It sounds like you are saying that robots without haptic feedback are useless?
If so that is not quite right. I regularly use computer controlled cutters, plotters and 3d printers. Not any of them have any feedback while they operate really. They are all robots, and they are quite usefull.
Half of their games didn't amount to much more than child gambling. I guess the saving grace is that people weren't there very often. Still I'd be curious to know if there is any sort of research as to whether childhood gambling transfers to adulthood.
Haven't been to Chuck E Cheese's in a while, but I wonder if they've toned some of that down since moving from tokens to (optionally "all you can play" time-based) cards.
Back in my day, the slot machines and coin pusher games served as a lesson against gambling, since they ate all your tokens really quickly and you almost never won anything significant.
I haven’t been to a Chuck E Cheese in at least 15 years BUT I have been to other “arcades”, including Main Event, and the trend for those has been make 90% of the games child gambling to maximize profit. It’s boring for my young children who don’t fully grasp the ticket concept and aren’t entertained by winning points. I remember the games of my childhood being much more about entertainment than they are now.
A better metaphor than gambling is carnival games, the prize return on investment in arcade gaming is systemically low. I've worked at several game companies and never known a single gamer in my life who's been interested in gambling.
The sports community is obviously what's being taken over by gambling. Sports are being so thoroughly defined by and ruined by it that it's weird to think of gambling as a big deal in other contexts. If you try to apply the gambling moral panic to video games it doesn't work because sports so conspicuously shows what it looks like when the slippery slope is real and not just hypothetical.
Trying to see the effects of gambling anywhere but with sports right now is like trying to see the stars when the sun is out.
If by FNAF you mean the game franchise Five Nights at Freddy's, that could only have boosted their popularity. You get the fans of that game who would at the very least go there to see the real deal (minus the killing) as an additional untapped set of customers. The core demographic (parents with young children) won't care about that game one way or another, and if they do have a child into that game's fandom it will only make them more willing to cajole their parents into going.
The causes for their demise are completely based on the economics of maintaining actual animatronic characters.
I'm 44 of they match a FNAF horror themed dave and busters I'm gonna be all over that... I'm not really a FNAF .. per se... or player but the movie was okay..I liked the Nicholas Cage one similar to it better...
The Aura robots at The Sphere in Las Vegas are the current technology.[1] They have full voice recognition, speech generation, and ChatGPT-type models good enough that they can do standup comedy and deal with people heckling them.
A few years from now, there will probably just be a display in a security or maintenance control room to report when one of the Aura bots needs some help.
And some of those bots will probably be running table games.
That's the best interaction I've seen - so many are just GPT piped into a TTS, but this seems to actually be identifying different speakers in the crowd? There's a point where a guy butts in to ask a question and the robot basically says "wait a sec, I'm talking to this person, are you done? Okay, now I'll answer your question, raise your hand." That's another layer of interaction that's impressive and the latency and speech recognition quality is near-realtime. Very cool
Exactly. Their brand is tightly interwoven with the animatronic band, but they haven't been evolving that. With generative AI and improved robotics they could create much more immersive experiences.
They are damaging their brand. Kids have lots of screens at home.
Honestly most kids have better video game rigs at home. Maybe the games with driving rigs, flying yokes, or handheld guns are harder to replicate, but kids get plenty of gaming at home. It’s not the outing it once was.
It’s the end of an era, along with the old floppy disk based control system Chuck E. Cheese restaurants used. Every time I saw the older (pre-remodel) location I used to occasionally visit in SoCal… It was like jumping into a time warp back to the 80s and 90s for me. Nolan Bushnell has effectively outlived his creation.
I had a birthday there in my mid-20s and probably blew $400 or so at the place just giving piles of tokens to my friends to play in the lousy arcade at the Fairfield location (yes, the Fairfield between SF and Sacramento). Someone arranged for the robots to sing me a song. I'm pretty sure that's my most memorable adult birthday. I find absurdity deeply entertaining.
They could have doubled down and invested in some newer animatronics, with voice recognition and more realistic movements, reactions, mobility, etc., to differentiate themselves from other pizza/video games chains. But instead they chose easy, with "big displays." How unimaginative.
the old animatronics were already expensive as is. That's the quirk of being a market targeing children. Children don't necessarily scale as quality increases.
I have an 8-year-old and a toddler and have hosted and attended many a birthday party at Chuck E Cheese and elsewhere. A digital dance floor and trampoline are way better at a birthday party than an animatronic band. Kids love both and each gets them moving and wears them out. An animatronic band wouldn’t even hold their attention for a minute.
I'm surprised that Five Nights at Freddy’s was referred to as just a horror movie - the 2014 game it's based on was a smash hit that spurred many copycats and transformed the survival-horror genre.
Anyway as an outsider I've never seen these things portrayed in movies, cartoons etc. as anything else but creepy. Personally I regarded them as a show of American economic might - I mean:
1. Robots.
2. For entertainment in a family-oriented restaurant.
I’m not sure I’ve ever fully understood Five Nights games. I just thought it’s something kids like for no good reason, like Hello Neighbour, which feels like an incomplete Garry’s Mod level.
Wow that brought back some memories! I knew I had gone to a pizza place with an animatronic band, and it definitely wasn’t Chuck E Cheese. I’ve never been able to figure out what it was.
Chuck E. Cheese was founded by Nolan Bushnell of Atari fame, just 5 years after he created Pong. I didn't expect this connection at all when I first learned about it.
Somewhat related is the The Rock-afire Explosion band from ShowBiz Pizza Place. There is an excellent documentary on the history and some of the fans preserving the technology.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTmhS6hcY-A
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 99.7 ms ] threadOld tech that's only useful for entertainment (like movies) at a distance and still expensive.
If so that is not quite right. I regularly use computer controlled cutters, plotters and 3d printers. Not any of them have any feedback while they operate really. They are all robots, and they are quite usefull.
Back in my day, the slot machines and coin pusher games served as a lesson against gambling, since they ate all your tokens really quickly and you almost never won anything significant.
The sports community is obviously what's being taken over by gambling. Sports are being so thoroughly defined by and ruined by it that it's weird to think of gambling as a big deal in other contexts. If you try to apply the gambling moral panic to video games it doesn't work because sports so conspicuously shows what it looks like when the slippery slope is real and not just hypothetical.
Trying to see the effects of gambling anywhere but with sports right now is like trying to see the stars when the sun is out.
The causes for their demise are completely based on the economics of maintaining actual animatronic characters.
but I like creepy things...
The Aura robots at The Sphere in Las Vegas are the current technology.[1] They have full voice recognition, speech generation, and ChatGPT-type models good enough that they can do standup comedy and deal with people heckling them.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LphOgO5HJHs
For Las Vegas I'm surprised they managed to restrain themselves from making it more chesty.
For now.
A few years from now, there will probably just be a display in a security or maintenance control room to report when one of the Aura bots needs some help. And some of those bots will probably be running table games.
They are damaging their brand. Kids have lots of screens at home.
R.I.P.
I remember playing on a vintage street fighter machine with what was probably a middle school kid. I lost pretty bad.
> In: More screens, digital dance floors and trampoline gyms.
Sounds very appropriate for the era. Everything that has any ounce of character is replaced with their cheaper, more generic digital reincarnations.
It's probably no surprise that an alternative that brings immediate pleasure / curiosity ultimately won out.
Anyway as an outsider I've never seen these things portrayed in movies, cartoons etc. as anything else but creepy. Personally I regarded them as a show of American economic might - I mean:
1. Robots.
2. For entertainment in a family-oriented restaurant.
3. In the 80s.
https://youtu.be/3v6y2pY1pZ0?si=sU3OrRSmR0gXDNPT
The robots are the whole reason you go to Chuck E. Cheese over say Dave & Busters or Bowlero.
It's the entire differentiator.
Yup, it was Showbiz and the Rock-afire Explosion. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rock-afire_Explosion
Thank you!
Chuck E. Cheese still uses floppy disks in 2023, but not for long
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/01/chuck...
(On that floppy disk tip from other article around this week https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40327307)