April 15--Everyone knows that you're supposed to lose at claw-style arcade games.
It's a well-known truth proven time and again by hopeful players who insert a dollar, maneuver the arrows, then press the red button and watch the metal crane lower to grab a stuffed animal -- sometimes even lifting it for an exhilarating second -- before dropping the toy and leaving the player in heart-pounding disappointment.
Everyone knows this, or so I thought, until my 3 1/2-year-old daughter discovered the claw game at Pizza Palace, our local pizza parlor in Elmhurst.
At first Gracie thought it was a machine that sells toys. On a lunch date with my husband, Shawn, she begged him to put in a dollar so she could have one of the brightly colored animals piled in a heap inside.
"It's a game," Shawn recalled saying, thinking it could be a great way to start introducing the concept of loss. "You have to win it, and it's really hard. People almost never win at claw games."
Except that they did win. After Shawn controlled the buttons with Gracie standing nervously at his side, they scored a cheap, circular blue dog on one of their first tries. Gracie was elated and convinced that Pizza Palace is the greatest restaurant on Earth.
Her luck didn't stop there, either.
Subsequent visits to Pizza Palace yielded several more toys -- all nabbed within the first dollar or two. And the streak has continued on claw games that Gracie spots now almost everywhere we go: Wal-Mart, the grocery store, her friend's Pump it Up birthday party.
The situation has left Shawn and I scratching our heads about two things. First, have arcade games changed since we were kids? We swear that as children, we were heartbroken more often than our happy little gambler with a coin purse.
And, more importantly, how are we ever going to teach Gracie how to lose gracefully when we just keep winning?
It felt like I hit the jackpot when Ivan Voss, games manager at Six Flags Great America in Gurnee and an arcade industry expert, confirmed our hypothesis.
Since the late 1990s, Voss said, the arcade industry has made a push to make games easier to win. It started with candy-claw games, which allowed players to insert 50 cents and win a Tootsie Roll every time. It's since evolved to larger games, like the claw games Gracie plays.
Great America has claw games in each of their arcades which are named, appropriately enough: "Instant Winners." In the last five years, the theme park has also added games in which younger children are allowed to keep trying until they succeed and get a prize. These games are called "store games," because the park sets the price of the game at what it wants and needs to make on the prize, as if a customer were just buying a toy from a store.
"We battle, basically, the reputation of everybody thinking we're out to get everybody," Voss said, explaining the shift. "It's more about the parent than the kid, to tell you the truth ... if they can walk away with the thing in hand, they feel a little better."
This fascinating window into the arcade world made me even more eager for advice on how to teach Gracie to lose. A toy chest full of claw game toys is not exactly good practice for her first crushing defeat when she's old enough to play soccer.
Judy Petrushka, an outpatient therapist at Advocate Good Samaritan Hospital in Downers Grove, said there is value in teaching children to accept defeat because it helps them to have self compassion -- a characteristic more important than self-esteem.
Winning can lead to high self-esteem, but that doesn't translate into a strong sense of character that keeps trying when things are not working in our favor. Losing, on the other hand, helps children to practice experiencing difficult feelings, and to communicate about them and to find a way to move forward, she said.
"We want to help our kids say, 'Sometimes we don't win, and sometimes I'm just learning, so that's OK. I had fun with my friends,'" Petrushka said.
Thankfully, as with all games of chance, our luck eventually ran out. During a recent visit to Pizza Palace, we told Gracie we'd play with the change at the bottom of my purse and that would be it.
When she didn't win, she cried so hard she could barely breathe, much less eat her pizza. She begged us to ask the bartender for more change, but we explained that life doesn't work that way. Sometimes you lose and run out of cash. Gracie vowed to never play a claw game again.
A few days later, though, the prize for our approach came from Gracie's preschool teacher, who greeted me with this at pickup: "Do you know what Gracie's favorite restaurant is? Any restaurant with a claw game," the teacher said.
"But," she added with a smile as Gracie looked up proudly, "It's OK when she doesn't win. She's a big girl."
vortiz@tribpub.com
