Very little game, lots of scam

Insert coin to play game!
Those flashing words were burned into our minds as teenagers who frequented arcades to play video games, pool and the odd pinball machine. That was 25+ years ago and I am sure my most frequent partner in gaming, Jim Armstrong, would drop his jaw at what arcades have become.
Over the weekend my fiancee and I took her daughter, Vernonica, to the arcade at the mall in Bemidji as part of her birthday party. She and two friends and her brother were excited to be going.
Knowing how much they love to play video games at home I assumed that was the draw at the arcade. How far from the truth I was I did not know until they all received their tokens from the change machine.
They immediately fanned out into the room filled with games. There were a few pinball machines, many video games and many more machines that too me seemed almost like slot machines for kids.
They would drop a token (coin) into the machine and depending upon where it landed or what slot it went through the machine, paper tickets would come out of the front of the machine. The entire "game" if one can call it that, took a few seconds.
Then when they were all done playing their tokens they take the tickets to the front of the arcade and can buy toys that were at best cheap amusement park type prizes. The low end ones were like 10-40 tickets and the good prizes were way up there like 1,800 tickets. For $10 each they could have bought better stuff and more of it at the dollar store.
But Veronica and her friends all had hundreds of tickets by the time they were done and very few of them had played anything other than these ticket machines.
They did play a couple of games of air hockey but other than that the draw was the simplest of games that spit out tickets. There were some really exciting video games but they stayed away from those machines.
When we were teens we played the video games to try and beat the game or at the very least get the high score.
The arcade experience was not what I expected but to each generation their own.

–Until then,
Ken