Wednesday, December 03, 2003
The Man Who Beat the Old "Press Your Luck" Game Show
Link
(From my bookmark list, probably originally from Metafilter.)
I remember watching that show every once in a while. It was the one with those poorly-animated cartoon "Whammies." We (me and my mother) grooved on it at the time, but yeah, it seems rather dumb now. (Though slightly less dumb than the update currently showing on the Game Show Network.)
The basic idea was this: three players answered general knowledge questions to earn "spins," which they would use in two different rounds of play on the "big board." The board was a bank of video monitors around which an outline would flash about six or seven times a second. All the monitors themselves changed about once every two seconds. Each monitor typically had a range of possible contents, but each spot on the board tended to have the same kind of award. One spot was small cash, one physical prizes, and one in particular was a large sum of money (up to five grand) plus an extra spin. Most of the spaces also has "Whammies," little cartoon guys who were the source of all pain in this game.
During the board rounds, each player would use the spins he earned answering questions to "stop" the board, by pressing a button atop his podium. Whatever monitor was lit when the board was stopped, and whatever were its contents, would be earned by that player, and tis monetary value would be added to his total. If the monitor contained a Whammy, he would lose all his earned cash up to that point in the game. A player getting four Whammies during the game would drop out of play. Spins earned by a player could either be taken or "passed" to the next player. Passed spins had to be taken, but if a player with passed spins got a Whammy result on one of them, all his remaining passed spins would be converted into "earned" spins. The money-plus-extra-spin spaces always granted an "earned" spin.
I saw a good number of game shows back then (I was around 12 I think), and I always wondered how the people who ran these things could afford to give away so much stuff. I knew about advertising, and reasoned that they must logically earn more money that way than they gave out. But would it be possible for a truly skilled player to break such a system?
I didn't think much about game design back then. Now I see that whoever designed the games used in those shows probably had to submit a report to the producers telling the maximum cash outlay, and the average, if not more. On The Price Is Right (in its pre-Millionare incarnation), for example, you wouldn't have the big-money pricing games every show, or more than one or two of them (such as Plinko) in a given episode, and most of the games (especially Plinko) had an unavoidable random component. Win Ben Stein's Money had very low cash outlays, really, no more than $5,000 an episode. I have no special knowledge of the game show design process, but I would imagine a game with a higher luck component will generally have larger prizes.
Press Your Luck's flaws were that the game had relatively large prizes for the time ($5,000 possible on a single spin), and that the board only appeared to be random. Now that you have enough background, click the link above for a rather nifty little true story....
Link
(From my bookmark list, probably originally from Metafilter.)
I remember watching that show every once in a while. It was the one with those poorly-animated cartoon "Whammies." We (me and my mother) grooved on it at the time, but yeah, it seems rather dumb now. (Though slightly less dumb than the update currently showing on the Game Show Network.)
The basic idea was this: three players answered general knowledge questions to earn "spins," which they would use in two different rounds of play on the "big board." The board was a bank of video monitors around which an outline would flash about six or seven times a second. All the monitors themselves changed about once every two seconds. Each monitor typically had a range of possible contents, but each spot on the board tended to have the same kind of award. One spot was small cash, one physical prizes, and one in particular was a large sum of money (up to five grand) plus an extra spin. Most of the spaces also has "Whammies," little cartoon guys who were the source of all pain in this game.
During the board rounds, each player would use the spins he earned answering questions to "stop" the board, by pressing a button atop his podium. Whatever monitor was lit when the board was stopped, and whatever were its contents, would be earned by that player, and tis monetary value would be added to his total. If the monitor contained a Whammy, he would lose all his earned cash up to that point in the game. A player getting four Whammies during the game would drop out of play. Spins earned by a player could either be taken or "passed" to the next player. Passed spins had to be taken, but if a player with passed spins got a Whammy result on one of them, all his remaining passed spins would be converted into "earned" spins. The money-plus-extra-spin spaces always granted an "earned" spin.
I saw a good number of game shows back then (I was around 12 I think), and I always wondered how the people who ran these things could afford to give away so much stuff. I knew about advertising, and reasoned that they must logically earn more money that way than they gave out. But would it be possible for a truly skilled player to break such a system?
I didn't think much about game design back then. Now I see that whoever designed the games used in those shows probably had to submit a report to the producers telling the maximum cash outlay, and the average, if not more. On The Price Is Right (in its pre-Millionare incarnation), for example, you wouldn't have the big-money pricing games every show, or more than one or two of them (such as Plinko) in a given episode, and most of the games (especially Plinko) had an unavoidable random component. Win Ben Stein's Money had very low cash outlays, really, no more than $5,000 an episode. I have no special knowledge of the game show design process, but I would imagine a game with a higher luck component will generally have larger prizes.
Press Your Luck's flaws were that the game had relatively large prizes for the time ($5,000 possible on a single spin), and that the board only appeared to be random. Now that you have enough background, click the link above for a rather nifty little true story....
