New Fields: All Ages and Free Play

For years now, we have been getting regular requests for two additional location fields: parents/caregivers want see whether a place is “all ages”; and people want to see what type of payment the place accepts.

Side note: See below (fine if you skip to it) for how we could use your help!

Adding new fields to locations is something that we never do (unless there is a way to programatically populate the data). This is because a new field means that we/you have to populate 12,600 entries (times 2 for two new fields), which is a lot. And it also means the interface will become more busy/complicated. So despite the requests for these tags, we were very hesitant to do it.

The additional consideration was that it’s actually not simple to implement these correctly, and we ended up discussing how best to do it for years (and whether we even wanted to add them). For example, for all ages, some places are all ages until 8pm, or half the machines are in an all ages portion and half aren’t, do we track 21+ vs 18+ (etc.). For payment type, places take tokens, coins, payrange app, many other apps, RFID, or they’re free play at certain times and coin drop at other times, or the entire place is free play except for two machines, ETC. What is the best way to handle all of this??

Note that most of these discussions occurred “publicly” in our Discord, not as some internal developer-only discussion. We are interested in ideas from a wide audience.

Much of our hesitation stemmed from the understanding that attempting to accommodate every single case would add unwanted complications for users and would result in messy data. We needed to focus purely on the core problems. And after all this talk, we think that we were able to distill these fields down to the essence. Will this make everyone happy? No! But that’s ok. That’s not the goal. The goal is to solve the most pressing problems.

So, what do people actually want? They want a simple location filter for “all ages” that excludes the places their kids can’t step into. So we added the value “Yes”. Given that a pure Yes is not always correct, we also added “At Times”. But we still kept a simply binary (?) filter: All or All Ages. If a user filters for “All Ages” they get results for both of those values, but in the details it explains which one is All Ages At Times, and then you can read the location description for further details. For the sake of managing data and seeing which locations have been edited, we also added a “No” field. This field isn’t used at all in filtering or display or anything. There is not enough need to filter for “places kids can’t go to” and doing so - again - would complicate the interface. But if that’s something you really wanted, you could get mostly there by filtering for Location Type: Bar, Bar/Arade, etc.

Payment type was even simpler. We realized the core thing people want to know is: is the place Free Play? Ya know, coin drop vs free play. Given that like 98% percent of places are coin drop in some form, there really isn’t a need to track coin drop. And there isn’t a need to track all the different flavors of coin drop. People, in general, don’t care (although based on map comments people do not like paying via app or RFID card). They simply want to know if a place has an entrance fee and then they can play unlimited games for free in an allotted span of time.

Anyway, so now it’s live. We pulled the trigger, spent a week dialing it in (such as adding tips for what to select, displaying these fields, and so on). We initially populated the all ages field using the location types, which is a good first step and probably gets us 90% there in terms of accuracy and completion. Some location types are very obviously all ages. Some are almost definitely not. And some could go either way (and for some of those, we opted to not tag them at all, so that they can be manually updated by users). And for the Free Play tag, the initial population was based on words or phrases in the location descriptions.

As of this writing, these fields are in an unstable state. They still need a lot of review and editing before they are settled.

If you’ve read this far:

Here is where we could use some help

These four location types are mostly untagged for all ages (they only total like 380 locations):

• Club
• Casino
• Music Venue
• Pool Hall

Filter the map for those types, and go through the list, see which ones are not tagged, and then fix!

This location type is tagged as NOT all ages, but… some of them might be, or might be at times:

• Bar/Arcade

This location type is tagged as all ages, but it may be wrong in some cases (like for cannibis shops and adult emporiums and Bar/Restaurant that actually just bars… with food):

• Shop
• Bar/Restaurant

And yeah, check for places that you know are FREE PLAY and see if they’re correctly tagged.

THANK YOU.

Side note: the creation of these two fields closed out our last two remaining issues in the Github website repo. We’re done! Now no one will write to us asking for stuff, because we officially did it all.

More screenshots: