance on the flow, pace, and balance of a game more than they do punishing players for mistakes or forcing the repetition of content to artificially pad the length. Exceptions do exist, and have attracted a fanatical Cult following of e-peen strokers.
One aspect of modern gaming that is a massive throwback to the arcade era, however, is Microtransactions. It is increasingly common, especially in the smartphone arena, for games to be free, but require repeated, small payments in order to actually be playable. ‘Pay2Win’ and ‘Pay2NotWait’ games may as well install a virtual coin slot in the user’s phone or PC, as they have simply exhumed the once-dead-and-buried Arcade Mentality and have given it a fresh coat of paint.
An incredible example of Microtransations resembling the Arcade Mentality can be seen in the latest update to MMO Shooter, “Defiance.” A new type of endgame mission for high-EGO players was added to the game called ‘Expeditions.’ In order to enter an Expedition, a player needs to pay 1 Hunter Requisition. While inside an Expedition, players can also pay 1 Hunter Requisition to revive themselves if they die. The catch is that Hunter Requisitions each cost $0.40 in the “Defiance” cash shop. Sure, the game provides every player 3 free Hunter Requisitions each week, but that’s really like providing a player at an arcade with 3 free tokens: It will get players in the door, allow the new over-the-top difficulty to kill them, force them to use up their free revives for the week, and ultimately get them into the cash shop to spend money on more Hunter Requisitions.
Paying for extra tries in “Defiance” is identical to paying for extra tries at the arcade decades ago. Even the cost is approximately the same, since most newer arcade machines switched to 50-cents per play instead of a quarter. While this new form of Microtransaction is a novel recycling of an old money-making method for the Internet era, I can’t help but feel that it is setting a dangerous precedent. Players in arcades at least had a spending cap based on the amount of change they had in their pockets. With online games being funded entirely by credit cards, I can foresee players losing track of how many times they’ve revived and getting an unpleasant surprise on their next credit card bill. Likewise, I’m concerned that other developers will take note of the fact that broken difficulty in games can lead directly to profits by charging for extra tries, ushering in a new era of games that are intentionally frustrating and not fun for the express purpose of vacuuming Microtransactions out of players’ wallets. It looks like the arcade is back, for better or for worse, and now has a direct conduit into our homes via the Internet.
