Joel: Ha - I will add 'Pause' to my cyborg list! What a great idea. But it clearly couldn't be an 'arcade cyborg' as you could not pause arcade games... ;) dmf: As ever, many thanks for the link! Thanks to you both! Chris.

Hey Chris, This is a fantastic anecdote that really captures the unique ethical ambiguities of the arcade coin slot. I myself had many situations where I had to ask if it was appropriate to pay for strangers to keep playing a game with me, and it was always an odd thing to face. As for 'extra strong pockets' - there were few more distressing discoveries than that your coins were escaping down your trouser leg! All the best, Chris.

Hey Chris, I don't think I ever felt any good at pinball, but it was clear that I was at least able to learn the table, and that covered up for my evident lack of skill. :) The greater precision that was possible on the videogames fit me much better, but I always enjoyed the pinball for its inherent chaos. Thanks for your comment! Chris.

Hey dmf, Limits, as you say here, were an important part of the arcade experience and in some ways created the opportunity for mastery precisely by constraining the experience. It is striking to me, as someone who never took an interest in the repetitive grind to mastery that sports entail, that the arcade was one of the few places that I was open to that kind of experience. Videogames today do not engage me in this mode at all (possibly simply because I am older, possibly because the designs are so different). In fact, the governing design frameworks are entirely different: the goals thrown up to players these days come in the form of achievements i.e. ephemeral goals to be ticked off and discarded. These rarely build any kind of mastery, or at least, so it seems to me. I remain faintly horrified when my co-workers in game development have their game discussion around the achievement scoring dimension of their play. As I suggested in The Virtuous Cyborg and elsewhere, achievements risk a stultifying effect on the play of any game, robbing it of its creative character. It is a point I expect to return to in #100Cyborgs if and when I look at contemporary videogame design elements. All the best, Chris.

Hey dmf, I never thought I would find myself defending the virtue of coins, but as you say here, the 'smoother' the transaction, the more easy it becomes to simply leech money. Universities are the last places you'd expect to see this... but alas, the thing that goes by this name is nothing like the thing Kant imagined, and are yet another kind of profit centre, farming either students or research grants. I find it extremely troublesome. Many thanks for the history of AI commentary link. AI was my Masters degree... the thing I learned on that course was that what science fiction called AI had no bearing on the field. In the time since, it has only got worse. Utility, here and elsewhere, overrides all other values - the blight of our times. Thanks again for your engagement, Chris.

Hey Robert, It was a total accident. Obviously the game required us to create a world out of the ancient SIlk Road... it was only after we'd completed building it that we calculated the size - and realised how much bigger than Daggerfall it is! :) All the best, Chris.

Thanks for clarifying, dmf! I'd love to hear from other people on this to get a broader perspective... Although it's tough to get people to comment on blogs these days.

Hey Robert, Thanks for sharing your view! To be clear: it's easy to keep the Welsh names if I don't do anything clever to ensure they are only used for Britannia. They're in the name tables already. It's just getting them 'honest' that's the problem. Knowing that anyone cares about getting Welsh names into the game makes me want to keep them, even if there's a risk of them cropping up in strange places. :) Thanks! Chris.

Hey dmf, Fair challenge! Are you talking about players in the arcade, or in the privacy of their home? I rather suspect the public performance aspect of arcade play helped encourage this emotional control, because we were playing together in a public place. It is certainly not the case that playing videogames with a joystick necessarily leads to this virtue, but the opportunity is there and, at least in my experience of the arcade, the swiftness of the arcade game created a very different rhythm in respect of its frustration that may be more amenable to teaching emotional control than contemporary videogames. Although this serial isn't going to go as far as contemporary videogames (I hope to tackle this later in #100Cyborgs), I feel - perhaps merely as an intuition - that the conditions of the arcade were better suited to inducing good behaviour in its players, precisely because they were shared public spaces and belonged to no one player. In the privacy of your own home, different conditions apply. Thanks for engaging! Chris.