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.