They’re dead. Good riddance.
We got to discussing how arcades had disappeared at CB2 yesterday. Most of the discussion focused around how to make arcades worth going to again, but I’ve been thinking about it since and I’ve come to the conclusion that arcades sucked, and any nostalgia for them is like longing for the days when everyone on the street had to pop down to #26 to watch TV, because they had one, and crowd round their black and white set whenever there was something on one of the three channels.
Photo by Vincent Diamante
Here are the ways arcades suck:
They’re inherently expensive.
Each game in an arcade needs its own hardware, its own cabinet, and floorspace in a high-traffic retail area. When you play an arcade game, you’re effectively renting a small living room in a city centre. But it’s worse: if you want to change game, you have to get up, find it (and they can only have a few dozen on site) and wait until the disc – locked in its bulky, themed cabinet – is free.
There’s no way that can compare favourably to buying a single box, cheaper than an arcade cabinet thanks to mass production and shorn of the irrelevant cab, which sits in the living room you already own and plugs into the TV you already have. There’s no way it can compare to having every game you buy work on that little box, without each game needing its own hardware, TV and floorspace.
Arcade machines these days cost £1 or £2 a pop. That’s not a new thing – £1 of today’s money is less than 25p in 1978 money, when Space Invaders was released. Machines have, in fact, improved dramatically whilst costing about the same. They’ve simply been undermined by cheaper, better options – like selling people their own plastic guitars instead of asking them to come to a shop and rent one.
Arcade games were always this expensive, and if you remember it differently, there’s a good chance it’s inflation playing tricks on you.
They’re inconvenient.
Quite simply, unless you’re fortunate enough to have an arcade on your daily walking route, you have to get out of the house and go find one. Even if arcades were still common, that’d most likely mean a 10+ minute trip each way for the sake of an hour’s – or half an hour’s – gaming. You need to have the right change. You need to wait until the game you want is free… and you need to wait for the operator to get it in the first place.
If you want to play multiplayer with friends? You need to find time in your schedule where you can both converge on the same physical location. Think of the people you play games with: in the modern, connected world, needing to meet at a shop just to play a game is a big deal.
And good luck if you want to play something with more than one friend at a time. Few machines are set up for four players or more, so you’ll either be splitting up or playing spectator.
They damage and constrain gaming.
This is the big one.
Arcade games are incredibly limited. They have to catch your attention and be immediately comprehensible. They have to deliver an accessible, engaging experience with a time limit (because you’re renting the space, remember?), so all slow-paced experiences are out. Good luck with exploration gameplay: we need that player on rails, rushing through the content until their dollar expires.
And immersion? You’re in an (ideally) crowded room. People are shouting. Dozens of machines are competing for attention with music, loud noises and flashing lights. This atmosphere does not permit any kind of immersive or contemplative experience.
Then there’s the fixed costs. Each cabinet costs thousands of pounds to assemble, and the operator has to be convinced it’s worth the floorspace. Though indie arcade cabinets have been made, these barriers to entry would completely kill any indie game without enough clout to at least reach XBLA or PSN these days.
Photo by Blake Patterson
So I’m glad arcades are dead. I’m glad because – despite all the glamour and the buzz around arcades back in the day – the gaming options that killed arcades are cheaper, better, more convenient and far more diverse. If arcades were still the heart and forefront of gaming, we’d all be worse off.