Preface & Index

Arcades are semi-unique in that they are both communities defined by their space and that the space is the main object of discussion. The architecture of a modern American arcade is very different from those of the 20th century. Those locales were originally designed by outsiders managing the architecture of the discourse around profiteering from the public with small media attractions as the product, while as a general rule modern arcades are spaces reclaimed by community members who are in one way or another devoted to that community. This distinction is important because it means that postmillennial arcades, when overseen by insiders, reflect the tastes of the discourse in their space. Like a church for video games, these areas are an influential part of their discourse that help define the aesthetics and values of their communities just as much as they are created by them.

The material culture reflects the normative culture. How the space is used is paramount to understanding the individuals and power structures within it. Within this study I investigated four specific locations in Ohio, gauging their authenticity in the eyes of the discourse, their demographics, how their space was used and what their ultimate connection to the different communities was.

Authenticity matters. Because the space plays a role in defining the values of the community, what really constitutes a legitimate arcade in the eyes of their audiences is an essential part of reading these spaces and the people around them. The arcade community avoids inauthentic spaces as contrary to their values. The Cincinnati Cinemark "Starcade" at the right is not a part of these values. It is a small, cramped space with only a few games designed to profit from consumers through its token system without facilitating a community as an actual arcade would. It is not recognized as having authenticity, and that makes it irrelevant to the discourse. If arcade goers do not value the space, the space is not a part of their interaction--thus, what may be billed as an arcade by its management or advertisers is not necessarily an "arcade arcade" according to community members.

This authenticity-based divide between what is marketed as an arcade and what actually constitutes one is integral to understanding the discourse because it brings to light a greater conundrum. What is and isn't arcade culture is not always clear because arcades are not one discourse. The spaces comprise groups of individuals with some overlapping values, but one group is unlikely to identify with another despite sharing the same space or a perceived connection by outsiders. Thus, another goal of this project is to define not just the spaces of Cincinnati and their communities, but also what constitutes arcade culture.

Although experimental, my approach is to do this with the rich media format of a web log. Arcades are a naturally rich media in their own right, the experience of arcade culture is framed around a visual medium, and just as blogs are a very recently emerged alternative media in academic writing, arcades are a relatively new object of research. The rules and mode of style that should comprise an academic blog is not clearly defined at this time, but it seems appropriate to treat a new object of study with a new medium of research. My intention is to use the different format in such a way that the individual pages can be digested in parts, in their entirety or on their own merits without having read preceding articles.

Index

Preface & Index

October 20, 2013: GameWorks

November 1, 2013: Dave & Busters

November 3, 2013: "The Place" Retro Arcade

November 22, 2013: Arcade Legacy

November 22: Arcade Legacy

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662 Cincinnati Mills Drive, Cincinnati OH (Cincinnati Mall)
Landline phones today are unmarketable. They aren't portable, they can't send texts, browse the internet, take photos, interact with social media or make free long distance calls. The idea that this is trying to sell one fourth of what a phone in 2013 ought to do is very difficult to overcome. Similarly, the crisis of the arcades is in its simplest terms that they do not sell as standalone products. Arcade hardware is now obsolete and not superior to what can be bought at home. The revolution of online play and voice chat has made face-to-face contact less appealing, and thanks to the likes of MadCatz and Hori even authentic arcade sticks can now be bought and configured for home consoles. From a technical perspective, the most an arcade can give you over its living room equivalent is mild discomfort from standing in front of a cabinet for hours on end.

What an arcade can bring to the table is sensory. Face-to-face competition and cooperative play are not unique to the arcade, but they are easier in this environment than at home. As a form of historical reenactment, arcades also recreate a space that would otherwise not exist and preserve its cultural memory for succeeding generations. These are not obvious aspects to the new customer base however, and instead come as secondary benefits of joining the discourse. The primary product is not well defined in the current period, and like other arcades, Arcade Legacy is trying its hand at capturing an audience. Just as The Place became more desirable through hosting console games as well as home games, Legacy is doing its own take on the idea. Instead of just the newer consoles, with a larger budget and more room to house the games Legacy is also bringing in Dreamcasts, Nintendo 64s, in addition to the Xbox's contemporaries, hooked up to several tables of television sets that all come as part of the deal when paying your entry fee. Legacy also does double duty as a grassroots video game and collectibles store, selling both recent games like Pokemon X & Y as well as older works like Castlevania and Chrono Trigger. By fusing all these disparate aspects, Legacy has worked on simultaneously reviving both the local arcade and the mom & pop game store that GameStop buried.

The introduction of those home console systems has a consequence that is difficult to anticipate. There was once a very distinct divide between gamers who played on video game consoles at home, with the names of Nintendo, Square Enix and Sega driving their world, and those who played in arcades with Capcom, Konami and SNK games. The divide was less so for the senior members of the arcade community that started out with Donkey Kong and Frogger, but for the 90s and early 2000s players the line between what is arcade culture and what is console culture used to be apparent and is now dissolving. At what point do we draw the line between authentic arcade and not-arcade? If an entry fee venue were to stock game consoles alone it wouldn't be considered authentic by the community, but how many cabinets equates authenticity? This question is integral to discussing another aspect of the discourse, the Fighting Game Community or FGC and its competitive circuits. Although originally born out of competitive Street Fighter, and that franchise has remained the driving force behind the FGC, today it also encompasses other arcade games like Marvel vs Capcom, Tekken, Dead or Alive, Soul Calibur, and most tellingly of all Super Smash Bros. Of all these names, SSB is the most out of place. Super Smash Bros. was originally born on the Nintendo 64 console, played not with arcade sticks and buttons but a trident-shaped controller housing several face, shoulder buttons and an analog stick, all of which was succeeded by the GameCube's more refined PlayStationesque controller. The means by which gamers interact with their media is recognizably different. Arcade goers have derisively looked down on console controllers for years as "gamepads"--the skilled and enthusiastic use of an arcade stick in tournament play, where "bring your own controller" rules are commonly in effect, is arguably one of the most important points in establishing ethos for members of the discourse. Bringing a gamepad to a tournament is looked down on for perceived lack of reliability, inefficiency in carrying out characters' movesets, and a sign of someone who was introduced to the game not through arcades but through home consoles and online play. It is not impossible for community members to find recognition using gamepads, but it is looked down upon, and there's a lot of "I told you so" going around whenever someone has to replace a broken gamepad during a tournament. Sticks are durable, reliable and most importantly of all respected.

So how is it that Super Smash Bros., a series that was born on the N64, lived through the GCN and then brought to the Wii, and now soon the Wii U and 3DS, is now gaining acceptance among the discourse? Thanks to the influence of SSB Melee the GameCube controller is the competitive standard for the Smash community, and will likely remain so through future installments. Smash already had its own tournament scene in the Apex tournaments, but at EVO 2013, Melee was played alongside the other big name games like Street Fighter IV and Marvel, in the process drawing heavy publicity for raising over $90,000 to support breast cancer research. The story only evolved from there, when Nintendo employees attempted to shut down both the stream and the Smash tournament, were forced to retract their demands by the resulting press scandal, and Melee went on to become the most watched fighting game in EVO's eleven-year-history. Super Smash Bros. is now one of the most important games in the FGC and yet most Smashers don't identify as part of the FGC, and vice versa. The Smash community still runs its own tournaments, but now Street Fighter and Tekken players are looking into SSB and an interchange between related but separate discourses is taking place. Already Melee is being talked about as potentially returning for 2014. This is the most recent in a gradual shift in tone situated around Smash, with a key preceding point being a 2012 interview with Tekken producer Katsuhiro Harada in which he encouraged gamers to "look more open-mindedly at each other's games," with particular emphasis on Super Smash Bros. after his own experiences in watching tournament videos and playing the game for himself.

For Legacy the conflict of identity as part of the arcade community versus the Fighting Game Community versus the Smash community hits home because it stocks more fighting games than any of the other three authentic arcades in Ohio. Thursday evening is fight night here, nominally beginning at 5PM but in practice beginning at 7PM and lasting all the way up to closing time at 1AM. Multiple Street Fighter cabinets, Mortal Kombat and other tournament-ready games line the arcade area. The transition out from the brightly lit mall area into the deep darkness of the arcade is palpable. The Place did a lot to recreate the experience, but Legacy is the location with the actual real estate necessary to be a 90s mall arcade. They're far from the only kind of game in the house, but between the candy cabinet Super Street Fighter IV and original SFIII cabinets they're definitely the most visible. Like at The Place, everything is in free play mode with the coin slots left in as decorations, or on games like Dungeons & Dragons: Shadow Over Mystara a credit button's been installed to add lives with each press.

Other genres have piggybacked on Legacy's success. Old school pinball is here too, along with Guitar Hero projected onto a massive canvas at the back of the location. In part because of its tournament play, and also because of the establishment's role as a traditional game store where obsolete media like Super Nintendo cartridges and PlaySation 1 games are sold, the demographics are much younger than The Place. Children and their unfortunately dragged along grandmother have the run of Guitar Hero, while tweens struggle with Mortal Kombat and older youths mill about the shoot-'em-up section. Legacy is more focused on newer games than preserving history or novelties, but it does have a fare share of retro games in Tetris, Punch-Out!!, Pac-Man and X-Men. The location's soundtrack is an eclectic mix of instrumentalized Japanese pop from fighters and the pounding speakers of the DrumMania rhythm game.

The peak hours are at late nights on weekends, Thursday through Sunday. The venue is open until 1:00AM on three of those nights for good reason. Children tend to gravitate toward whatever their parents play if supervised, while couples sometimes choose Legacy as a date spot. Around 6:00PM is when the crowds gather, with a relatively even turnout in diversity. Ironically,the younger audiences drawn in by console games gravitate heavily toward the simplest of the arcade's cabinets. "This game's so stupid!"--the Mortal Kombat kids are flaky, and quickly jump over to Arkanoid when they can't puzzle things out; others stick by the light gun predecessors of current First Person Shooter design, sniping polygon airplanes. Movie properties are unpopular because of the foreknowledge they demand, while complex games like Dungeons & Dragons or Street Fighter are daunting to those who don't have older players around to show them how to not make a fool of themselves. The arcade's role as a public space, where oneself is on display, is most visible here.

The defining point of the discourse lies within plain sight; at every arcade that I have visited, the most popular machines are the ones that allow players to play against each other. Not just seeking the highest score, but actively competing with a human being for a finish line, a point goal, or to wipe out their opposing health bar. More than anything else, players wish to play against other players. This virtual exchange of blows expresses a unique form of expression and communication between people. Watching and reacting to a competitor breeds a special relationship. Games act as a medium of speech within the discourse. Because of the combative and often spectacular nature of these arcade games, tentatively I want to approximate this as an expression of warrior culture and an enduring, generations-long instinct for the ritual passing of violence between peers, but this viewpoint is stymied in a tradition of masculinity. Arcades are traditionally thought of as male spaces, but the new arcade is emerging in a time when 45% of all gamers are female. The idea of a nongendered warrior culture of competition is not unprecedented, but the transmitting of it through arcade media is something that has not been widely accepted. These places are a unique means of cultural transmission between individuals and groups which promote communication through the medium of competition. The general values of the discourse are of the space as serving the community, of the money spent returning to the community, of authenticity as the marker of social acceptability as demonstrated through skill, equipment and supporting action, and the ultimate international language of the discourse is through the expressive act of playing the game.

November 3: "The Place" Retro Arcade

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4069 East Galbraith Road, Cincinnati OH
Walking into The Place. the twin corridors of coin-op machines recall one of the arcade sets from The Wizard. I believe this feeling attests to an inherently more relaxed atmosphere. This is not the kind of thing you would say to one of the employees at D&B. That arcade was staffed by minimum wage employees in blue shirts and part-time student workers bussing tables; The Place is overseen by a husband walking the aisles and his wife watching the counter. The first thing I saw walking in was a toddler, leaning over a babygate installed where the counter would open up into the arcade proper. There's no company protocol in this space.

It's not quite like the glory days that The Place is trying to recreate. The previous arcades used a card reader model to drive profits, this one relies on an entry fee system. You buy time here instead of games, and while the quarter slots exist, all of the machines are locked in perpetual free play mode. The Place is a nine-year-old's dream, or it would be if the nine-year-olds of today still went to arcades. Most of the machines present are still in their original cabinets. The back of The Place is dominated by paired Daytona USA racing machines from the 90s, linked together for multiplayer and encapsulated by racecar-shaped plastic hulls. They're dwarfed by the huge numbers of the same game stocked at D&B, but somehow I don't see enough people anxiously fighting for a turn at Daytona for those huge numbers to be necessary. Nearby is an original Gauntlet cabinet from 1985, its controls sprawled out like a diorama unfolding around the screen. Not everything is so fortunate--Tekken II is crammed into a generic, unpainted Atari cabinet--but for the most part The Place reads like an interactive museum of arcade history.

The soundtrack of an arcade is very different from the home video games of today. In modern times we have sweeping orchestral soundtracks written by world famous, classically-trained composers and progressive rockstars, which dominate the atmosphere and the sensory experience of the game. But arcades have always been a much more plural experience. Tekken 2 is one of The Place's most popular games, and standing at the cabinet it's not just Tekken 2 that you're getting. A whole world of different games, each singing its own tune and string of sound effects bombards you. The Punch-Out!! machine near the very back of The Place is audible all the way from the front door. Galaga's level music will slip into your ears while you're playing The King of Fighters. It's like a pixel jungle of different beeps and murmurs mingling together on the arcade floor. You wander between machines trying to figure out where that one sound is coming from, and it gets you playing that game when you find it. Try opening three YouTube tabs with a different game being played in each and a fighting stream of your choice, and you'll begin to approximate the experience. This form of audio marketing once drove the success of small game companies, but stripped of its original context it's akin to having library books narrate themselves to you from their shelves.

While it's exciting to find an arcade recreating this kind of ancient history, not everything is sunshine and rainbows for The Place. The arcade is plagued by advertising issues. A small pool of regulars with very few new faces makes up the majority of the business that The Place does, and while the doors stay open it's only from Friday through Sunday. This isn't to say that new people don't show up. Arcade manager Cary had seen people come three and four hours away to visit The Place, staying in hotels so that they can come to the arcade and play all day long. Some people bring their whole families. More locations like it are springing up, but there's a subtle distinction in the minds of the players as to which arcades have earned their authenticity. "Real" arcades hold classic games from the 1980s up through the early 2000s, focus on cultivating a community and host tournament play when the opportunity arises. The family-oriented environment is a far cry from the sanitized pachinko experience D&B provides. Authenticity is important, but it's also appealing to a withering community. Despite being located close by to a local high school, The Place's demographics stretch mainly to older individuals in their 30s and 40s, and the young children that they bring in with them. In the age of the PlayStation 4 and Wii U, teenagers and college youth are the exception where they once ruled the arcade life. And like the barcades that are now drawing a significant portion of The Place's potential costumers, its owners have recognized that steps have to be taken to not only endure as businesses but to draw a larger audience.

"I don't think you can really have just arcade games anymore." Cary gestured to the home consoles near the front of the arcade, "That's why I got the Wii U, the Xbox." Bringing in these more expensive consoles that customers might not be able to afford for themselves but are more than willing to put a $10 fee down to play is one way of keeping his business afloat. Cary's efforts at being a progressive arcade have kept the doors open, but barely. Small businesses like this are becoming increasingly fragile over time as large chains take over, and in an industry widely agreed to be dead as an independent genre preserving this history is difficult. The Place doesn't bring in enough revenue for him to quit his day job, but money is far from his primary concern.

"Success for me is about seeing people like you come in here and have fun." Cary's intentions are to get players in the door, playing video games as a group again. For him The Place is about opening up a collection of electronic artworks to players, bringing the memories of the 80's golden age back to life for older players and introducing new ones to the classics. The TRON cabinet is his pride and joy; while it still has the original hardware, joystick and controls, when it was first acquired the game had sustained significant water damage and the cheap wooden cabinet had to be repaired by a specialist. Cary went and bought the original poster for the game online and used it to rebuild the cabinet in its original form. By his own reckoning, TRON isn't a fun game, but the cabinet is an art piece.

It's is a sentimental location. The arcade's name was derived from a previous arcade that used to be close by, near a local smokeshop. The Gauntlet II machine was acquired because of Cary's attachment to the game as a kid, and his 1982 Joust machine previously held the highest possible score of ten million, set by one of the game's world record holders as part of a campaign to max out 100 Joust machines to reach a total score of one billion. The entire establishment is fueled by memories and the recreation of a dead space in the postmillennial world. Perhaps the most vexing part of playing games in The Place is the realization that unlike the large and well-supported chains, this business may not last forever. There's a certain inevitability that comes with the understanding that each of these machines once called a different building home, and could someday find yet another establishment to take them in. Summers are the busy season for the retro arcade, but once school starts up again attendance decreases. Youth interest in these older games is low, so The Place's primary audience is families trying to expose their kids to a different generation's games. The lack of teens and 20-somethings is a serious problem. Teen culture was heavily intertwined with arcades in the 80s, and the absence of younger customers threatens The Place's survival. Without them, it becomes like one of the failing churches in America's depopulated countryside; older community members stay in place while young people are drawn into more virile communities. Younger age groups become alienated by a lack of peers. Even if young people can be stimulated into attending arcades regularly and better advertising could keep them informed, there's no guarantee that they would visit a small business instead of one of the larger chain. The Place has a product that the barcades can't offer, but in the age of easy emulation and Virtual Console, less people are looking for that product. The introduction of home console systems is intended to stimulate attendance, but the arcade is still in need of a strong injection of younger members to help it thrive.
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November 1: Dave & Busters

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11775 Commons Drive, Springdale OH
The names which dominate the arcade industry are an instrumental part in the discourse. There isn't the same kind of rivalry among individual players as has developed in the console industry (you certainly won't hear a single "Genesis does what Nintendon't!"), but the companies go to certain lengths to ensure that the playerbase knows who's building their favorite ride. When I surveyed Dave & Busters' inventory of machines, what surprised me most wasn't the extended stock of ticket machines or enlarged smartphone apps. GameWorks had prepared me for that. What caught me was that out of the 76 machines that make up D&B's section of traditional arcade cabinets, 42 of them were Sega properties. These were primarily 90s and early 2000s 3D shooters and simulation games, the likes of Virtua Tennis and Virtua Cop, with Daytona USA as the preferred linked racer of the day. The remaining 34 machines were divided among Konami, Capcom and Namco. This is a similar trend to what I observed back at GameWorks. Konami takes Japanese machines and repurposes them for the American market by pasting English logos and instructions over the cabinets, not even translating the actual game in many cases, while Sega as an originally American company handles overseas releases with a little more finesse. Although Namco's Pac-Man franchise is still a household name in this age, the company itself has nowhere near the raw name recognition of Sega or even Nintendo, who has been dipping their own fingers back into the arcade market with dedicated Mario Kart machines.

Walking into D&B you wouldn't expect to find an arcade nestled within it. Flanked by high definition TVs broadcasting Bengals games and areas set aside for foosball tables, the front hall reads like the entrance to sports diner. That's also a lot of what you see both around and in the arcade itself, many young adult men watching football and drinking Bud Light. But the main body of  customers are families, teen couples and small groups of kids, orbiting around the restaurant tables located centrally within the deep blue arcade floor. Amid the flood of Capcom ticket machines, electronic skeeball and basketball shot games, tucked into a corner near the entrance is a single Galaga and combination Donkey Kong-Mario Bros. cabinet. Like the shoved aside fighters at GameWorks, it's a melancholy sight to see former industry giants brushed under the rug. Moreover, the grandfather game of the industry is nowhere to be found. Not at GameWorks, nor here could I find a single Space Invaders cabinet. Its legacy is absent as well; Taito Corporation has all but withdrawn from the arcade scene. The impact of this is subtle, but in effect the distant but no less major figures that once influenced the discourse are becoming less visible over time.

And while Sega may hold a majority share in the traditional arcade market, in reality this makes up a small cut of D&B's actual content. Expedient large-scale ports of smartphone games are the dominant attention grabbers here, with oversized Doodle Jump, Cut the Rope, Temple Run and Fruit Ninja consoles reigning in the kids. There are very few dedicated arcade properties left, with the space taken up instead by recognizable brand names and licensed intellectual properties like Ice Age and Deal or No Deal. Where this isn't an option, knockoff copies emulating their surface appearance to appeal to or deceive customers happily substitute, as in the "Dizzy Chicken" game subbing in for Angry Birds and Fiesta EX replacing DDR. Sega may hold the world of cabinets in the palm of its hand, but their ten thousand dollar UFO Catchers are nowhere to be found, instead covered for by offbrand claw games. It's as if a Chinese counterfeiter designed an entire arcade, bootlegging whatever he couldn't license in for cheap. Every time someone scores high or throws another reel for a spin, warbling sound effects and victory fanfares ring from one end of the cavernous diner to the other. The constant jingles, blinking coin games, spinning lights on towering slot reels and neon slogans of "Everybody's a winner!" over several machines lends to the interpretation that if GameWorks is the small-time gambling circuit east of Cerulean, then Dave & Busters is Giovanni's Rocket Game Corner--conveniently, the arcade does in fact let you trade in your winnings for Pikachu. Perhaps the most unique feature of this arcade is the overwhelming amount of positive reinforcement used to drive the players to continue until closing time.

I disparage D&B, but one of the real problems with writing about it is that it's rehashing GameWorks on a larger scale and without the neat DDR crowd or endearing Tekken kids to absolve it. Compared to the more altruistic arcades that my study followed, Buster's operation rings hollow. There are venues dedicated to the community that try to keep their doors open for the sake of keeping the authentic experience alive, where profits go back to supporting that experience, by buying and restoring machines, funding tournament play between pro gamers, and by comparison to those establishments members of the discourse have made it clear which among these has authenticity. The most connection Dave & Busters has to the discourse is that solitary corner where Mario Bros. and Galaga are tucked away, and the wave of Sega cabinets flooding the back area. The moment I brought this space up to a hardcore arcade fan it was dismissed; "Those guys are just out for your money."

The contrast does reveal a certain understanding among community members. The discourse strongly holds on to the idea that authentic locations use their money in ways that align with the values of the community, rather than diverting it out of state to support a chain. It's comparable to the BuyCincy movement and the drive to invest in small businesses rather than megacorporations. After hearing these sentiments firsthand, I started to regret ordering their $4 milkshake.
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October 20: GameWorks

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1 Levee Way, Newport KY
You cannot concretely connect the arcades of today with their predecessors. The early 2000s all but flushed out the traditional arcade. In the five year period between 1996 and 2001, the rising capabilities of home computers and game consoles had helped to cultivate a world where high end arcade cabinets could no longer inspire the kind of jaw-dropping that Virtua Fighter and Sega Super GT did. The likes of Mario 64 and even Final Fantasy couldn't compete with arcade juggernauts on that front, but the moment the Xbox and Playstation 2 hit the market a swift and steady decline of the local arcade cleared venues from American shores, sped on by the changing dynamics of the battle for better graphics and greater depth of gameplay. It's more accurate to call this the latest in a series of extinction events for the video arcade; the Dreamcast had already been putting competing hardware to shame in '98, and the golden age is generally agreed to have ended in the mid 90s with the rise of powerful fourth generation consoles in the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo. Annual revenue for arcades is today measured in millions rather than billions.

Arcades still persist in Japan as the everpresent "Game Center" with the support of urban congestion and widespread availability, but the process of destruction has been so thorough in the United States that the time for last ditch efforts has long since passed. Any attempt to resuscitate the American arcade at this point is not the salvation of the venues remaining, but a revival of a historical social forum--there are next to none of the original arcades left to save. This history is a complicated issue in its own right because it is part of a collective memory shared and replicated among members of the discourse without a single authoritative voice framing it. Even in the web era, a lack of serious academic interest in the surface issue of the console wars and even less enthusiasm for the niche decline of arcades has reduced the issue to an exhaustive but difficult to verify oral tradition. Part of the issue of not having an authoritative history for the end of the arcade is that the very same lack of interest that helped usher in their end has also lead to a lack of material on the subject. Most academic research stems from 1997~99, and emphasizes proving a connection between arcades and delinquency or layabout behavior. JSTOR and UC libraries may be inexhaustive resources on medieval art and Egyptian archaeology, but anyone looking to start up video game studies has their work cut out for them. Nonetheless, a lack of academic interest does not make the history disappear. You can hear various versions and understandings of it from any veteran arcade goer, pieces of the glory days inevitably sneak into the annual EVO tournament streams, different generations each talk about the pace at which their local arcades gradually dried up. It makes one wonder if the Byzantines reflected on their defeated empire like this.

What I'm getting at with all this is that GameWorks is of a very different breed from the locally owned venues of years past, or even of the mall arcades that once dotted the continental United States. Nestled away within Newport on the Levee, it is by technical definition a mall arcade, but it is not the dark maze of corridors formed by back-to-back Space Invaders machines that entered the collective imagination around '78. To cope with the changing demographics and failure of old revenue tactics, new, experimental and alternative business models have been adopted to reimagine the arcade as something that can succeed even through times as dire as the 2008 recession.

The modern arcade is a hybrid of sports bar, family diner and 10-and-up casino. Ticket machines, coin-flipping games and a revolving diamond-shaped plastic Bejeweled console now hover around a framework of light gun and racing games that seem to serve more as a pretense to be called an arcade than as a core focus of the establishment. Sega's once-ubiquitous UFO Catchers are still around running their same particular brand of crane game, but now feature licensed Angry Birds products rather than Sonic the Hedgehog or Alex Kidd dolls. GameWorks is a composite venue that tries to bring together the appeal of watching Bengals games, eating out with family and taking part in the video arcade experience, but this puts three conflicting groups with different social backgrounds in proximity without actually providing a uniting experience. The pattern I observed was that customers arrived in groups, which kept to their own. Families eating out stayed together, eating and then approaching the arcade machines as one, groups of young men hanging around each occupied the same Time Crisis and House of the Dead machines without once deviating to play something alone, and groups of kids all crowded around the lone fighting game cabinets in the corner of the store to watch each other play and take turns in competition. One employee related to me a thriving Dance Dance Revolution scene among enthusiasts that would come with a change of clothes on certain nights and spend the whole evening practicing their DDR moves. These disparate groups were not interacting with one another; contrary to the video arcade's role as a forum of social interaction, people do not come to the modern arcade alone as they would sometimes do in the past, and they're not out to make new friends either. GameWorks is a neon Israel. One space with three purposes that attracts three separately-minded communities which do not intermix.

Does GameWorks have authenticity as an arcade? Old timer Taito fans and fighting game enthusiasts alike would disagree, but the DDR scene would vouch for it. Admittedly, I have my own stake in this discussion. Back when I was in middleschool around 2006 GameWorks still housed rows of Mushiking cabinets dealing out trading cards for use with the game, and at that time I would have labeled it an arcade very quickly. But with more and more space dedicated to the bar and diner aspects of GameWorks, it's hard to not see a retreating pattern in the role of the video games. This strikes home at one of the most difficult issues of the discourse. The arcade community is a fragmented collection of conflicting interests driven heavily by personal taste. One group which wants to identify with the discourse may be shunned by another group, and another that would not identify with it may be lumped in regardless. Who is part of the discourse is as much an open question as if the discourse still exists.

The prenatal stages of the old arcades are still visible here. Those crowds of boys scrambling to play Tekken 5 and Marvel vs Capcom 3 are not so different from the youths that came before them. Very simply, they pick up a game that they enjoy and contest over who is the best. They play, refine their techniques, and fight for the Player 1 or Player 2 sides of the machine depending on which side is "hot" with wins. Watching them I can see better technical expertise than the young couple that had been at the machine earlier--throws, guards, basic ability and understanding of the mechanics among the next generation, even while the kids haven't mastered the special moves just yet. This is virtually identical to how previous generations of pro gamers got their start. But for all of the enthusiasm expressed at the novelty of an eight year old boy making top 48 at EVO 2011, this is not a pure stream of cultural formation within the space. GameWorks is not the kind of accessible local arcade that kids can hang out at after school. Newport on the Levee is a geographically isolated location far removed from any neighborhoods, almost inaccessible without a car, with prohibitive parking fees and overrun by abrasive Kentucky natives. And kids under 18 aren't allowed into GameWorks on weekdays without an adult accompanying them. This creates an abortive stop-and-start that disconnects the learning process and bars the birth of a local community. Without regular access, the discourse will fail to thrive.

To some degree, the modern arcade is seeing the same uses as those of the past. GameWorks' most popular game is Hummer, Sega's linked racer that takes up a wall of its own with multiple interconnected machines ready to accommodate up to eight players simultaneously. The fact that these machines are so busy casts light on the small amount of continuity shared between the arcades of the 80s and 90s versus today; competition. Fighting games, once a dedicated staple of arcades across the globe, are now relegated to a small corner of the modern arcade, superseded by linked racing machines in their purpose as the means of friendly competition between players. When I asked one of GameWorks' employees about this, her response was that customers are more interested in racers because they are looking for games where they can play against one another. From this we can infer that fighters are no longer recognized by the general public as competitive. Paradoxically, a genre designed from the ground up to facilitate competition is now recognized chiefly for its single player campaigns. If the continuity between premillennial, millennial and modern arcades were stronger, this would qualify as a lack of literacy in the discourse, but this is now the majority understanding among the customer base.

Contrary to Cincinnati and the greater Cincinnati area's image as one of the most segregated portions of the United States, the demographics of GameWorks are more egalitarian than one would suspect. African American, Caucasian and Hispanic customers are the most common, with families concentrating on the weekends and 20~30 year olds becoming more common on the weekdays around happy hour. Going by the employees' comments, day to day attendance has been steady throughout the arcade's history, but over the past nine years GameWorks experienced a general decline through the recession and attendance is just now on the rise again. Among children, those in the 4~7 range go for ticket-printing games to win prizes, while the 9~12 majority focus on light gun and sports games. Summers and vacation times are the busiest, while colder weather also leads more people through the doors.

This diversity is a significant departure from the traditionally white-and-male environment of old arcades. GameWorks has attempted to market itself by democratizing the experience and opening its doors to as many potential customers as possible, but this has had the opposite effect on existing members of the discourse. The players frequenting more accepted locations like Arcade Legacy do not recognize GameWorks as an authentic arcade. The ticket games, bar culture and lack of oldschool games like Space Harrier or Galaga place it outside the values of the discourse. There is a very visible divide in how the machines are presented. GameWorks' barcade model is part of a movement to eliminate coin op, removing or disabling the quarter slots on arcade machines and replacing them with card readers for use with the company's Game Cards, adding credits to the card in units of 20 for $5. This new approach to paying for the arcade experience functionally buys the same number of plays as the quarter per credit rates of old and is arguably cheaper than the competing entry fee model, but also destroys the American symbol of the arcade in the process and over-regulates the player base by filtering out younger players.
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