I was watching the reactions of some local "kids" (teens and twenty-somethings) to the games at the arcade which recently opened in town. With one person being the sole exception, they had very little interest in what was there - and there was a good selection! Most of the young'uns preferred to just play billiards or darts. Nobody was playing Ms. Pac-Man, no one wanted to play Asteroids nor Centipede, not even just out of a, "Sure, I'll give it a shot," kind of an interest. They all had this, I don't know, mildly repelled expression on their faces.
But it wasn't just those games, it was things like Skee Ball and air hockey and foosball. "Nobody" wanted to play Dance Dance Revolution, and the small group which I saw try to play it walked away after completing only two tracks out of their three-track music set. They didn't want to learn how to play. No one was playing the FPS, the light gun games, NFL Blitz, the racing games, NBA Jam, the ticket redemption games, nothing expect Mortal Kombat II. Most people just took a "keep your distance and watch; don't try it" approach.
When I talked to some of them about the new arcade and the recently opened sports center (which has similar games), they were all nonplussed. It seemed none of them had fun nor intended to return. I was baffled. How could you not like arcade games?
Then it hit me. Modern games don't want players to "try hard," and they don't want players to fail. The arcade mentality was completely foreign to these young players. The idea that a game would want you to fail after a few minutes was something they weren't used to and didn't like. The idea that you had to practice and get good at a game to get more minutes of playtime per credit seemed to be completely without value to them. (They probably would have preferred to take the in-app-purchase approach to make the games easier by inserting more money.) There was no concept of "you had to beat the game at its own game" in their minds. And the concept of playing a game with "bad graphics and sound" where you needed to use your imagination to fill in the gaps seemed to be an insult to their expectations.
They weren't interested in setting high scores nor facing challenges. They only wanted the arcade games to behave like their home games where you get hours of non-challenging playtime regardless of your skill. That sort of gaming is busy work in my opinion - it's free of challenge, and just something to keep you occupied. And as the games weren't providing it, they saw no reason to play them. They just preferred to return home to their Xbox Ones and their PlayStation 4's or "buy a game" on their cell phones for 99 cents instead of playing a game for 50 cents. I can understand wanting to play an easy game like that to veg out to right before going to sleep, but not during the middle of the afternoon!
There was only one kid there who was interested in games from the mid-90's and earlier, particularly the Nintendo ones. Everyone else looked like they didn't know why they were there. I'm kind of concerned about the future of these game centers.