Week 3 Run: Lives, Continues, and the Arcade Economy

Where "three lives" came from, and what happens to difficulty design once losing stops costing quarters

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8 March 2027

Three lives, a game over screen, a continue that costs another coin: none of it was designed around what makes a satisfying challenge. It was designed around how many quarters a cabinet needed to earn per hour. That constraint outlived the cabinets.

Before the session#

Find a game — any era — that still has “lives” as a mechanic, and ask what job that mechanic is actually doing now that nobody’s feeding it coins.

In the session#

We trace the arcade economy forward: home consoles removing the coin but keeping the lives, then games that finally let the mechanic go entirely.

Afterwards#

Keep your example. It reappears in week 4 as the thing checkpoints replaced.