Tag: #videogames

My heart sank – a not unfamiliar feeling for a step-dad – as I watched my girls running off, excited that I had just put $20 each on their cards which should, in theory, provide an hour of fun playing video games. Myah, of course, didn’t care about playing the games as much as she was obsessed with winning as many tickets as possible. This led her to a game where you swipe your card (spending $1 in the process), pull a lever and win some ridiculously low number of tickets. The entire game takes about 12 seconds which, if my math is correct, averages out to about $914 per hour.

Sonya, on the other hand, seemed enthralled with the simple process of swiping her card. She would run up to one machine, swipe her card and jump up and down in excitement as the lights would begin to flash and fun noises began to emanate from the machine. Instead of actually playing the game she would rush to the next machine and swipe again. And again. And again. As impossible as it seemed, Sonya was managing to spend money at a faster clip than her older sister.

Being a generous spirit, I had included my niece, Izzy, in video game fun-day and she was also blowing through money at a pace that would embarrass a drunken sailor. With three wild children running amok in different directions, I had no idea how to contain the situation. Feeling like Sonya was the most out of control, I ran after her in hopes of slowing down the drain on my bank account.

I encouraged my little one to get on a bouncy train ride which looked like it should eat up 5 minutes or so and quickly discovered the first thing I hate about modern day arcades. After putting Sonya up on the train, I swiped the card – saying goodbye to another dollar – and watched as a few lights blinked on the train, it bobbed back and forth six times and then stopped. The ride wasn’t even 60 seconds long and Sonya earned exactly ZERO bad word tickets for her efforts.

One of the many lessons learned that day was that the little “rides” don’t award any tickets. They last for a few seconds, aren’t any fun at all, give you no tickets and charge you a fortune. What kind of bad word scam on hard working American middle-class families is that? Can somebody please tell me why there is no congressional sub-committee investigating this buffoonery? It’s easily more dishonest than the worst pyramid scheme to come out of Wall Street.

But it gets worse. Myah and Izzy were hooked on a game where you scan your card – adios to another bad word dollar – press a button and win some random number of tickets. While the game promises the possibility of winning thousands of tickets, the usual prize was five or ten. I did my best to urge them to play an actual game, one that would take at least a minute, but all they cared about was the lure of massive amounts of tickets.

I hate bad word tickets.

Left to her own devices, Sonya had blown $2 shooting up a bunch of zombies with a crossbow. This seemed inappropriate for a little girl so I scooped her out of the machine. Not before, however, I discovered you get exactly ZERO bad word tickets for shooting Zombies, something my sweet little princess performed with an alarming aptitude. As a matter of fact, actual “video games” don’t give tickets. There are games that are designed to give tickets and then there are actual video games, something you can play for a while if you are any good, but they don’t give you tickets.

The scam just gets bigger.

Eight and a half minutes after first handing the cards to the three hooligans they were yanking on my shorts, pulling on my arms and demanding more games. Less than 10 minutes and they had collectively blown SIXTY DOLLARS! How does that even happen? How did a fun trip to the arcade turn out to be more expensive than a cocaine habit? Were the drug cartels now in the video game business?

It sure felt like it.

I was already over my entertainment budget for the week and was loath to spend one more dollar on these idiotic rip-off machines. Still, I didn’t have a clue what else to do with the girls as I thought we would be here for at least an hour. I hated to give in to their tears but, what the bad word, it’s only money and surely I could teach them to make the second $20 last a little longer.

I did.

Sixteen minutes. That’s how long it took them to spend the next $60. I wanted to throw up.

Little did I know that the worst was yet to come.

I resisted the next set of tears and insisted we move on to spending our tickets – a level of hell more horrible than anything even Dante could have dreamed up. Myah led the way with 512 tickets which could have purchased her a plastic ball with a smiley face on it, allowing me to move on to the next child.

But Myah had other ideas.

She started with one tootsie roll, a bargain at 5 tickets. Myah was stumped over her next purchase, unsure if she wanted to spend another 5 tickets on a tootsie pop or move on from the tootsie family and get a piece of bubble gum for 5 tickets. I don’t know why I was worried about what I would do with the girls for the rest of the day because it was apparent that Myah would be here till closing time trying to maximize her ticket purchasing power.

I pushed and prodded, begged and pleaded and finally lost my temper. It worked, though, because only 36 minutes later Myah spent her last 25 tickets on a small plastic alien with a parachute on its back. That little piece of Chinese made crap was the most expensive thing she had purchased. Why she wanted 100 crappy pieces of crappy crap rather than one semi-crappy item she might actually play with was beyond me and unfortunately, she proved to be the trendsetter because the other two girls nickel and dimed their way through their tickets as well.

I have become intimately familiar with all of the various video game establishments in my time as a step-dad and each one has their pluses and minuses. Chuck-E-Cheese has it right in that they allow you to purchase and unlimited card when you have a birthday party there. I like that. Charge me whatever, I don’t care, but give me two hours without a kid coming up to me crying because they ran out of money. In spite of the unlimited card, Chuck-E-Cheese comes in at the bottom of my list because of the dreaded ticket muncher. Have you ever encountered this insanity? They don’t put the tickets electronically on your card like other places. You still get actual tickets. To cash them in you are forced to feed your tickets into the ticket muncher which counts your tickets and gives you a receipt.

I’m not sure I have the vocabulary or adequate writing skills to express how absolutely terrifyingly horrible this process is. Kids can win a lot of tickets in two hours of unlimited playing. I challenge you to munch 2,000 tickets while the machine keeps jamming, kids are running around like wild animals and other stressed parents are waiting for the machine. If you leave without having a nervous breakdown, developing an alcohol addiction or needing to seek professional therapy then you are a better parent than am I.

We now give our video game money to Game Time where, for FIFTY DOLLARS!!!, our children can have about 30 – 40 minutes of fun. I don’t even let them spend the tickets anymore which Game Time, thank God, loads electronically onto the cards. We bought lanyards for the swipe cards and make them save their tickets so that one day, after we have spent about $6,000, they will be able to win a stuffed animal.

When I was a kid my momma would give me $5 and I would ride my bike to the mall and play video games ALL BAD WORD DAY. It is absolutely insane how much these games cost and how awful the prizes are.

So why do we spend what amounts to the cost of tuition at a quality four-year university on video games? I really don’t know, to be honest. I guess we just want our kids to be happy. We like to spoil them but are displeased when they act spoiled. We enjoy being Americans with discretionary income and want our kids to have it better than we did, even though we had it pretty good.

My advice to you? Buy your kids a Frisbee and send them outside. Don’t worry about the arcades. They’ll be fine. I’m spending enough for both of us.