Coin Return: The Personal Experience in Arcade Paradise

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Arcade Paradise. It also briefly mentions suicidal ideation. If you are struggling with suicidal thoughts, contact a suicide prevention organisation near you. For those in the US, you can reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or find them online at 988lifeline.org. If you are in the UK, you can call The Samaritans on 116 123 or visit their website at samaritans.org.

Arcade Paradise is a chimaera: a laundrette management sim/minigame collection/arcade management regime. I'm not even sure that's quite right. Its story starts with the father of the protagonist, "Ashley", making them superintendent of a laundrette on the bad side of town. Their Dad says something about teaching them (Ashley is not assigned a gender) self-discipline. The main character anticipates long hours of soulless rigamarole but soon becomes acquainted with some dusty arcade cabinets in a back room. They're a little worse for wear, but they're the saplings for the business that our manager really wants to run: not a sad, stinky laundromat, but an orchard of upright arcade machines, all of which we can play.

One manoeuvre Arcade Paradise uses to avoid classification is giving its under-games varying form factors. Some are minute enough that they're undeniably minigames, but others are plump enough that you can imagine them having been full releases for the 2600 or Intellivision. Even if we did want to file Arcade Paradise in the "Minigame Collection" drawer, that title is not explicating in the same way that most other genre labels are. It tells you nothing about play aesthetics. If we want to find folders for the theming and mechanics of these files, then Arcade Paradise is a retro racer/block puzzler/pool sim/Pong clone/twenty other things. I know it might be old hat to mention that game genres are not exactly scientific, but in spotlighting how exactly media bursts the banks of categorisation, we learn more about it and how we might be misleading ourselves with terminology. On that note, calling today's specimen a "management sim" might also be muddying the waters.

The term "management sim" was coined for strategy sandboxes where the player institutes some combination of the layout, economics, and protocol of a workplace. You hammer fence posts into the ground and enrich zebra enclosures. You budget for wards and assign doctors to them. You're getting the diet version of that formula every time you set prices and order SKUs in Arcade Paradise. But in its totality, the game is more hands-on than the aforementioned management sims. The play has more to do with the recent wave of first-person games that model manual tasks (e.g. Supermarket Simulator, Fast Food Simulator) than with textbook management sims (e.g. Let's Build a Zoo, Theme Hospital).

In Sim Tower, if I want to produce food, I open a restaurant in my skyscraper and wait for the chefs to fire up the grill. If I want to prepare food in Cooking Simulator, I might need to chop and boil potatoes, fry steak, and plate it all. Or to compare our manual games to one outside the management genre, if I need to slot a new engine into my hotrod in Rock 'n' Roll Racing, I just select it from the garage. Installing a new set of valves in My Summer Car requires placing the engine on the ground, pushing a crane over it, clicking the handle on the crane until it is lowered into place, taking a spanner, screwing the engine to the crane, pushing the handle on the crane to lift the engine, wheeling it over my car, and then completing the attachment process in reverse.

To wash clothes in Arcade Paradise, you can't hire a cleaner or just hit the action button next to a machine. You need to pick up the crate of dirty clothes, toss them in a machine, wait until they're washed, pick them up and move them into the dryer, wait until the dryer is done, then remove the clothes and place them on the collection counter. In other words, Arcade Paradise is at home among games about the physical application of resources rather than their abstract governance.

As we time these loadings and unloadings, we get hints of plate-spinning circuses like Diner Dash and Overcooked. The difference is Diner Dash is palpitating with the stress of a restaurant during lunch hour, while our duties in Arcade Paradise present the other hassle of the service industry: the dead zones where nothing is happening and time slows to a crawl. Other developers align their reward meters to give you a steady serotonin salary with the occasional spike or will have deadlines come due within a blink of each other in order to keep you on your toes. However, Nosebleed Interactive is not enchanted by this trend and has rigged its carnival so that the schedules don't meet in the middle.

If you are a future employer reading this, know that I am a blackbelt at slacking off. Staring at the clock face of the rotating dryer drums, I hear the air hockey table calling my name. Yet, it takes so long to play one session of the amusements that if you try it, you'll be leaving jeans to go stale in the suds drums. You can tell yourself you're going to chase high scores for five minutes, look at your PDA and find twenty minutes have elapsed. Disciplined time management can, therefore, demand going teetotal on the games.

At first, Arcade Paradise seems to be a lesson in taking responsibility. It's natural to scoff at our Dad's stuffy voicemails about pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, blow off the thankless drudgery of our paid position, and go have some actual fucking fun. We're young, and we only get one life. The father character has stacked the blocks of his brain with a common precarity. With the avian height of his expectations, he was always going to be disappointed unless his kid was the next Rockefeller, which was never going to happen. So why should we even try? We might as well spend our twenties perfecting our UFO Assault strategy.

The floor plan for our business means that we declare our intentions locationally. All the detergent-coated toil is in the beige front room. The bleeping, flashing cabinets are to be found beyond the sliding door atop the Dave & Busters carpet and against the bisexual wallpaper border. Any morning you come in and sprint to the arcade, you're watching the washers and dryers blur past you as you turn your back on them. Still, in time, most players will discover what any young adult does: that by applying themselves a little, they can buy more of the luxuries that season their rest hours. Ashley can invest some of their hard-earned scratch in more and better cabinets, and when they do have to take out the trash or scrape gum off the seats, they find it doesn't have to be as dull as dishwater.

In their mind's eye, Ashley turns everything into a video game. A holographic target is projected over the maw of the dumpster, and you gauge your throw of the refuse sack with a power meter. Clogged toilets have health bars and can be pronounced "defeated" by a tubular announcer. On Arcade Paradise, there's the seal of Jane McGonigal's philosophy. McGonigal is a game designer who has been long advocating for the implementation of gameplay mechanics in non-gaming contexts. She believes this could better incentivise people towards healthy and moral actions. For McGonigal, a proof of gamification's potential came in 2009, when a traumatic brain injury dropped her into a pit of suicidal ideation. As a balm, she devised a game called Superbetter, where she permitted herself points and other rewards for taking actions that were not exciting but that helped nurse her back to health.^[1][2]

Arguably, McGonigal is overly optimistic in her vision, but gamification did proliferate, sometimes for good, sometimes not. Fitness apps now tout objectives and progress bars, stamps on reward cards add up to freebies, and you can buy all sorts of tchotchkes in physical lootboxes, from figurines to knives. But these are mostly schemes that were devised by companies and thrust upon us. If we go back to McGonigal's original self-improvement game, we find a structure personally authored and tailored to a single life. That's what Ashley lives out every time they pull a wad of sugar off a chair, hear "Awesome", and receive $20.

It's a betrayal of that vitalising framing that the final upgrade to our public palace exiles the laundromat. It's the pot of gold at the end of Ashley's character arc: The business was a coin-operated boulder shackled to them by their father, and when they're free of it, they're free of him. By tying the protagonist's capital to their independence, the game makes the economic currency emotional currency, too. But selfishly, I do miss the washing machines once they're gone.

Even before that renovation, you can soon get the arcade printing enough money that you'll never need to fold another sweatshirt again. This is why I say Arcade Paradise only starts as a game about the rewards of a hard day's graft. In reality, running an arcade is at least as taxing as running a laundrette, a whirlwind of maintenance and financing. Arcade Paradise prefers a teenage fantasy of what managing a video game parlour would be like. In its emails and IMs, the game implies Ashley is putting their half a business degree into fifth gear, but you're a one-person staff, you spend almost all your day playing video games, and when a machine breaks down, you just flick a few cockroaches off the circuit boards, and they're good to go.

By the way, it is fine for your video game to be goofy and fantastical. Yet, in this particular fantasy, you have to swallow the rough with the smooth. One reason that it's not hard for players to take their lumps at the laundromat is that some of the minigames, especially those in their starter pack, won't keep their attention. Look, developing a minigame collection sounds like a cakewalk. No program you throw into it would have to be that complex, but developers in the genre are faced with an impediment. Games anthologies are strenuous to produce for the same reason that film anthologies are.

Most artists twist together some wiring for their piece and add some paper mache onto that base, and some more paper mache, and even more after that. If you're making a collection of pieces, you have to start over from the skeleton repeatedly, and in game development, that means less time to adorn the systems or wax the controls on any one addition. The quality across Arcade Paradise's sideshows flutters, and where its electron gun texts have appeal, we usually glean it from their premises rather than any close reading.

Take Racer Chaser. It is not a game you will find a superior substitute to. That's because there is no other rasterised reverie that mixes the police pursuits of GTA with the orthogonal mazes of Pac-Man. However, I don't know if it would stand up to the competition if there was any. You're constantly being thrown out of your car by pernicious law enforcement, and when that happens, the game enters a recess until you find another Ferrari to hijack. My crime spree feels like one step forward, one step back.

It takes a special kind of mind to manifest an etch-a-sketch action game, but that's what Line Terror is. It enlists one of my favourite dynamics, that of your progress being illustrated by the mitosis of a structure, and breaks it down to be more minimalist than I ever could have imagined. But its manual is too incomplete to cover how to survive, and its strobing colours and piercing whine leave it harsh on both the eyes and ears.

Zombat 2 is a conspiracy between bird's eye meat grinders like Smash TV and the on-flight upgrading of wavy onslaughts like Killing Floor. But buildings can block your view of lethal enemies and, as is par for the course in Arcade Paradise, its vigour does not ramp up enough over time. Minute ten of a session plays too much like minute five.

I worry that the game uses its pretence of archaicness to excuse its raggedness. But it makes sense that Arcade Paradise would be sloppy in places. Where another studio might have gotten up to the Zombat with imperceptible hazards or the Racer Chaser with uneventful on-foot evasion and been able to continue massaging their mechanics to health, Nosebleed Interactive would have been using that same time to start another game that they couldn't finish. Their need to scuttle away from each minigame without investing a lot of development resources would explain why the games I can recommend in Arcade Paradise are those that wouldn't have taken a lot of mentoring. I'm talking about the miniest of minigames like Woodgal Jr., which has us darting left and right on a two-lane track, or Attack Vector, where we must shoot down the helicopters that fly at us from one of four directions but can only do so by rotating the turret on our tank.

Of course, Arcade Paradise's entertainment complex is not just a stock room of synthlight kiosks. On one level, it is trying to be an arcade without all the bullshit. The graphics and sound aren't full of artefacts, breakages may be easily remedied, you can save your progress at the booths, and your pocket is an inexhaustible vein of quarters. The patrons disappear on approach, making me wonder, are they ghosts? Am I? Nonetheless, it means every machine is free, and there's no awkward side-shuffling to get to the bathroom and back.

On another level, Arcade Paradise is aiming to emulate what it was really like to visit the arcade, which has it breaking ranks with 99% of other gaming nostalgia trips. We locate the amusements within a space, we glimpse their bezel as we jerk and bonk the joystick and can look away from the CRT. We stalk a jazzy library of affordable pleasure with dim lighting and rationed elbow room. We don't just tap these casks of entertainment in a contextual vacuum but relate to them through Ashley. The machines act as touchstones in the business that Ashley runs, which is itself an escape from their Dad.

One of the most egregious gaffes we make when trying to conceptualise games is that we conceive of them as a pre-scripted set of experiences, entirely transferable from one person to another, but video games are perceived and played by people. Each of those players views the game with unique polarisation and accesses it in a distinct environment. Their experience is an emergent interfacing of themselves, their life, their setting, and the game.

I'm reminded of Patrick Klepek publicly calibrating where video games fit into his life and his children's now that he's a parent. I think about Tim Rogers, a game critic who has perfect recall of everything since he was a boy. This constant flashback affects his memories of games and how he writes about them. His crowning glory is a six-hour video in which he reminisces on the unbreakable tether between Boku no Natsuyasumi, his youth in Kansas and Indiana, and his time stationed with Sony in Tokyo. Arcade Paradise's games are sometimes emaciated, and its humans can evaporate at a touch, but it is mindful that our retro games didn't just exist in a menu. They existed within a personal history. Thanks for reading.

Notes

1. Our Story by Superbetter LLC. Staff (Date Unknown, Accessed January 11th, 2025), Superbetter.
2. Jane McGonigal: Game on with 'SuperBetter' by Peter Hartlaub (March 4, 2012), SFGate.

All other sources linked at relevant points in article.