For anyone growing up in a seaside town, the sight of arcades and family entertainment centres along the seafront will have been a normal sight.
Weekends spent visiting the beach for an ice cream and a bit of time spent on the penny machines was commonplace, with never a second thought given to the possible implications further down the line.
For people growing up in areas where these sorts of venues don’t exist, the sight of 8 year olds feeding money into prize machines (and even some that look exactly like old fruit machines) might be pretty shocking.
Isn’t that illegal?
It’s not, and I will cover why, but I’m not going to talk in too much detail about the licensing rules for gaming arcades here, as there are is already a dedicated page on this site which covers that side of things.
Instead, this is all about my own personal experience of growing up in a seaside town, having easy access and early exposure to gambling games, and the impact I think it had on me and the people I grew up with.
Growing up in a Coastal Town with Arcades
In Cleethorpes, where I grew up, the seafront is busy with Family Entertainment Centres and Amusement Arcades.
Some of them are unlicensed and so don’t have an over 18s section, others have a license and therefore an area of the arcade is marked as over 18s only, and the odd one or two are more akin to mini slot casinos like the Admirals you see in town centres, so only adults are allowed to enter those.
I was oblivious to these difference as a kid, I just enjoyed visiting and seeing the lights and the games.
I used to love hitting the arcades with my Dad at the weekend. He would give my sister and I a few quid each to break down however we liked and spend on the various different machines there.
I loved the prize grabber and the 2p and 10p machines, but also the video games like Primal Rage and Time Crisis – which had a ‘real’ gun and in later editions even let you duck behind cover and reload by tapping your hand against the gun. My tiny mind was blown.
I’m showing my age here, but the reason I mention these video games that no longer exist alongside the gambling type games that very much do, is because to me, they were no different.
Prize grabbers and 2p machines aren’t actually classed as gambling machines – although the way the line is drawn between what counts as gambling in an arcade and what doesn’t is questionable if you ask me – but you are still risking a very small stake for the chance to win something. The ‘skill’ element argument is ropey in my opinion, but anyway…
What I was never really interested in though, were the fruit machines (this is an old name for a type of slot machine if you didn’t already know).
Yes, you might be shocked to learn that there are fruit machines or ‘fruities’ that kids are legally allowed to play on, so long as the maximum stake is no more than 10p and the maximum monetary prize is no more than £5.
I wasn’t interested in them because they didn’t look fun. They looked confusing, a little bit intimidating, and each ‘go’ was over too quickly.
Clearly then, I was never in any danger of becoming a problem gambler, but I certainly learned about and experienced gambling at a very early age, and was brought up thinking of it as just another leisure activity.
In seaside towns like mine, the arcades were just part of the local culture. It was somewhere else to add to the list of potential places for kids to go, along with the cinema or bowling or ice skating. No one thought any more of it.
Not everyone was like me though, and a few years into secondary school I noticed some of my school friends were playing with much larger ‘bankrolls’ than I ever had.
Kids would come to school with £20 worth of change, spend break time playing push penny and then at lunch try to find somewhere local that would let them use the fruit machines. There was even the occasional bet for money in the playground; who could do the most kick ups, for example.
Some kids were going through £40 or £50 in a day if you counted money won and lost.
My little plastic arcade bag containing £3 worth of 2ps and 10ps and a pocket full of tickets paled in comparison – the equivalent difference between coming on as a sub for the school football team and getting trials at Grimsby Town FC (up the Mariners!).
These kids for whom gambling had become something bigger were also developing a dangerous attitude towards money in one or two specific cases.
One lad would regularly ask to borrow a pound so that he could “win a quid off of…” some other kid, then pay me back and use his own newly won £1 to build his pot up again. There was no consideration for the fact that he might lose the £1 he had borrowed and end up owing me as well.
It sounds silly to talk about it in these circumstances, but fast forward 15 years and that lad is a 30 year old man borrowing £100 to put on a horse so he can pay his gas bill.
It’s the mentality he was learning which is dangerous here, and developing that mentality in your formative years makes it incredibly difficult to unlearn later.
How much of this was down to the individual and how much was down to the kid having easy access to arcades at the end of the street?
Hard to say.
The lad I’m thinking of also had older brothers and their friends perhaps setting him a bad example, but he was a regular on the fruities down the seafront, so it’s hard to argue that they didn’t play a role.
If he hadn’t been allowed in those places as a youngster, would he have behaved the way he did?
Should Children be Allowed to Visit Arcades?
The thing with seaside arcades, is that no matter what you call them or what the law says, children that use them are being exposed to almost exactly the same sorts of gambling games as adults in the over 18s sections.
The only difference is that the kids slot machine has very low maximum stakes and either pays out very small amounts, or pays out in tickets rather than money, which can then be traded in for toys or sweets at the Prize Kiosk. If you have good luck you will win tickets that are worth more than the money you put into the machine, but just like with regular slots, usually you won’t.
The machines look identical though, with all the flashing lights and chiming noises, only these machines are often adorned with child friendly characters like Fred Flintstone etc., which is, arguably, worse.
The thrill of a win is the same, the enticing sounds and visuals are the same, the process of using the machines is the same. Put simply, the kid playing a fruit machine is having the exact same experience as the adult playing the fruit machine.
The coin pusher machines aren’t a million miles away from simple casino games like roulette either; you put a single coin in, and if physics works in your favour, you will get a 1:1 payout or better, i.e two or more coins might be pushed over the threshold.
Then there are the racing games where you predict which mechanical horse (or meerkat, or whatever) will win the race, and get paid out depending on how well the horse you backed does. Explain to me how that is different from betting on the gee-gees?
You could easily argue that these amusement arcades are nothing but a training ground for the gamblers of tomorrow.
Yes, there are other games like air hockey and pinball machines that offer nothing but harmless fun, but they are all mixed in together with gambling games which makes for a bizarre and slightly baffling atmosphere.
In a licensed Family Entertainment Centre, you can find the following amusements right next to each other:
- Low stakes fruit machines
- Air hockey
- Target practice shooting games
- Video games
- Whack a mole
- Mini bowling
- 2p coin pusher/drop machines
- 10p coin pusher/drop machines
- Crane grabber machines
- Punching machines
- Mini carousel
- Cartoon character ride on toys
- Ticket paying slot machines
- Racing betting games
In my old favourite arcade, Fantasy World in Cleethorpes, there is even a kid’s soft play centre inside the arcade, just opposite the over 18s area with all the £500 jackpot paying fruit machines.
Zip Zap Zone – sounds fun, doesn’t it?
It’s also a bit disconcerting for a 6 year old to walk past a grown man kicking the living crap out of a punching/kicking machine, to see if he can beat the top score.
It’s such an odd mish mash of amusements that are all bundled in together, and it makes you wonder why they aren’t kept entirely separate.
Licenses and Game Categorisation
The big question here then, is why these elements are all mixed together in the same place?
It’s all to do with the categorisation system.
The law categorises each machine, and only certain machine categories can be operated in certain venues. You usually only find category C and D machines in seaside arcades, but they do sometimes have category B4, B3, and B2 machines as well.
For example, category C machines are for over 18s only, and they must have a maximum stake of £1 and a maximum payout of £100, while the Cat B4, B3, and B2 machines can pay out as much as £500 on a climbing scale, with stakes of up to £2 a spin.
There are 4 sub categories in the ‘family friendly’ Cat D, all with rules that are specific to the kind of prizes that can be given out. Most category D machines give out non-monetary prizes, like teddy bears or sweets etc., but a category D machine can pay out as much as £5 so long as the maximum stake is no more than 10p, and this is why kids fruities can exist.
So it is the stake amount and the potential prize value that is the main factor in the way the machines are categorised.
As for why the law thinks that gambling 10p to win £5 is acceptable for a child but gambling £1 to win £100 isn’t…. I have no idea. All the machines have an RTP so they are essentially the same thing. It’s bonkers, but the law often is.
When it comes to the venues themselves, an Unlicensed Family Entertainment Centre needs only a license from their local authority in order to operate, and it costs just £300. With this, they can offer as many category D machines as they can fit in their venue.
This makes them incredibly easy to set up provided you have the capital to buy in the machines, and they are technically not gambling businesses at all.
However, if they want to offer category C machines or higher, they need to pay around £1,500 for a proper gambling license from the government, and the category C/B machines must be in a segregated area so that under 18s cannot access them.
Many do opt for this option, as they can attract people who want to gamble larger amounts for more serious prizes, so they become Licensed Family Entertainment Centres.
Now we end up with a proper gambling venue smack bang in the middle of a family entertainment venue, and apart from a swinging gate with an ‘Over 18s Only’ sign on it, they both look almost exactly the same.
Thus, the seaside amusement arcade is born, where gambling games are played by adults next to ‘non-gambling’ games played by children, and where non-gambling games that probably should be classed as gambling games are accessible to kids of any age – provided they are tall enough to reach the coin slot.
Why is this Allowed?
It’s hard to think of another example where things that are legal for adults but illegal for minors are used in such close proximity, or which mimic each other quite so blatantly.
Perhaps arcades are just a leftover from days gone by, when other now seemingly ridiculous occurrences were commonplace. Remember smoking indoors? Kids weren’t allowed to smoke themselves, but adults were allowed to smoke right next to them in cinemas and on buses and pretty much anywhere else they were sharing confined spaces. It seems an obviously idiotic thing to allow in retrospect, but back then it was just the way things were.
Maybe arcades as we know them now will eventually get the same attention and be forced to rethink and rebrand. Would it really be so bad for the kids/non-gambling games to be in one building and the adults/gambling games to be in the building next door?
A more cynical reader might say that they have been deliberately mixed together so that the arcade companies can get youngsters into gambling early and then the adult machines are a natural progression for them.
I’m not sure it’s quite that calculated myself, but whether or not that is the thinking behind it, it certainly can have that effect.
Another interesting question that comes out of this is exactly when kids should learn about gambling. Just like drinking, sex, drugs, and knife crime, they will find out about it eventually, which is why most of these things are taught in schools.
The thinking is that it’s better for children to be well informed and educated about so called ‘vices’ than find out about them in secret and end up getting hurt or getting into trouble.
Lots of things are dangerous if you are ignorant of them. You wouldn’t do your own electrics if you knew nothing about electricity would you, because you might kill yourself. Electricians understand it though, so they can work with extremely dangerous electrical equipment safely. Education is the key.
If children were taught about gambling rather than shielded from it, would we have fewer people gambling irresponsibly as adults? Would more of us grow up with a healthy attitude towards betting and gaming?
Learning About Gambling
Although I can see that the seaside arcade could serve as a gateway for youngsters to get into gambling, I still enjoy taking my own little boy to the arcades and watching him shoot those awesome water guns at the dinosaurs coming towards him on the massive LED screens (things have moved on since Time Crisis… they don’t know they’re born do they?), and hearing him giggle with delight as he swaps his hard won tickets for a jelly sweetie, and giving him a bag of 2ps to put in the coin pusher.
They even have booster steps for kids to use so they can reach the coin slots. That’s nice of them isn’t it?
Am I a bad father? Am I ushering my boy down a path towards a life of gambling? Or am I just a Dad enjoying an amusement arcade with my family, like my own father used to do?
Different people will have different answers, but in my own view, I think he will be just fine. I was brought up to see gambling as nothing more than a bit of fun, and to spend money I could afford on the experience rather than to throw money I needed at a dream.
I will teach him the same thing.