Arcades as the Cathedrals of Our Youth
by E. Christopher Clark | Thursday, May 28, 2009
PHOTO: Flashbacks arcade, Seaside Heights, NJ, 7/22/08 - 2 of 5 on Flickr by goodrob13 CC BY-ND
Utterli, the service I use to record my morning podcast is refusing to take my calls, so I figured I’d just write up a quick post on what I was going to talk about this morning in its place. Today’s topic was going to be “Arcades as the Cathedrals of Our Youth,” and it was going to be a good one. I’m never as impromptu and improvisational when I write as I am when I speak, but here goes.
My friend Leslie sent out a tweet over the weekend about a meet-up she was planning at an arcade on the New Hampshire seacoast. As I’d been geeking out about video games all weekend, I got really excited about this, pitching the idea of this family-friendly meet-up to my own family straight away. It took us a little while to decide that we were definitely going—our weekends get filled up so fast and so frequently that every once in a while we crave a break—but we finally decided that, “Yep, we’re gonna go.”
This morning, thinking about the meet-up, I got around to thinking about past adventures to the arcade. There was a time, when I was young, when the arcade really was a sort of cathedral for my generation. I recall quite clearly afternoons when me and my friends made pilgrimages to arcades, actual pilgrimages, to worship at the altars of X-Men, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Mortal Kombat. I remember begging my parents for change to play The Simpsons game with my brother at the boardwalk arcades we visited most summers. And I can still see myself walking into Funworld in Nashua that last time, a few years back, and it making me quite sad to see how badly it had fallen into disrepair.
Listen: the arrival of awesome video game consoles for the home has destroyed the arcades of the past. I don’t think there’s any denying that. But I would take things one step further. I would say that our obsession with bringing everything into our homes is isolating us and contributing to the development of a culture obsessed with the self above all else. We can play video games in our houses by ourselves, only connecting to friends via Internet-enabled gaming when we really feel like it. We can rent movies from our couch, or download them from our computers, and never have to go to the theater. I feel like lots of the things that we’re getting all excited about now are actually dividing us as a people. We don’t ever have to interact with other people anymore, unless we really want to. And that’s a problem, because sometimes we need to be forced to interact with other people. At least I think so.
Me, I want to get back to going to arcades. I want to get back to hanging out at the movie theater, or the Roller Kingdom, or at the bowling alley. I don’t want to sit in my house anymore.
How about you?
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Comments
E. Christopher Clark says:
I have great hopes for the Wii too, not that I’ll ever be able to afford one. One of the reasons I loved the arcade was that I could scrounge up some change and go play video games, since I never had anything cool in my house to play, or, if I did, my brother was probably using it (he was/is the better gamer anyway, and works with video games today, so I suppose that was all for the best).
Anyway, I’m going to the arcade this afternoon with my family to meet up with Leslie and others. I think we’re decided on the arcade underneath the Hampton Beacon Casino Ballroom, and I think the start-time is 4ish.
Brendan says:
I agree. Jesse Carpenter and I spend about six months going to Funworld every Friday night to play NBA Jam. And I loved dropping by Dream Machine in the Pheasant Lane Mall to play Street Fighter. (I always seemed to get bumped off by the same 4’ Korean kid, though.)
I wish I could afford a Wii too. Too bad for us, I suppose. Maybe when we finish our books.
‘B’
E. Christopher Clark says:
NBA Jam was one of the games from back in the day that they still had. That and NFL Blitz. I was about to play NBA Jam before I decided to go and get my ass kicked playing Marvel vs. Capcom by some punk teenager.
Actually, it was fun despite the fact that he kicked my ass. I’d started out playing by myself and it was actually more fun once I had someone to play against.
Yes, I will definitely be getting a Wii once I’ve sold a million copies. I’ll be getting a lot of things.
Jeremy Couturier says:
I could not agree with you more. Arcades seem like a long lost memory to me now but they were really something special back in the day. They now seem like old west ghost towns, filled with memories of years past and badly aging footnotes in gaming history. Kids don’t know what they are missing today as X-Box live can never measure up to the original arcade experience of yesterday. Still I have hope as the Wii is creating a communal experience into our homes with user friendly, arcade like games and concepts.