Quarter circle motions: remembering the role of place and community in the local arcade.
On a particularly tough Saturday thinking of lost loved ones and considering certain life changing choices, I returned to the one thing that is guaranteed to bring me comfort: the closest arcade with a Street Fighter setup. A vehicle to lose myself in hours of mindless, now automated and almost meditative stick slamming.
I was sad to see one of the last bastions of retro style arcades in Cape Town (downstairs of Stadium on Main) in such a sorry state.
This isn’t a knock against the quality of the building or the cleanliness; those are all above standard from what I expect from a greasy, widely accessible arcade and pool hall. Rather, it was the conditions of the machines that I found shocking. It’s saddening to see a costly, tournament level Street Fighter IV Arcade Edition seated cabinet barely playable and left to gather dust.
Around the globe, the arcade centres typically associated with the Fighting Game Community (FGC) are a bit seedy, and that’s fantastic! A machine like that derelict Street Fighter cabinet represents what I love the most about retro and FGC focused arcades:
Locally, as well as in the States, South America, Japan, wherever; you have guys and girls across all race groups, income levels and cultural scenes sharing the same chaotic space because of accessibility and the absence of judgement. All for the opportunity to test their mettle against their friends and strangers alike.
From my own anecdotal experience; arcades that host an FGC were the spaces where you could find a memorable mixed crowd:
The relapsed punk with a cig hanging off his lower lip as he smashed his way through King of Fighters 2012 against a younger teenager not even half his age. That kid very likely spent rainy afternoons after school smashing away at King of Fighters 2003 in the vestibule of his local spaza shop or pool hall; getting his skills up to scratch for a weekend afternoon in the burbs, saving some up a few five Rand coins to get a decent couple of hours of valuable play in.
The young couple in the corner using the ancient Street Fighter 2 Championship Edition cabinet as leverage as they made out and grinded against one another to the muzak on loop struggling to blare through the tiny, tinny speakers mounted on the walls, competing against the helium-filled screeches coming from UFO catcher claw machines and ticket games.
The overly enthusiastic brats who couldn’t afford to play regularly on the more costly setups would also form an instrumental part of the scene; hanging around and cheering at a Tekken Tag or a Street Fighter IV match, in awe of the graphics and gameplay of the huge flat screen setup, and eagerly watching on for the concluding result of the match-up. More likely than not, the loser of the match-up would pass them a few tokens to go waste on the cheaper, older SNK and Namco fighters as he skulked off after having his ass handed to him five matches in a row.
This is the sort of social setup I grew up with in the arcade of my hometown, and more recently in Cape Town through Stadium on Main; the space I would hit in the first couple of years after moving to the Cape, a safe haven after difficult days of feeling out of place and full of self doubt at a new university.
These were both spaces that are ugly, chaotic and mundane, but necessary because of the equalising opportunity they create through both their accessibility and the space for competition they offer. There’s a beautiful low barrier of entry there; it’s not necessarily welcoming but it doesn’t discriminate either. It’s just a space that lets you be. You won’t get accolades for hitting the place up and starting to find a sense of place, but you won’t be dismissed either. The scene is that there is no scene. It’s up to you to take the initiative and make the space work for you on your own terms.
This is what arcades mean to me; I was able to find solace in this space. Beyond my own anecdotal narratives (very likely built off nostalgia), global tournaments such as this month’s Evo 2016 Championship Series demonstrate that this is still the lasting legacy and spirit of the FGC as a whole: people coming together across all sorts of social, cultural and national boundaries to jam Street Fighter.
The common link between these spaces and their continued survival is a machine setup that consistently works and is well managed. At the very base level, those machines and the pool tables between them need basic maintenance; they function as the intermediate thing that bonds otherwise strangers together — the common artefact generating a liminal space in between the racial and economic disparities of the city, the township and the burbs.
This isn’t just a local problem though; retro and FGC arcades worldwide are either closing or being turned into hyper pristine spaces with over simplified “entertainment experiences”. The spaces are just becoming too costly to maintain. In the States and Europe, the trend is moving towards the retro and FGC scene being co-opted by the barcade.
These barcades tend to be aligned with a more white, upper class and millennial crowd; a microbrewery bar offering opportunities to play retro games in spaces that by their very nature (spatial location, targeted demographic) are exclusionary. With a target market that are willing to pay a premium for the experience of playing an arcade in an environment that is comfortable for them, the owners of the barcade are able to mitigate the maintenance cost of the machines. A seemingly perfect setup for the owner and patrons.
Perhaps because of these market forces, barcades may become the last outpost for arcades; a curated space where some form of a community clench on for survival.
However, I personally feel that this would be a tragic loss of place. The people who run and frequent these barcade spaces have forgotten the history of the original arcade spaces that they frequented and fell in love with as kids and teenagers; a truly subversive space where they most likely smoked their first cigarette, took their first hit of hard liquor, fondled their first partner.
Not everyone is an enthusiast for the technology of the machines themselves, but many hold a deep-seated, tacit fondness for the sense of place such a space provided. Perhaps there’s no money in crusty nostalgia. Most of those social complexities are forgotten and ignored because they’re so mundane and part of growing up that they inevitably become misremembered, over simplified or are rendered invisible with the passage of time.
In essence, those who push to re-commoditise the experience of being at an arcade are quick to forget the often very diverse, and sometimes difficult, social milieu that is built into the foundation of the nostalgia for the arcade and FGC experience. They forget the bigger context of what such an experience meant; competition and cooperation as a matter of everyday life, playing across social differences in a space that renders you as equal as everyone else. It doesn’t get any more grassroots then that.
This is the je ne sais quoi that curated and repackaged visions of the arcade experience often fail to recognise, acknowledge and instil in their own reiterative work. As a result, the spaces that are produced ultimately feel like a simulacra. Post-modern consumption at its finest.
It may be my own biased history and sense of uchronia speaking here, but I sincerely hope the arcade in Stadium on Main continues to struggle on; thumbing its nose at the ever growing, posh retail behemoth across the road.
From your position, you may not necessarily need or want such a space, but that shouldn’t preclude such organically inclusive spaces from existing. It may be a safe haven for a teenager desperately seeking a space to escape from society to experiment and find themselves in a space that generates shared moments with others: a shared smile, a competitive spirit and perhaps even unexpected intimacy.
Long live the piss-stained, smoke-stenched, crusty arcade.
