Looking back on arcades as a whole, I’ve noticed a slow decline in clientelle variation.  From the very beginning, as I’ve mentioned before, I remember having all sorts of folks frequenting Ebeneezer’s, all coming together for one common purpose:  To play the vidya.

While there are certainly many people in a modern arcade at any given time, it seems like not only are there fewer females and non-whites, but the few who do visit these places hang around in little cliques.
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There’s one thing that would piss off an arcade denizen more than anything else:  When someone new came in and started ripping and tearing into the regulars.  Worse still, when they’d brag about it.  Essentially, as it was put to me, you made fast friends or fast enemies, especially when it came to fighting games.

When I started playing Street Fighter II, I was about four or five years old.  Of course, I was awful at first, but the big dogs took me under their wing, probably because seeing a preschool-age girl kicking ass at a serious fighter was hilarious.  Or maybe that’s just why I’d have done it.  Regardless, kids learn quickly and I was no exception.  Within a couple of months, I was the Ebeneezer’s Street Fighter II champion, and with every win, I’d receive cheers from everyone except for the poor sap who thought they could beat me.  It wasn’t until much later that I realized that I had become a secret weapon.

I don’t think I’m alone in this.  Every arcade had someone like me:  The person you’d trick someone into playing with when you’re pissed off just to watch them cry.  Even nowadays, I’ve had the (mis?)fortune of seeing a 300lb. zit-covered behemoth annihilate a muscle-legged little Korean boy at DDR, so some traditions still live on.

Now, to put this in perspective, not everyone who came in would be given this treatment.  It wasn’t some sort of freakishly cruel hazing ritual, to get your ass handed to you by a toddler.  It was specifically reserved for the jerkoffs who would saunter up to the cabinet while someone else was playing, toss in a quarter, destroy their opponent, and then continue from where said opponent left off, all without so much as a ‘Hey, can I play you?’  Worse yet, would be when they either didn’t say a word, and acted like their opponent didn’t exist, which could be topped only with an utterance of ‘Too bad.’  At that point, I’d be carried over and placed on a barstool, handed a coin, and given a reassuring grin.

Those types of people tended not to come back.

Then, there’s the type who stuck around.  They’d come in, be nice, smile a lot.  Maybe they won, maybe they didn’t.  They were usually weirded out by the little one who got picked up by mom at the end of the day.  They sure as hell didn’t play Street Fighter with me.  The struck up conversations with the people they played with.  They made fast friends.  Eventually they even talked to me!

And the community grew.

You know what I miss more than anything else?  Ash trays attached to arcade cabinets.  You never see that anymore.  Ebeneezer’s had several:  Pac Man, Galaga, Space Invaders;  they all had ash trays attached.  I was reminded of this when I went into a cabinet store in Manassas recently, where there was a stand-up Gradius cabinet for sale.  On the front were four screw-holes where an ash tray had once sat, proudly holding the butts of many-a-cigarette.  There were still ugly black stains where someone hadn’t finished putting out their smoke.

Nowadays, arcades are clean almost to a fault.  The carpets are pristine and vacuumed, the screens are wiped down several times a day, and there’s a ‘no food or drink sign’ visible at every turn.  For some reason, this frustrates me to no end.

Obviously, food, drink and cigarettes can damage the cabinets; it only makes sense to be cautious.  On top of that, not everyone smokes, so keeping the air clean is only polite, but in banning these things, something seems to have been lost, and I can’t quite place my finger on it.

We still have noise, flashing lights, fat dudes with sweaty pits (even more so since the advent of DDR), but we don’t have snack counters to chill at, the lights don’t reflect off the smoke, and that particular stink I find so comforting is missing. (continue reading…)