Why Cops Are Raiding Arcades Over a Fishing Game
November 23, 2016 2:24 PM   Subscribe

There's a line of arcade video games, with names like Fish Hunter, Dragon Hunter and King of Treasures, that are increasingly being targeted by authorities as gambling devices. You may have one in a local game room (set to dispense tickets probably) under the name Harpoon Lagoon.

While operators maintain they are games of skill, investigators tying down a fire button discovered that players would earn the game's operator-set average payout regardless of action.

I made a post some time back on crane games, or claw machines, which are also "operator adjustable to enforce win rate."
posted by JHarris (30 comments total) 18 users marked this as a favorite
 
It is interesting that putting one of these in a Chucky Cheese, and getting a $0.10 toy after pumping $20 into the game is okay because it's a redeeming no cash value tickets, but getting $19 back after pumping $20 into the game in a gambling den (the machine pays out at 93-97%) is a federal crime.
posted by thecjm at 2:46 PM on November 23, 2016 [28 favorites]


I'd say the crime isn't in the cash payout itself, but its promise. A lot more people will play for that 93-97% payout, thinking they can overcome the odds and end up with a profit.
posted by JHarris at 2:51 PM on November 23, 2016 [1 favorite]


It is interesting that putting one of these in a Chucky Cheese, and getting a $0.10 toy after pumping $20 into the game is okay

I can afford the $20, but it's the hour the kid spends browsing the toy rack that I'd like back.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 3:03 PM on November 23, 2016 [13 favorites]


"The most important thing is customer protection, to ensure players are playing something that's fair, that the odds are going to be known to them, and the rates of outcome will be consistent—and that's the problem with gambling dens." -Dr. Timothy Fong

And enforcement has nothing to do with the diverting of revenue from Lotto scratch-off tickets? I bet gamblers are often better off playing back-room numbers rackets, etc.
posted by thelonius at 3:05 PM on November 23, 2016 [7 favorites]


And enforcement has nothing to do with the diverting of revenue from Lotto scratch-off tickets?

This might be somewhat beside the central point, though. I mean, alcohol is taxed and regulated significantly for the benefit of the state, but I think it's still reasonable to argue that the underlying justification for regulation is a strong one. As another example, I believe in the universal legalisation of narcotics, but I believe that regulation, taxation and enforcement would be necessary parts of that process, even if that sort of interference isn't desirable in itself.

I agree that the state should not be engaged in the racket of lottery tickets and scratch cards etc, but I'm not sure the potentially mixed motivations for regulation mean that regulation is, in fact, undesirable.

Seems like one of those cases where consequentialist and deontological ethics, alone, are probably insufficient, and only a formally unsatisfying supplementation of one with the other will really do.
posted by howfar at 3:24 PM on November 23, 2016 [2 favorites]


I have been a professional gambler at an earlier stage in my life and, on the one hand, I am fine with the idea of letting people convince themselves that a game of luck is actually a game of skill, I am significantly okay with what seems like blatantly lying in order to create that impression.
posted by 256 at 3:32 PM on November 23, 2016


I love Harpoon Lagoon. I mean my son does. I just help him ... here, you're doing that wrong, I'll show you.
posted by Kabanos at 3:50 PM on November 23, 2016 [1 favorite]


I agree that modern gaming machines need to be regulated and maintain a consistent and known payout.

But the contrast here - a game that has a much better ROI in its illegal form than its legal one - really makes the whole Chuckie Cheese/ticket redemption arcade model look like the carny scam it is.
posted by thecjm at 4:50 PM on November 23, 2016 [1 favorite]


These machines are on the wrong side of a several pretty bright lines under US law. Just off the top of my head...
  1. Crane machines and similar carny attractions live in a gray area because you don't get cash from them like you put in to get plays, so it's impossible to plow your win back into the game. As soon as you can redeem your prize for cash and re-buy in, it's no different from a coinless slot machine.
  2. Gambling devices are regulated in every US venue to ensure that they are paying fairly. They are subject both to regulation in manufacture and inspection in the field. Even so, you sometimes find cheaters who get caught, like the video poker parlor I heard of about twenty years ago all of whose machines were rigged never to give royal flushes. (Funny how their customers never noticed that.) Most venues require games of skill to accurately emulate the game they represent so that skill results in real benefit, but not all do; in Atlantic City, for example, it's OK for video poker machines to make up the results after you play, like slots.
  3. Gambling venues are subject to regulation in other ways, such as age restriction. Illegal dens have no such standards. Such machines in a Chuck E. Cheese might even be seen as recruiting kids into gambling addiction.
  4. The better payout being more illegal actually makes sense because it is the better payout, particularly in the same currency you can buy in for, which makes the game attractive to a potential gambling addict. Games like crane machines which pay out only rarely and hardly ever in line with the amount spent are much less seductive.
posted by Bringer Tom at 5:23 PM on November 23, 2016 [11 favorites]


These machines are on the wrong side of a several pretty bright lines under US law.

Those do sound like good reasons.

The lottery thing has been bothering me ever since I got suckered into voting yes to the Georgia one 25 years ago, you know, for the schools. If it had really come to the point where the State must have gambling, I really think it would have been more honest to go to having casinos or horse racing. Those damn tickets are also really seductive to problem gamblers - each one is another little hit, and they are everywhere. I drove home for the holiday today, and they sell lottery tickets at the Georgia Welcome Center at the State line on I-85, now.
posted by thelonius at 6:20 PM on November 23, 2016 [3 favorites]


All arcade games are owner-adjustable. Pinball machines have screw-feet in their legs to change the slope. Video games have difficulty settings. Does the legal definition of gambling device mean that anything that can be "won" without any skill at all constitutes gambling? Because that's what the button-tying example seems to imply.
posted by rhizome at 6:27 PM on November 23, 2016


many of these machines accept $100 bills
Wow. The video was oddly compelling, though, so I can see why people play.

Really neat article.
posted by jeather at 6:29 PM on November 23, 2016


Does the legal definition of gambling device mean that anything that can be "won" without any skill at all constitutes gambling?

My understanding is that games of puce chance are gambling and games of skill are not. But I'm not a lawyer, nor a gambler. So I'm sure a high stakes gamblin' lawyer will be round shortly to set us all straight.
posted by pwnguin at 6:43 PM on November 23, 2016 [1 favorite]


Does the legal definition of gambling device mean that anything that can be "won" without any skill at all constitutes gambling?

The law is a bit of a mess in this regard, and even moreso because it varies from state to state. Generally speaking any payout in original currency that can be used to re-buy in is almost certainly going to be considered gambling. If the prize is nonredeemable it might still be considered gambling if the result is not subject to skill, such as the ability to aim, play cards well, anticipate the crane's timed shift in direction, etc. But some very definite games of skill, such as blackjack and video poker machines which faithfully represent real card games, are still gambling just about everywhere because they return real money as the prize. So yeah, the area is very grey, but probably not so grey that the fishing machines would be considered legal anywhere in the US.
posted by Bringer Tom at 6:47 PM on November 23, 2016 [3 favorites]


The button-tying thing isn't being purported to indicate that it can be won without skill, but to indicate that skill has no bearing on whether you win.
posted by a mirror and an encyclopedia at 6:52 PM on November 23, 2016 [5 favorites]


The lottery thing has been bothering me ever since I got suckered into voting yes to the Georgia one 25 years ago, you know, for the schools.

Yeah they sold us on that in Louisiana too -- and as soon as it passed, promptly REMOVED the general funding for schools from the budget to match the new lottery funding. So yeah, the lottery funds the schools, but the old school funding got shifted to the general fund. Slick.

The lottery is truly an awful way to gamble, with terrible returns and engineered to seduce those who can least afford to waste their money on unrealistic hope.
posted by Bringer Tom at 6:54 PM on November 23, 2016 [9 favorites]


All arcade games are owner-adjustable. Pinball machines have screw-feet in their legs to change the slope. Video games have difficulty settings. Does the legal definition of gambling device mean that anything that can be "won" without any skill at all constitutes gambling?

The article makes it pretty clear that the thing that makes it gambling is that you earn credits as you play which can be turned into money, with the dangled lure that you can make more than you put in. You'll find video poker arcade games in bars where gambling isn't legal and it's fine as long as they don't pay out at any point.

The button thing is just a side note that the operators are less honest than they purport to be.
posted by Candleman at 6:58 PM on November 23, 2016 [3 favorites]


Deserves its own post, but there's an interesting gambling company called GameCo that's bringing arcade games of skill to Vegas with legal gambling. Sort of related to eSports. Can't decide if it's brilliant or evil or both.
posted by Nelson at 7:03 PM on November 23, 2016 [2 favorites]


All arcade games are owner-adjustable. Pinball machines have screw-feet in their legs to change the slope. Video games have difficulty settings. Does the legal definition of gambling device mean that anything that can be "won" without any skill at all constitutes gambling? Because that's what the button-tying example seems to imply.

Oh boy, right up my alley. Just a sec, lemme go get my podium....

Okay. Not ALL arcade games are adjustable, but nearly all are. And modern pinball machines are a lot more adjustable than just the slope of the table, in fact most of them have many many adjustments. It can be very interesting to go through a pinball table's operator mode, they're full of game settings, tests, reports and other stuff. They (at least in the Williams days) even sold printers you can hook up to a machine and get a hard copy.

All of these things operate on the basis that the thing running the game is a computer. That is, a general-purpose Turing machine analogue that can perform arbitrary logical tasks. There is nothing magical about the settings in an arcade game, or the software settings on a pin table, for they are just inputs to the computer program, just like typing on your PC's keyboard. It's just that your standard user cannot access them, usually because the service button is inside the locked coin door.

Because of this, the "adjustments" can do all kinds of things, can have any effect desired by the manufacturer. It's not just game difficulty that might be changed, but pricing, testing, or even accommodating different hardware setups (like control schemes or cocktail table modes) or, as in this case, adjusting the amount of chance in the game. The thing about wholly software skill-based games is, there's a ton the game can do in secret to seem fair without actually being so. Fish Hunter/Harpoon Lagoon appears to take advantage of many of them: manipulating enemy health so it takes more shots to cash in (each of which having a direct monetary value) and reducing the number of high-value targets when the game's paid out too much. Really clever/scummy programmers could even do things like play with target hitboxes, choosing not to register a hit that would put the machine over the target payout percentage, or maybe enlarging the hitbox of an interceding, low-value target in order to block the shot.

Now for a moment consider it from the perspective of an honest operator. A danger with running skill-based games is, how do you make the game winnable sometimes to casual players while preventing a truly skilled player from emptying the machine? Ideally you'd have a game that's uncertain enough that skill can't give a player a significant advantage, but players usually recognize those as inherently unfair, and further it's a lot harder to rig physical equipment for a desired success percentage than to do it in software. It's unfortunate that, if a player can seek economic advantage from a situation (like by consistently winning at a machine where the prizes are worth more than the cost to play), he probably will. Randomness adds "fuzz" to the system, evening the odds across all, raising them for bad players and lowering them for good players.

I think part of the problem here is that rigging a software system to rely on chance is a lot easier, a lot more invisible to the player, than monkeying to similar end with a purely physical game. The obscurity of the game internals can make a rigged game seem fair. Video slot machines do this too, but they don't pretend as much to be skill games as a shooting video game appears to be.
posted by JHarris at 8:13 PM on November 23, 2016 [20 favorites]


I remember my daughter playing this on her third birthday at the little kids arcade in Los Altos. This is like finding out there are high stakes games of Hungry Hungry Hippos.
posted by w0mbat at 8:51 PM on November 23, 2016 [8 favorites]


The lottery is truly an awful way to gamble, with terrible returns and engineered to seduce those who can least afford to waste their money on unrealistic hope.

It's basically just an unreliable, extremely regressive form of taxation. It's unethical as Hell. Fuck lotteries.
posted by tobascodagama at 9:06 PM on November 23, 2016 [5 favorites]


You know what I'm 99% sure is gambling? Shopkins for kids that have "seasons" with "rare items" that kids trade with each other. There is always a "hidden" character that "could" be a rare one, which you find out after you pay. They even sell entire packs that are all secrets, until you pay for them. My daughter wants to buy them constantly, because of the possible rarity (often determined by the company) of the hidden items. Those things are making a mint for the company based on promises of a possible payout that have potential real market value, if ebay and swap meets are any indication. Or just contrived value in the eyes of the purchaser, with no guarantee that exchange for payment will fulfilled. I'm pretty sure this is a point that violates the gambling statutes of California, but I can see where the grayness in the line is. It reminds me of another toy I saw in Target that is a "bag of [fake] gold" that could have something actually more valuable in it. I mean, come on. I feel like it could be a ploy to get kids eventually interested in the state lottery later.
posted by SpacemanStix at 10:15 PM on November 23, 2016 [4 favorites]


The lotterys are bad, but outlawing them seems worse.
It seems most places that don't have a lottery has organized crime stepping in. The numbers racket.

If people are going to waste their money anyways it might as well go to the government.
posted by Iax at 11:14 PM on November 23, 2016


Bringer Tom: "The better payout being more illegal actually makes sense because it is the better payout, particularly in the same currency you can buy in for, which makes the game attractive to a potential gambling addict."
Machines with payout in the 90% range are also way more attractive to money launderers.
posted by brokkr at 1:21 AM on November 24, 2016 [2 favorites]


Yeah they sold us on that in Louisiana too -- and as soon as it passed, promptly REMOVED the general funding for schools from the budget to match the new lottery funding. So yeah, the lottery funds the schools, but the old school funding got shifted to the general fund. Slick.

California. Ditto.
posted by sebastienbailard at 3:32 AM on November 24, 2016 [1 favorite]


Seems like one of those cases where consequentialist and deontological ethics, alone, are probably insufficient, and only a formally unsatisfying supplementation of one with the other will really do.

Ubik! — the thinking man's Beano!
posted by y2karl at 5:07 AM on November 24, 2016


So yeah, the lottery funds the schools, but the old school funding got shifted to the general fund.
That's true any time you hear, "Let's tax x to fund y".

If I decided I was going to give you $100 every year to spend on your electric bill, you'd certainly take it. And maybe you'd have a ceremony every year where you hand an oversized check to a representative from the power company, just to make sure that I know you're spending that money on electrical power.

But the one thing you wouldn't do is actually purchase and use $100 of additional electricity every year.
posted by Hatashran at 7:53 AM on November 24, 2016 [2 favorites]


I disagree. When a government official says that they want to tax something to fund something else, the strong implication in that statement is that they will, in fact, be adding to the total funding of that something else. Just because they rarely ever actually do it doesn't mean that's not what they want people to think they've promised to do.
posted by tobascodagama at 9:03 AM on November 24, 2016 [2 favorites]


Another example: When your city/county proposes to raise the sales tax to pay for road work, it is generally expected that the new revenue stream will be at least substantially in addition to the existing road budget. (Same goes for taxes for transit) When it isn't, people tend to get rather angry.
The only difference between that and the lottery is that education funding is much less obvious, so they can get away with implying the lottery will be providing additional funds even though it is almost always mostly a replacement.
posted by wierdo at 10:00 AM on November 24, 2016 [2 favorites]


I encountered one of these machines one night in Mong Kok. It was all in Chinese and I didn't really know what I was doing, but the machine made a lot of noises at me and the colours were very pleasant and bright.

I spent a lot of money.
posted by tracert at 2:09 PM on November 24, 2016 [3 favorites]


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