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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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