Crane claw game
I paid $75 for this Pikachu keyring but boy, I earned it Playing the claw machine is not dissimilar to this in its appeal out of every 200 attempts, you win only a handful of times.
Jia Tolentino describes the pull of trawling through social media as a “rat pressing the lever … until I finally catch the gasoline whiff of a good meme”. I tried three, four, five times – feeding the machine over and over, my pulse racing, sweating and nervous-laughing – until eventually giving up. In cinematic slow-motion, the claw picked up Pikachu, only to drop him from its flimsy steel grasp right at the end. Why don’t we see if we can get him? As with heartbreak, the first loss is always the hardest. At first, it was just light-hearted fun and games. That day with Jack, I had set my sights on one plush toy: a small, smiling Pikachu. Why? Not because you’re a fighter, but because you are a nihilist.
#CRANE CLAW GAME FULL#
You know full well, as you put yet another $2 coin into the slot, you will likely be outsmarted by the arcade game. In playing the claw machine, you know the odds are against you.
Using a joystick, you manoeuvre the crane until you swoop in on your prize - freeing it from a sea of unchosen, doe-eyed compatriots - using the claw’s precarious metallic grip. You might know it as the “Claw Crane”, “Mechanical Crane” or “That Thing at Shopping Centres”, but I have come to know it as a thing of beauty.
You know, the arcade game where you have 30 seconds to wrangle a mechanical claw to retrieve a plush toy. It was only until two years ago, walking past the Capitol Square building in Sydney’s CBD, that my friend Jack first introduced me to the only game I have come to covet with the hungry energy of a Real Housewives of Potomac character who has had a little bit too much wine and needs to tell Ashley she’s a bad parent: the claw machine. As a teen, I played The Little Mermaid on PlayStation, but that’s the closest I’ve come to enjoying games of any kind. Anything that requires more than one minute of my feeble attention span is cast aside for the next thing – a video of a lawyer disguised as a cat on Zoom, say, or an errant bit of fluff on the ground.