Reconstruction Vol. 14, No. 1
Return to Contents»
Why the Undead Arcade? / Carly A. Kocurek and Samuel Tobin
Abstract
Keywords Video games, Arcade, Nostalgia, Museums & Archives, Media, History
Figure 1: The Dave & Buster’s in Columbus Ohio features a number of new arcade machines. (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/)
In 2009, Stride Gum launched a campaign to “Save the Arcades,” offering $25,000 to an arcade on the brink of closure through a convoluted contest. Arcade fans could play a retro reboot game on the campaign’s site, then assign points to one of the four arcades deemed eligible for the competition. In the rhetoric of the campaign, arcades are an endangered species, each arcade an outpost of something precious and threatened. Much of contemporary gaming culture revels in a nostalgic pull for so-called classic arcades, and players’ desire to validate through remembrances of games past helps drive and legitimate the nostalgia. Those were, after all, the days. But arcades are not entirely absent from contemporary culture. The same nostalgia that constructs an essential canon of arcade classics also fuels the survival both of long-running iconic arcade and newly opened businesses like the Barcade chain of arcade bars or the similarly themed Emporium bar and arcade in Chicago. Reports of the arcade’s death seem to have been greatly exaggerated, but this does not mean that the arcade culture of the early 1980s has continued in an unbroken line to the present. The game industry has transformed, and so have the arcades. They have become sites of nostalgic longing and player authentication, of entrepreneurial zeal and even of a strange cultural reverence. Today’s arcades, both new and old, seem to occupy a peculiar position in contemporary gaming culture. The arcade is dead – a form long past its zenith, an experience that cannot be recaptured – and yet it lives.
We live in a world filled with the undead, they shamble or seduce in movie posters and televisions screens, on night tables and gaming tables. These revenants, from zombies to ghosts to vampires take many forms, from cool, to funny, to sexy, to terrifying. The undead are the hot (cold?) content of popular media but they are also paradigmatic of its form. All around us the past writhes, the retro, the revivial, the reboot and remix all have necromantic aspects. All across the academy we see death and the macabre: black metal theory and evil media ignite, urbanists and geographers talk of ruins, philosophers animate the inanimate and the archive has been haunted for years. Indeed it is almost 20 years since Bruce Sterling wrote his dead media manifesto, a call for memory work and new modes of periodization and archeology. Raiford Guins gave us “Ms. Pac Man: An Elegy for the Undead” in response, connecting the living dead directly to games. More recently Garent Hertz and Jussi Parikka have invoked Zombie Media, an image of dead media brought back to life through circuit bending, but back to life changed.
Figure 2: In George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) a handful of survivors try to weather a zombie apocalypse in a shopping mall.
This uncanny difference and return is the animating spirit for this issue of Reconstruction. The arcade isn’t dead, or not only dead, nor does it merely continue: It dies and is reconfigured (for better and worse) through practices like circuit bending, collecting, archiving, cloning, music making, preservation, and all kinds of game play. The contributors in this special issue consider the arcade and its lingering impact on popular culture from historical and contemporary perspectives. What does the arcade mean now, and how does that intersect with what the arcade has previously meant? How are we to consider the persistence and occasional resurrection of a cultural form widely held to be vital to contemporary culture while equally widely held to be so far past its prime? And, what are players really saying when they pledge allegiance to the arcades of past and present as mainstays of gaming culture? This issue explores these and related questions through articles addressing museums, bedroom coding, game music, and anthologizing of games both as nostalgic enterprise and as cultural practice.
In "The Midway in the Museum: Arcades, Art, and the Challenge of Displaying Play," Jennifer deWinter explores the tension between museums' curatorial approaches to the collection and display of video games and museum visitors' tendency to treat game exhibits as playscapes. Museums, deWinter argues, attempt to dominate, and inadvertently destroy, the very sense of play that makes games appealing. Looking at historical and contemporary examples of games on display that range from the Chicago World's Fair to the American Classic Arcade Museum to the Smithsonian's The Art of Video Games exhibit, deWinter demonstrates that arcades become "both objects of contemporary play and objects of nostalgia brought about by a continuous sense of vanishing materials that never completely vanish." The arcade in the museum remains a place of pleasure because it resists efforts to produce a sanitized, contemplative place for reflection or education.
Alison Gazzard examines the influence of arcade clones in "The Intertextual Arcade: Tracing Histories of Arcade Clones in 1980s Britain." The popularity of unofficial clones and re-makes of arcade games points, as Gazzard argues, to a number of industrial and cultural factors. Britain's national push for computer literacy, the relative popularity of microcomputers like the ZX Spectrum and the BBC Micro, the bedroom coding practices of those with ready access to home computers, and the rise of computing magazines all contributed to the availability and appeal of arcade clones. These clones provide an opportunity to examine the nature of game code and game mechanics and the way games change when ported from the public space of the arcade to the private space of the home. They also demonstrate the influence of the arcade on home computing practices.
Drawing on arcade flyers and advertisements, Brendan Gaughen considers the extent to which the arcade and console game markets both competed with and influenced one another in "Innovation, Imitation, and the Continued Importance of Vintage Video Games." As the arcade grew less prominent in gaming culture, arcade games remain a point of departure for game designers and continue to hold the lure of nostalgia for players. While arcades and consoles often offer distinct play experiences, game companies often attempted to emulate the most desirable aspects of other forms of play with arcade machines drawing inspiration from home consoles and console companies striving to offer some of the novelty and technological sophistication of cutting-edge arcade machines. Even as the shared experience of the arcade becomes less familiar, it remains a touchstone of gaming culture and a major source of nostalgia, as evidenced by the popularity of MAME cabinets and anthology-style reissues of classic games, which are available for most contemporary consoles.
In “Scott Pilgrim vs. The Veteran Gamer: The Canonization and Commodification of Nostalgia in Anamanaguchi’s 8-Bit Video Game Soundtrack,” Megan McKittrick shows how the music and sound used in Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World: The Game’s function as profitable pastiche. McKittrick looks at how the musicians involved in the project deploy pastiche style to address an imagined audience of nostalgic arcade exiles. In order to do so McKittrick unpacks the complicated and largely overlooked history of game sounds and its role in the formation of player identity, canon, and genre. Veteran gamers find themselves hailed and authenticated through a specific mode of consumption of the nostalgic sounds of games like Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World.
To mark the release of Game After: A Cultural Study of Video Game Afterlife (The MIT Press, 2014), Raiford Guins discusses his work with Samuel Tobin. Guins’s book considers what happens to games that linger after they are sold – passing into obsolescence and transforming into artifacts or collectibles. In the course of this wide ranging discussion with Tobin, Guins outlines his views on the importance and difficulties of doing game history and need for a historiographical approach. Guins describes his understanding of undead media and the afterlife of games. In doing so he makes connections between the macabre, materiality and the museum in the service of developing a practice of game history.
This issue also features an assortment of reviews of events, spaces, and books. Elias Aoude offers a review of one of the United States' landmark arcades, the American Classic Arcade Museum (ACAM) and Funspot; Megan Brown reviews the annual Pinball World Championship; Adriana E. Ramirez presents a review of the short story anthology Ghosts in the Machine; and Ian Reyes reviews Jesper Juul's The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games. While these reviews are diverse and represent a range of perspectives, styles and formats they all deal with play and a kind of loss and recovery, be it historic, ludic or poetic. What we see in these reviews, and indeed across this whole issue of Reconstruction, is the figure of the undead arcade as site of ending and death but also as site of return, remembrance and reanimation.
Thanks to all our authors and reviewers for the work presented here, and also to all the people, including the Reconstruction editorial team and our peer reviewers, whose work behind the scenes has made this special issue possible.
Return to Top»