Claw & Order, Jersey Shore edition

June 30, 2023 6:37 AM

In New Jersey, cheating at boardwalk games is considered especially heinous. On the Jersey Shore, the dedicated detectives who investigate this malicious mischief are members of an elite squad known as the Legalized Games of Chance Control Commission. These are their stories. (archive.today link)

Via the Numlock News Sunday Substack, which spoke to reporters S.P. Sullivan and Amira Sweilem about their reporting. (archive.today link)

posted by Etrigan (18 comments total)

*DUN DUN*
posted by cooker girl at 7:03 AM on June 30, 2023 [7 favorites]

This is beautifully written. They clearly had lots of fun with the writing and the investigative journalism.
posted by SaharaRose at 7:30 AM on June 30, 2023 [4 favorites]

I actually love the narrative thread that runs through this: rigged games were such a huge problem in the '70's that an entire regulatory agency was formed, and they've been such diligent enforcers of the rules over the past 30 years that (with a few notable exceptions) now the games on the boardwalk are mostly fine. It sounds like everyone working in one of these games-of-chance interacts with inspectors pretty frequently, and they've all learned that if they break any rules, they'll probably get busted almost immediately. Regulation works!

Now let's try the same thing, but instead of busting people for scamming tourists out of $20, we go after reckless operators piloting multi-thousand-pound bludgeoning weapons and killing thousands of people every year.
posted by Mayor West at 7:44 AM on June 30, 2023 [7 favorites]

Playing games while secretly investigating those games is the dream job I didn't know existed until now.
posted by pianissimo at 7:52 AM on June 30, 2023 [6 favorites]

It's like parking tickets. No one cares about the fines, they're just too low. The fines should increase exponentially on each repeated offence.
posted by seanmpuckett at 8:05 AM on June 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

Then, a pair of reporters walked the boardwalk beat in Wildwood undercover as easy marks, wearing too much sun screen and a fanny pack, a bucket hat and a 1988 Jimmy Buffet tour T-shirt.

I would pay $10 just to see this. Screw throwing an overinflated basketball.
posted by tafetta, darling! at 8:24 AM on June 30, 2023 [4 favorites]

pianissimo: Playing games while secretly investigating those games is the dream job I didn't know existed until now.

I get the feeling that’s why the agency refused to answer questions about staffing or make anyone available to the media. No sense in exposing to the media what is likely to be the stereotypical patronage job for NJ.
posted by dr_dank at 8:27 AM on June 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

So in another life I worked on the software for one of those "stop the moving light" redemption games. You see them in arcades all the time. Before the flashier games came along that category of game was a massive money maker. Even though they cost the operator $3000-$5000 some paid themselves off in a few months and have been operating in the same arcade for decades. Bromley's Cyclone was at the top of the industry earning charts for longer than anyone cared to track.

The way the first revision of software worked was to pretty much cheat the player. Example: if you set the software to pay out "40% of the time" the game will just count coins in and tickets out and do the long division. If a player hit the button at the right time that would pay the jackpot, but the jackpot would move the payout over 40%, the game would just move the light to the next position and, looky there, you lost.

Not so in New Jersey! They made us submit the code to a third party gaming lab, just like the slot machine makers do, to audit the code and see if we were honestly paying out what the code said it would and that all players had an equal shot at winning. We found an algorithm that would still make the game skill-based and also honor the payout setting, but that was a lot more work than anyone expected.

So TLDR mad props to New Jersey for keeping it all honest.
posted by JoeZydeco at 8:56 AM on June 30, 2023 [29 favorites]

I am shocked-shocked-to find that gambling is going on in here!
posted by scruss at 8:59 AM on June 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

I have a secret love for claw games and I got so mad when I realized they had little to do with skill and were straight up rigged to drop the prize or not. There is still some joy in getting a prize with a "weak grip." I think the odds on these kinds of games should be posted, like with slot machines.
posted by muddgirl at 9:21 AM on June 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

As long as we're doing cranes: Have you seen the Japanese "Mega Cranes"?
posted by JoeZydeco at 9:27 AM on June 30, 2023

The first time my daughter played a claw game she was like 5 and we happened won some stuffed something-or-other. For a long time that she really, really wanted to play every one we came across. Because they're easy!
posted by gottabefunky at 10:34 AM on June 30, 2023

You can always call the Junior Claw Machine Inspectors
posted by gottabefunky at 10:35 AM on June 30, 2023

I really loved the interview with the reporters. The final line affirms my life choices - I'm headed to the Shore for the first time in ages this weekend and yeah, I'm looking forward to playing some skeeball, but the list of food I want is extensive.
posted by EvaDestruction at 11:15 AM on June 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

I never realized till reading it that I have a Schrödinger’s Cat belief in carnival games, in which I fully believe that they’re simultaneously all rigged and impossible to win, AND people win them all the time. And the only way to know which is true, is me playing. But $5-20 for a cheap stuffed avocado? I guess I’ll never know. So glad to have these forces in their Jimmy Buffett tour shirts and fanny packs “… to cleanse the stench of crooked carnies of yore.”

What a fun read!
posted by Mchelly at 4:09 PM on June 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

We found an algorithm that would still make the game skill-based and also honor the payout setting, but that was a lot more work than anyone expected.

Im so curious what this was! I'm guessing some kind of progressive difficulty change based on number of payouts or something, but I cant imagine how that would work and still get players.
posted by jonbro at 7:47 PM on June 30, 2023

The one that used to crack me up down the shore was Stacker, which was omnipresent for a couple of years. All you had to do was time button presses to line up a tower of sets-of-squares without letting any go unsupported, and you could win gift cards, game consoles, the works! (The last button press had to be within some miniscule fraction of a second, of course, but the persistence of vision made it LOOK as if the light stayed on the winning position for any meaningful length of time.)

While getting changed, I noted to one of the beach arcade owners that they had to be making money hand-over-fist with their Stackers. "Oh, no, just look at the prizes!" he scoffed. "Those cost big money."

"Uh-huh," I noted, watching a guy drop a $20 into one in short order and walk away with zilch. "And they pay out so often."
posted by delfin at 2:57 PM on July 1, 2023

I'm so curious what this was!

Well, delfin pretty much got it right. The ring of lights is being lit in a uniform order, let's say there are 50 lights around the circle and you sweep around once every 1.5 seconds. So you spend about 30 milliseconds (a millisecond is 0.001 second) lighting up the lamp and then you light the next one.

A person with enough practice could time the stop and hit that 30 mSec window pretty easily, so the earlier software would light up the next or previous position and fake the loss.

The answer was to make the positions light for a non-uniform amount of time. Maybe some are 50 milliseconds and some are 20. And the jackpot position would be set to 1 millisecond. Now not only do the lights count in a strange order*, but the chance of hitting the stop button in the jackpot position is much much harder. As more coins come in and more losses stack up you can be more generous with the jackpot, so you open up the window for longer. The operator can decide how much and how often to recalculate. The gaming lab was okay with this.

* Note that the order is almost invisible to the player because the old-style incandescent lamps would glow quickly when power is applied, but are also slow to cool down. The old #44 lamps would go fully bright in 12-15 mSec but take 100 mSec to fade down. Your persistance of vision covers the rest of it.
posted by JoeZydeco at 6:12 PM on July 4, 2023