> Look at video games, [...] I mean they aren't even games anymore. They're just metrics-optimized psychological-trick machines to extract the most money from you $1 at a time [...]
I don't think so, and I used to spend a lot of time in arcades. For one thing, everyone had to pay the exact same amount to play. Good player, bad player, whatever. There was no "free tier" to get you hooked before things suddenly got much harder, and when they did there was no way to pay more to make things easier (though toward the end some games did let you continue by pumping in more tokens). Every game was also self contained. There was no persistent state that you were in danger of losing if you didn't keep checking in day after day, week after week. Fortunately, the games were also cheap. Even when I was really poor, I could afford a dollar for several tokens that were enough to play the games I liked just about as long as I could stand. Hour-long games of Battle Zone turned into all-afternoon games of Joust. I could turn a game over to someone less skilled, go back to my apartment, eat lunch, come back, and pick up again before they'd managed to exhaust the lives I had accumulated.
Arcade games were certainly meant to be enjoyable, and to keep you playing, but they were nowhere near the dark-pattern psychological minefield that modern games - especially mobile games - often are.
I was thinking more about the late 80s to the early 90s.
Games usually were designed with an easy first level and a big ramp-up in difficulty, and yes, you could pay for continues.
No free tier of course, arcade owners certainly didn't want their machines being squatted by non-paying players, but the easy start was definitely a hook, and they definitely played the sunk cost fallacy. After you put in so many coin, you don't want to stop there right? You can put in lots of coins if you are not careful. They clearly solved the "play for hours" issue too, all games I knew had an ending after less than an hour, and you had to be really good to get there without continues.
And sure, the games were meant to be enjoyable, but so are the mobile games. The only significant difference is that you own your phone, so you running the game costs the publisher nothing. Arcade cabinets are expensive machines and owners don't want you to keep playing if you are not paying, so they have to balance their settings so that you don't stay too long on a single credit, but at the same time, make sure you want to come back for more. Mobile games only have the second requirement.
Of course, only talking about video games, arcades often have prize games that are borderline gambling too.
The trend in modern arcades seems less predatory though. You can get 10 minutes of game play for a credit no matter how skilled you are, as long as you select the right difficulty. There is less of the "get hooked on the first level and spend all your coins" attitude. The counterpart is that you won't play for much longer if you are really good.
> I was thinking more about the late 80s to the early 90s.
Then you're talking about a time when arcades were already past their peak, facing competition from consoles and PCs, forced to invent or refine some of these dark patterns in a declining market.
So when you asked whether the description of games today also applied to arcades you might have meant those arcades, and I don't deny that your impressions are real or accurate, but I stand by my claim that the description does not apply to arcades in general. When you include their heyday, the majority of arcades that have existed did not have much in common with the kinds of games we've been talking about.
Did you just describe arcades?