The Lost Magic of the Arcade
Gather 'round kids and I'll tell you a story about the way people used to play video games. Over a quarter century ago, there were these special places called “arcades” and they were the social clubs of the young. Full of dim lighting, raucous noise and stacks of shiny tokens, they offered the allure of a Las Vegas casino; once you were inside you never knew what time of day it was or how long you'd been there, and you didn't care.
People stayed at the arcade for hours pumping themselves up on sugar, hanging out with friends, meeting girls (or guys) and showing off their skills on games like Pac-Man, Donkey-Kong and Centipede. They stood around amazed as the arcade's resident rock star made one quarter last forever on Pac-Man and watched breathless as he kicked thousands of asses in Kung Fu Master. During that Golden Age, nothing felt better than the ponderous weight of a pocket full of quarters and the knowledge that for the next few hours, they'd buy you your own little corner of interactive Heaven.
For some reason, in the mid-80s game manufacturers seemed to run out of creative steam for that first generation of mainstream games, and began saturating arcades with mediocre copies of existing beat-em-ups and shooters. Arcades continued on until the mid-to-late 1990's with exciting new games, but what had briefly been a generation-wide sensation increasingly became a niche-y, specialized pastime. That era of the arcade being a legitimate hangout for young people - like what we saw in Flynn’s Arcade in the original Tron movie - simply died in the mid-80s.
To make matters worse, this uninspired approach also started happening to the plethora of home consoles on the market, reducing consumer confidence in manufacturers' ability to make good games. Atari’s crash took home video games out of the picture for a few years and it took some time for the game industry to pick up the pieces after this devastating failure, but with the release of the Nintendo Entertainment System, gamers, publishers, and developers were once again optimistic. Sadly, it was just too late. Rather than revitalizing arcade gaming, this new console technology rang the arcade's death knell.
The fall of the arcade is a sad tale with even sadder consequences. Today (at least in America) the arcades are nearly gone and gone with them is that unique arcade experience. Sure, with a home console you can lounge on the couch, mere steps from a fridge full of Red Bull and frozen pizza, but where are the lights, the noise, the energy? Where's the thrill of watching some incredible gamer stylishly beat your favorite game? Where's the excitement of anxiously lining your quarters up on the screen to indicate that it's your turn next? Most things can be done at home these days but continuing with the Vegas analogy, even if you have the ability to gamble over the Internet in the privacy of your own home, why would you want to? Arcade gaming is about being there, surrounded by other gamers, talking to other gamers, competing with other gamers, admiring other gamers' skills. It's about learning something called “etiquette” and social responsibility. The anonymity of online gaming has allowed people to act like total douchebags if they want to with zero consequences, but just try questioning someone's sexual orientation in an arcade. You'll be asking for a world class ass-whuppin'.
With the slow death of the arcade came the rise of its successor, the Family Fun Center. Food/entertainment/gaming centers like Chuck E. Cheese and ShowBiz Pizza Place began in the '70s and early '80s riding the wave of the Golden Age of gaming, but as the arcade began to decline, so did they. The '90s saw the opening of places like Discovery Zone Play Place, GameWorks and DisneyQuest that expanded the concept to include things like laser tag, go-karts and miniature golf and though some of these businesses still exist today, many of them have been closed down due to low attendance. Others, like Jillian's and Dave and Busters, have taken to catering to more of an adult audience, offering full service menus and alcohol. In any case, the focus of these places isn't video games—with their bumper boats, billiards, batting cages and skeeball, the idea is to experience a kind of “mini-theme park” or to watch your friends bowl when they're hammered.
The magic of the arcade may have been lost but in recent years, home console makers have been recognizing the importance of that magic and have been going out of their way to recreate it. Their most obvious bid for resurrecting the gaming experience of thirty years ago has been bringing the titles of that era to the console through conduits like Xbox Live. Games like Qix, Altered Beast and Centipede can be now be bought for a fraction of what we used to spend playing them at the arcade and played as long as we want to. It's a start, but bringing back classic games only addresses the nostalgic, “I want to relive the games of yesteryear” urge. It does nothing to prevent gaming from being a solitary, slightly shameful activity, like watching Maury Povich or eating an entire box of Oreos. One way game makers are attempting to solve the isolation quandary is by implementing social tools like competitive leaderboards and voice chat. While these solutions help some—seeing your high score at the top of the board is definitely satisfying—they still fall short. How can admiring your score in your living room compare to gloating about it in public and basking in the admiration of a crowd of lesser gamers? And how can talking trash over a mic to a ten year old kid with his voice modulated to sound like a chain smoker with an electronic voice box ever compare to showing your opponent the eye of the tiger in person?
The company seemingly most committed to recreating the social experience of the arcade is Nintendo. Setting out with the Wii to create an all-inclusive, mainstream gaming experience, Nintendo has been years ahead of the curve in terms of creating both games and hardware that encourage social play. The Wii's motion controller (as well as its controller mats and balance boards) and emphasis on party games reintroduced us to the performative aspect of gaming, making it fun once more to play games with other people and to watch other people playing them. The Wii's party-play encouraged people to congregate in each other's living rooms and made games interesting and acceptable to people who might otherwise avoid gaming altogether. A bit late to the party but no less determined, Microsoft and Sony have recently jumped onto the party play bandwagon by adding the Kinect and Playstation Move to their consumer offerings. These new technologies yet have limited game libraries but feature games with dance and sports themes that are designed to be enjoyed among friends.
In addition to the efforts of the home console makers, makers of MMOs and social gaming companies have done their level best to bring people together, with uneven results. As mentioned before, the issue with online games (and MMOs are a prime example) is that the ability of gamers to hide behind their avatars enables them to exhibit the worst kind of behavior. Although in some cases online games foster community, just as often they encourage the worst kind of assholery and there's not much anyone can do about it. On the other side of the spectrum, social network games like Farmville and Mafia Wars have taken advantage of the built-in communities of sites like Facebook to promote themselves but along the way have made themselves a colossal nuisance. Most of us can identify with firing up our Facebook pages and groaning at the sight of twenty-five Farmville notifications just sitting there waiting for us to delete them. Not only would many of us not be brought together by these pestery little games, we actively avoid them.
The old school arcade is gone and neither the modern home gaming systems nor the newest online games can replicate their particular magic. So where does that leave us? With technology pushing us ever- more toward never leaving our homes, will there ever again be a place or an occasion for us to get together and game? Sony has tried to draw us shut-ins together through the 2008 release of its Playstation Home application. Here gamers can create their own apartments which other gamers can visit and can buy virtual clubhouses for themselves and their friends. While it's a compelling idea, it's still a mere half-step from the virtual world of the MMO and as such, not the ultimate solution.
In the end, we're left admitting to ourselves that at least on the immediate horizon, there's just no satisfying substitute for the old school arcade experience. Perhaps in the future people will gather to game in the oddly antisocial way they hang out in cafes, each person staring at a laptop at their own individual table? Or maybe the futuristic approximation of arcade gaming will be people hanging out in hover chairs staring at digital monitors like the tubby folks in Pixar's Wall-E? Or maybe one day we'll actually realize something like Star Trek's holodeck and we and our friends will be able to able to join up and literally jump into our games? Whatever happens, we should hope that somewhere along the line people remember the joy of leaving their homes, coming together and getting together to rediscover that authentic, old school, arcade-style magic.
