Talk:History of arcade video games

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Orphaned references in History of arcade games[edit]

I check pages listed in Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting to try to fix reference errors. One of the things I do is look for content for orphaned references in wikilinked articles. I have found content for some of History of arcade games's orphans, the problem is that I found more than one version. I can't determine which (if any) is correct for this article, so I am asking for a sentient editor to look it over and copy the correct ref content into this article.

Reference named "tao2":

I apologize if any of the above are effectively identical; I am just a simple computer program, so I can't determine whether minor differences are significant or not. AnomieBOT⚡ 22:14, 14 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Verge Article[edit]

First of all, I really appreciate the continuing efforts by User:Masem to organize some of the video game and video game history articles to eliminate redundancies and make everything more coherent. I support this effort wholeheartedly. In this case though, we have reliance on an article in the Verge for much of the material that is really, truly, awfully, horribly inaccurate. Just as a few examples:

  • " By definition, an "amusement arcade" is a place that houses coin-operated machines, and for the first half of the 20th century, that meant pinball." - Coin-operated amusement arcades date to the late 19th century and were initially focused around sound and film viewing machines rather than games. In the early 20th century (i.e. about the first half of the "first half" of the century) the arcade was dominated primarily by Mutoscopes, strength and grip testers, electric shock machines, fortune tellers, and -- starting in the 1920s -- crane machines. Pinball was not really a thing until the 1930s. Games of skill were not a big thing until the late 1920s and arcades turning to games of skill did not really happen until the advent of the Sportland concept in 1930.
  • "The first successful coin-operated game was called Baffle Ball, created by David Gottlieb in 1931" - So lets leave aside that the first successful coin-operated games appeared decades before Baffle Ball. Even if this is meant to be pinball instead, Whiffle, Whoopee, and several other games were immensely popular before Baffle Ball. The Gottlieb distinction is he is the first person who was actually able to mass produce a game fast enough to almost keep up with demand.
  • "Bally and others originally made much of their money manufacturing slot machines." - Bally was established in 1932 to create a pinball machine. It did not even enter the gambling machine business until 1936 (though it did introduce a payout pinball a couple years before that). The early pinball companies were not in slots, and the early slots companies, like Mills, were never heavily in pinball. There is still a lot of connection with gray market gambling concepts, but this sentence is not true on its face.
  • "The first full-fledged and highly publicized legal attack on pinball came on January 21st, 1942, when New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia banned pinball in the city, ordering the seizure of thousands of machines." - Los Angeles and Chicago both banned pinball before New York. And the 1942 incident was a court ruling, not a ban by the mayor. LaGuardia was seizing machines and a court upheld his right to do so.
  • "The period between the late 1940s and the introduction of a new type of arcade game in the early 1970s — the video game — was one of continued controversy, growing attraction of games for young people, and innovation for the machines." - Coin-operated amusements were continually in decline for most of this period. The trend only really started changing in the mid 1960s.
  • "In early 1972 Bushnell and Dabney left Nutting to form their own company, Syzygy Engineering." - Syzygy pre-dated Bushnell's stint with Nutting, which I though was pretty common knowledge at this point.
  • "Ping-Pong was essentially a remake of 1958’s Tennis for Two, one of the first computer games with a graphical display" - This is utter nonsense. They don't look alike, they don't play alike. Tennis for Two is side-view, Ping-Pong is overhead. Tennis for Two displays no paddles, just an arc representing the ball. Ralph Baer and Bill Rusch would not have even known Tennis for Two existed.
  • Skipping ahead for brevity (too late!), the article later discusses a hibernation of arcades for "ten years," which is not in any way true. Coin-op video game revenue peaked in the early 1980s near $5 billion (yes five, not eight. Coin-op revenues peaked at eight, but video has never been the entire industry), fell back to earth in 1983, and then bottomed out in 1985. In the late 1980s, video had a great resurgence, with revenue peaking around $3 billion in 1990 (you will see some variations in the figures because its all estimates and Replay, Play Meter, and Vending Times figures never agreed, but the general upward trend is consistent). The home market hit $4 billion in 1990, so they were neck-and-neck. Overall, coin-op was by far more profitable when pinball and other games were factored in. It was a $7 billion market, making up most of the lost ground after the crash. Yes, when you account for inflation its not quite as close, but the point is arcade culture was not "beginning to pass away" in the 1980s as the article states. That would come later.

I could go on, but I know this wall of text must already be outstaying its welcome. The TL:DR version is that this is a poorly researched article that should be used only very carefully. Sadly no one has really done a good job of actually chronicling the history of arcade video games yet. Hopefully that will change at some point. Indrian (talk) 22:37, 14 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Again, I'm trying to work with sources that I can find, and particular in the arcade area this is where sourcing at the scholarly level starts to fall apart (particularly that 1983-1990ish period). BUT key is to try to structure this better than it was in the Arcade game article and get some better sourcing for it so that we can build it up better. What I have found with the other articles is this is iterative (and bouncing back and forth) - I find a source that helps me at one place that shows a weakness we had elsewhere so its like the need to polish that up as well. We do want to get rid of the gross inaccuracies, some which I can tell came from the Arcade game article that I pulled w/o checking. So take whatever sledgehammer is needed. --Masem (t) 22:44, 14 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Absolutely, and I think you are doing a great job! Coin-op is particularly tricky because a lot of sources do not do a good job of distinguishing between what coin-operated video games were doing and what the market as a whole was doing. So figures like $8 billion get thrown around, for instance, that actually represent all coin-op amusements, pinball, pool, shuffle alleys, basically everything that is not a jukebox or a vending machine. So at a glance it looks like the market was $8 billion in 1982 and $2.1 billion in 1991, when the numbers are not quite that divergent. Its further confused because most of the newspaper sources that modern articles are presumably drawing from are getting their figures from the three trades: Replay, Play Meter, and Vending Times, but their estimates did not actually coincide with the calendar year much of the time so when Playmeter reports "1982" figures, what it really means is "figures from June 1981 to June 1982" (I think that was Play Meter's range, but that's just off the top of my head without double checking, so don't quote me. If its not that its similar and not at all calendar). And of course its all just estimates, and they are probably wildly off because you know these cash only businesses were being cagey about what they reported to the IRS. None of that is to criticize the work being done on the article at all. Its just a massive game of telephone between sources has led a lot of stuff to be distorted in books and retrospective articles that try to cover this stuff. It makes the job exceedingly difficult. Indrian (talk) 22:54, 14 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The new era are virtual reality arcade centers[edit]

There should be a section about it. Many cities have one or more now. --79.221.84.78 (talk) 21:14, 8 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

This is probably a valid point but we do want sourcing for it. There's enough for that to add. --Masem (t) 21:18, 8 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
There are a lot of news articles write about it. But most of them only write about specifc non relevant arcade centers or are VR only magazines. Under Google Scholar and Books are some more useful ones but not all under public access. Keywords are virtual reality/vr arcade/center. There is even a short german wikipedia article (de) about it. --79.221.84.78 (talk) 21:59, 8 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

This Article is Interesting, but Wildly Off Focus[edit]

The author has written a nice article, but it’s a history of coin-operated video games, not a history of arcade games. Coin-operated games date back to the 19th Century. They have encompassed pool, bagatelle, pinball, shuffle alleys, trade stimulators, allwins, pachinko, electric rifle target games, light gun target games, tests of strength, foosball, pitch-and-bat baseball machines, bubble hockey, air hockey, love testers, electric shockers, cranes, medal games, coin pushers, skee ball, electromechanical driving games, and many other products that have nothing to do with video. They have moved from railway depots, bars, traveling fairs, and exhibitions to automatic houses, penny arcades, sportlands, funlands, shopping mall arcades, and family entertainment centers. This article represents them not one bit.

I believe we need a new daughter article on the history of coin-operated video games to go into the nitty gritty of Gun Fight, and Hang On, and Street Fighter II, etc., and then we can move most of this article’s content there. Then, maybe someday someone can turn this article into a real history of arcade games. Indrian (talk) 03:23, 11 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I don't disagree that there's a distinction from "all" arcade-style games and arcade video games, and there's a larger history to be had on the former topic. The only issue is that "arcade game" is presently geared towards the "video" style. If there is a better for the broader topic (that includes all coin-op) beyond "arcade game" we should probably use that, since the common meaning of "arcade game" is the video style. But if we can't do that, it is easier then just to move this to "history of arcade video games" (which needs to led with a bit of non-video arcade stuff), and start a fresh article for "history of arcade games". --Masem (t) 05:56, 11 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Maybe we could divide the article into separate sections for different types of arcade games? For example, sections on video games, pinball, redemption, electro-mechanical, air hockey, etc. Maestro2016 (talk) 12:33, 11 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I mean, its absolutely to have one article on the history of all arcade games like those you like, and then a separate article on arcade video games. One article to cover both is not practical. The only issue, again, is that in terms of common naming "arcade game" today more often refers to "arcade video game" rather than the broader scope, so its a matter of figuring out the best naming. This would also affect arcade game too, which is written on the basis of being mostly video games. --Masem (t) 12:50, 11 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
The article is currently under 50 KB, so there should be more than enough space to cover different types of arcade games. I doubt the content on other types of arcade games would take up nearly as much space as video games. As for the term arcade game, the technical definition is all types of coin-operated games, yet the most common usage is indeed video games. So I think it's fine to focus on video games, but not exclusively on video games. Maestro2016 (talk) 13:01, 11 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Sure maybe at the present state. But now I look at arcade game and there, that's going to be an issue. The arcade video game has its own focus of late, while the non-video arcade game topic is something different and not really covered, nor would be appropriate at the scope of what's presenting in arcade game (though whether we move that current content to a different article or what, I'm not sure). I think the first point of business is to determine, given the title "arcade game" is the primary topic going to be all such games, or strictly on arcade video games. Then we can make a few choice page moves to untangle that. --Masem (t) 13:19, 11 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

It is really not accurate at all to say that the term "arcade game" "is presently geared towards the 'video' style." Modern arcades, such as they are, continue to host many, many concepts that are not video games, particularly various redemption and sports games. Unscientifically typing "arcade games" into Google yields within the first page of results a link to a search for arcade products available from Walmart that includes a product called the "Bundaloo Unicorn Claw Machine Arcade Game," an Amazon shopping search page that includes in its top results a "Skee-Ball Arcade Table Machine Game for Home Basement Recreation Room" and an "ESPN EZ Fold Indoor Basketball Game for 2 Players with LED Scoring and Arcade Sounds," and a page of ebay listings including a "NEW BONUS HOLE COIN PUSHER – QUARTER SLIDER" and an "ICE SUPER CHEXX PRO BUBBLE HOCKEY GAME LIMITED EDITION 2005." Once you get past some of these shopping-related results, one of the first hits is for BMI Gamking, an extant company that advertises itself as a "global supplier of arcade games, amusements + virtual reality." Their offerings of "new arcade games and new arcade machines" are organized into categories that include "All Sports Arcade Games" and "All Redemption Arcade Games." Another leader in the field, Innovate Concepts in Entertainment (ICE) describes itself on its website as "a manufacturer of the best amusement and arcade games since 1982." ICE has never made video games: they make redemption games, sports games, and cranes. When trade publication Replay announced in March the opening of a new arcade in North Carolina with 35 games, the picture chosen to represent this venue featured not one video game in the bunch. There has never been a time when "arcade game" was generally understood to only mean "video game." Indrian (talk) 04:13, 12 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

You're not wrong, but I'm just cautioning that most people today that are not familiar with the industry will likely think video-game based arcade games when the term "arcade game" is used, and a key part in WP's naming schemes is by WP:COMMONNAME. That said, we can still be clear that "arcade video game" is the key subset starting with Pong etc., that falls under "arcade game", assuming there's consensus that's a logic naming change. That would propagate to arcade game as well as well as into our categories like Category:Arcade game (in that we'd need to make a new one for "arcade video games"). --Masem (t) 05:26, 12 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I think you are overcomplicating a bit here. Arcade video games are commonly called arcade games, which is fine. The Space Invaders page can continue to start "Space Invaders is a 1978 arcade game" because that is all true and correct. And Category:Arcade game can continue to be applied without further clarification to any arcade video game. I am talking about specifically how to approach the history of arcade games through a main history page and subpages devoted to particular topics. Right now, this page gets very specific about the history of video arcade games and basically does not mention non-video arcade games at all. If all forms of arcade games were given the same depth of treatment as video games currently are in this article, it would be extremely long and need to be split. Furthermore, the in-depth coverage of video games and lack of coverage of other games leads a casual reader to assume that video games are the only arcade games. Basically, this article needs to be a high-level history that spans the entire history of the medium from the 19th century to the present. Video is part of that, but such an article only needs to discuss how ball-and-paddle video games were the biggest hit in the industry in 1973, for example, rather than going in depth about how Nolan Bushnell saw Spacewar! and the Odyssey and founded a company called Atari with a guy named Ted Dabney and they made Pong. Its too much detail for a top level history article and should be in a daughter article that links to this one. Its a scope issue, not a "let's recategorize everything on Wikipedia" issue. Indrian (talk) 05:44, 12 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, I'm sort of saying the same thing in that the current text in this article probably should be at History of arcade video games, and this article can cover from the earliest such mechanical games through electro-mechanical, pinball, etc, and briefly touch on arcade video games. Similarly, what is at arcade game should probably be at arcade video game while arcade game would be covering all the different types (and perhaps that's a starting point for its history). And we ought to really categorize Pong, etc. into "Arcade video games" as a subcat of "arcade games". But, that's all based on making sure that consensus agrees that this is we should be done, that "arcade game" commonly refers to the broad range of games and not just limited to "arcade video games". The consensus may think that "arcade game" is set to the topic of video-game based arcade games, which would change the naming schemes. We just want to make sure there's agreement of how to discussion the two different topic realms and then we can implement the necessary changes relatively easily. --Masem (t) 05:51, 12 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I do get what you are saying and understanding that you and I seem to be in agreement, but to your larger point about consensus, erroneous perception by the general public does not mean we incorrectly label something with the more commonly applied label or exclude items from a label they properly fall under. If you do a Google search for the terms "Bell Pepper" and "fruit" together, you get 11.2 million results. Do the same search except replace "fruit" with "vegetable," and you get 13.2 million results. If we take what I think your logic is to its natural conclusion, then by one measure of COMMONNAME, the vegetable label clearly wins out and we should go ahead and classify the bell pepper as a vegetable and remove the chili pepper category it currently belongs to from the overarching category of fruit. Obviously, that would be very silly, but a whole lot of people do think its a vegetable and not a fruit. Likewise, we can't just decide by consensus that video games are the only arcade games because some people equate the term "arcade game" with "video arcade game." We are not just talking about industry types here. Nobody who actually goes into an arcade with a bunch of video games, an air hockey table, two redemption games, and a basketball game is saying to themselves, "those video games are arcade games while that air hockey table and those other games are not." On its face, the definition of an arcade game is "a game found in an arcade" and that has never been the sole province of video. There is no overarching term that includes video games and excludes everything else or vice versa. Whether you call them "coin-operated amusements," "coin-operated games," "arcade games," or some other term, they will all encompass both video and non-video products. The only way to distinguish them in terms of sub categories is to organize them into industry recognized categories like "video," "pinball," "redemption," "sports," etc. Anything else would be inaccurate and untrue, and consensus can't create a falsehood like, say, turning a fruit into a vegetable. Indrian (talk) 06:06, 12 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Okay, I see what you're saying, and I do agree, this is just a factual thing and should not need consensus but just needs to be fixed. So here's what I would suggest:
  1. Arcade game in its current form should be moved to Arcade video game
  2. A new Arcade game to cover all forms of arcade gaming (pinball, redemption, etc.) should be created in its place.
  3. This page, History of arcade games, should be moved to History of arcade video games
  4. At the present time, the suggested new Arcade game can have a history section for the entire history (with a link and brief summary for arcade video games), until such a time that a better expansive history article is needed.
  5. Arcade video games in Category:Arcade games should be moved to a subcat of that Category:Arcade video games for proper distinction.
  6. A semi-automated task (AWB) to go through VGproj pages that have a link to arcade game to move that to arcade video game could be done but this is a minor facet since, as you say, an arcade video game is still an arcade game.
That addresses your original point and should smooth out all the distinctions. --Masem (t) 15:28, 12 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
That sounds perfect to me. I really appreciate your willingness to engage in this conversation and work through this stuff. And I do appreciate all the work you have been doing to flesh out some of these articles as well. Indrian (talk) 16:14, 12 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
As you can tell, I have done all the basic moves, and while Arcade game is currently thin, that can be fleshed out. I'm working to figure out how to handle the category moves. --Masem (t) 17:25, 12 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
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