Arm Wrestling Machine Recalled for Breaking Arms

Lucas123 writes "After three players broke their arms while wrestling with a Japanese arcade machine, the manufacturer promised to remove all 150 of the mechanized appendages. Said game maker Atlus' spokeswoman: "The machine isn't that strong, much less so than a muscular man. Even women should be able to beat it.""

Comments

We had one at work

[future assassin]

My boss bought one and it was stored at one of our stores. We'd have customers who thought they were all tough use the machine and do some damage to their arms. I tried it a couple of times and had some seriously sore shoulder for a week. If you are out of shape or drunk you will hurt yourself on the machine if you try too hard or if you up the strength level of the machine.

theory and practice

[l2718]

With a reply of "the machine is not that strong" it sounds like the engineering was done on paper. It doesn't take that much force to break an arm -- it's a question of torque more than force, and I'd bet the machine has plenty of leverage.

Violent video games

[jsse]

I remembered we had a boxing video game in a local gameshop. Players' punched on a padding sensor and the strength would be measured, and the screen will respond accordingly.

The game was just fine until one day accident occurred. As a matter of fact, this was not the fault of the game design itself. A smartass attempted to hit the padding with a jump-side-back-kick with spinning, and missed, and broke his non-kicking leg as it was landed on the wrong place (well, as a witness myself I must say I'm not so sure whether he had planned any landing afterall).

Needless to say, the game was recalled for 'causing violent accident'.

Violent video game is OK as long as the players don't attempt to hurt themselves in most embarrass ways.

BTW, below is the no-full-page-ad of the headline story:
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?com mand=printArticleBasic&articleId=9032180

If you're too tall or too short...

[MMaestro]

The machine can twist your arm up pretty badly. I once saw and tried one of these machines and I felt like my arm was being torn out at my shoulder. I'm 6'4" and since the machine was practically designed for people a whole foot shorter than me, my arm was in a pretty bad position (since I tried to play fairly and keep my elbow down on the pad).

Worse still, if a player is shocked by something (the sudden force of the game or your friend decides to drop an ice cube down your shirt), since the mechanical hand "grips" your hand with its thumb (assuming you held it properly), you can seriously mess your arm up if you try to pull away suddenly.

Re:Semi-karma whoring

[mcmonkey]

Are there any pro arm wrestlers (hah)/phyicists/smart-dudes that can comment about a good arm-wrestling strategy?

Easy. Lifting your elbow up provides an advantage through leverage. AKA cheating. Next time your buddy gets his elbow off the table while arm wrestling, kick him in the nuts.

Re:Strapped on?

[MMaestro]

The player's arm isn't strapped to the machine, but its not like you can simply let go. The mechanical arm is pushing down your hand and assuming you were in the proper position (elbow down on the "table", hand gripping the opponent's hand) theres no straight-forward motion of letting go.

I see her point too, though

[Moraelin]

I'm a male, but I can see her point too.

The only problem is that, as the saying goes, "there are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics." Where there is a hideously large variability in the sample, _only_ comparing averages is at best misleading. There's a reason why, for example, in science and engineering you don't just calculate the average of the data you measured, but also the error bar.

Plus, most people who bring up an argument along the lines of "on the average X are better at Y than Z", will proceed to use it along the lines of "therefore all and each X are better than all Z". Or some equivalent redefining from average to one member, like:

1. therefore I'm better than you

2. therefore we should only hire X

3. therefore it's ok to pay Z less for doing the same job and meeting the same goals/quotas/deadlines/etc

4. therefore some ridiculously non-challenging task is (or should be) an X-only job

Etc.

E.g., as an extreme example of 4, there's a whole horde of machos arguing that a woman shouldn't ever be allowed to join the army and carry a 6 pound assault rifle, because women are on the average weaker. Never mind that even a couch-potato of either sex can jolly well use one, and that the whole point of the army is to drill you and train you into the shape they want you, even if you hadn't moved more than from the couch to the fridge in your whole life before.

So I can't honestly blame anyone who's weary of having such averages shoved in their face.

Averages have at best a trivia value most of the time. In any given situation you're dealing with individuals (e.g., if you actually need to hire someone strong) or with the whole gauss curve (e.g., if you want to make such an arcade machine which doesn't break the arm of someone on the far left end of the scale.) Trying to reduce it all to an average is, at best, bad science, even if you don't have some supremacist agenda.

Even taking your skin colour example, just the average is useless in just about any conceivable practical situation. Even if you were judging the potential market for sunblock or tanning beds there, you have such variables and market niches as:

- white western-origin people living in Africa or viceversa. Unless you mean actual racial profiling, someone could "hail from West Africa" only because their white portuguese ancestors settled in a trading post there in the 1600's.

- native populations such as the Khoisan, which have quite a range of skin tones, some fairly light

Etc.

Yes, I know what an average is, but you don't actually deal with only the average for any practical purposes.

So I too would be weary of people pointing out such misleading averages left and right and then retreating into "I'm just pointing facts." A "fact" taken out of context, or used in the wrong context, can be as mis-leading as an outright lie. Unless you've found some problem where the average alone is relevant, that is.

Re:I see her point too, though

[orphiuchus]

I'm sorry, but I'm a US Marine(in the infantry) and I just have to say that you have no idea what you are talking about. You don't go into combat carrying just a 6-pound rifle(actually, its about 3 pounds), generally a combat load includes your flak(armor), your kevlar(helmet), no less than 6 full mags, your day pack which can weigh up to 40 or 50 pounds, plus any other random bullshit they make you drag along. In addition to that, in a 4 person fire team one person has a 203 grenade launcher, one has a SAW(which is a true bitch to carry all day with 1000 rounds of ammo), one has a extra barrel for that SAW, and the point man is the only one actually carrying just a combat load. The physical demands of combat are far beyond what you can even imagine, but just to get an idea, go wrap yourself in 60 pounds of junk then try to run 100 meters dropping to a prone every 10 feet. Sprint like hell when you get up, and hit the dirt in the time it takes you to say "I'm up, he sees me, I'm down", and see how you feel at the end of it. Are you starting to see the picture? Nobody is actually in shape for the kind of physical stress that combat puts on a person, you simply put out all you have and hope its enough.

Re:lol

[Mushdot]

Maybe you are thinking of this one? You stick your finger up someones backside!

Re:even women?

[pnewhook]

I think your bench press numbers are a bit unrealistically high. The guideline I've always heard was you should be able to bench your own weight (that should be fairly easy if you are fit).

Your 700 lbs comment is too high. Keep in mind that the *world* record for benching 700 lbs was only broken in 1985, so to expect that 700 lbs is now some sort of minimum standard for the average guy is a bit unrealistic.

Take a look at this chart: http://www.criticalbench.com/sportstraining.htm . The highest bench presses for American football players is only in the 300 lb range.