Ha, I was thinking historically like solitaire or chess or bridge or the like.
The real exception is gambling games.
And I did think along the same lines (in a very minor way) with arcade games. Pinball - where skill let you prolong a game gave way to video games (like pacman or tetris you mentioned), which quickly got too hard to keep going. And it went further when games like gauntlet kept you feeding quarters in a pay to play way.
But at that time, we got atari and nintendo and so forth. Pay once, play for a long time. Kids grew up with this, and parents worried about the cost of a cartridge.
But the current crop of games is free, yet blatantly money oriented. Plants vs Zombies pre-EA vs post-EA comes to mind. Add grinding and then pay to not grind.
Yes, a little rose colored. But in vegas you can actually register as a compulsive gambler and the casinos will not serve you.
The real exception is gambling games.
And I did think along the same lines (in a very minor way) with arcade games. Pinball - where skill let you prolong a game gave way to video games (like pacman or tetris you mentioned), which quickly got too hard to keep going. And it went further when games like gauntlet kept you feeding quarters in a pay to play way.
But at that time, we got atari and nintendo and so forth. Pay once, play for a long time. Kids grew up with this, and parents worried about the cost of a cartridge.
But the current crop of games is free, yet blatantly money oriented. Plants vs Zombies pre-EA vs post-EA comes to mind. Add grinding and then pay to not grind.
Yes, a little rose colored. But in vegas you can actually register as a compulsive gambler and the casinos will not serve you.