It's hard to imagine that
a generation raised on the convenience of console and PC gaming,
would find anything remotely alluring in the faded glamour of tawdry
provincial amusement arcades. Yet, in recent years, end of the line
destinations such as the Golden Mile in Southend-on-Sea have come to
represent a shabby, neon-lit Mecca, kindling the interests of a new
breed of retro videogamer.
Very few of these
contemporary enthusiasts are of an old enough vintage to tear-up with
dewy-eyed nostalgia at the memory of the glory days of arcade gaming,
when the weapons of choice were shop-soiled light guns, and
cooperative multiplayer meant you and three of your friends jostling
around an incarnation of the popular top-down dungeon crawler –
Gauntlet - furiously mashing buttons.
“I quickly got tired of
playing on arcade emulators at home. I realised that I wanted to get
out of my bedroom and play Pac-Man in his natural
environment...” writes Richard Kelly - co-founder of The Free
Range Games movement, who was born almost 12 years after Space
Invaders first captured the hearts and minds of teenagers
bored-stiff of rolling dice and moving counters around in boardgames
like Monopoly or Snakes and Ladders.
“...It turns out that
Pac-Man's natural habitat is a cavernous brightly-lit shed, populated
by unsavoury, destitute-looking characters and packs of feral
children, situated next-door to a rough pub that once hosted meetings
by the English Defence League, and a hole in the wall takeaway that
dispenses chips and kebabs until 3am. It's a place where obscure
arcade classics, many of which are poorly translated Japanese titles
bearing names such as Cobra Limpet, Arena Skies and
Bat Compiler, rub shoulders with ranks of chirping slot
machines, penny waterfalls and claw cranes stocked with 'Beats by Dr
Dre' headphones of dubious provenance and Minions soft toys.”
Kelly's obsessive search
for the roots of videogaming has carried him the length and breadth
of the United Kingdom and beyond, from the stuffy alcoves of cross
channel ferries, to the tiny lobbies of independent fast food
takeaways, to social clubs bordering remote caravan parks, where the
puny 'pew-pew' of a laser cannon and the concussion blasts of
exploding space boulders, resonating from an Asteroids table
arcade, competes with the repetitive thud of darts.
For a hardcore cadre of
amusement arcade regulars, racing games remain the big draw. The
genre, which mostly forgoes any pretence of storytelling in favour of
advancement through a succession of increasingly difficult circuits,
is well-suited to the short sessions typical of the arcade gaming
experience. Many of the most popular racers offer players a level of
immersion that they would not get in a home setting, with realistic
vehicle cockpits incorporating steering wheels, accelerator, brake,
and clutch pedals, gear shifts, handbrakes, glove compartments,
electric windows, and a three year warranty.
Games of this type often
include time trials in which players must reach destinations within
tight schedules, assisted by any extra-time power-ups they manage to
gather along the way. Failure to meet these targets is brutally
punished with the player usually required to deposit additional 50
pence pieces in order to continue.
At the age of 11, Mark
Remy was a regular at his local gaming arcade. A veteran of racing
simulators, he cruised the digital highways of Miami and other
exotic locales in a variety of high-end virtual sports cars and
articulated trucks.
“Back then it was all
about the horsepower and the torque,” he reminisces over a cup of
tea, in a cafe a few doors down from the arcade where he first earned
his racing stripes.
“There were always
plenty of extra-time bonuses to collect in those games. I never once
thought about where all those additional seconds might be coming
from.”
In 2014 Remy turned his
back on videogames and now fronts a local school outreach programme
for children hooked on driving sims. His sudden change of heart
followed a chance encounter with a former classmate - Donna.
“We sat opposite each
other for a year in Mr Kilby's European Studies class but when I
bumped into her in the street, a few months ago, I almost didn't
recognise her. She looked about 80 years old. She told me that she
had recently undergone a second hip replacement. Then she offered me
an unwrapped Werther's Orginals toffee with a used green tissue stuck
to it. I politely declined.”
After leaving school Donna
had fallen in with a bad crowd on the notorious 4tune website. When
she announced in a heartfelt goodbye post that she was leaving the
message board she found herself the target of internet trolls who
began to relentlessly spam her social media accounts with insults and
threats – a practice referred to online as 'dog-pounding.'
At the peak of this
internet harassment Donna was spending, on average, an additional
6000 hours each day going through the messages left for her by trolls,
who gleefully informed her of their plan to keep spamming her accounts
until she was aged over 9000 years old. Reading one lengthy message left
on her Facebook page (which turned out to be a cut and paste of
Leo Tolstoy's novel – War And Peace - translated into German)
caused her to miss both her 18th and 21st
birthdays and spend a small fortune on German language lessons.
It all adds up,” says
Remy. “These 4tune trolls stole her youth, her middle age and her
twilight years, all so they could level up in their sick game.
“Those hours that she
spent in front of her computer reading those vile hate messages took
a toll on her eyesight. As her vision deteriorated it took her longer
to read the thousands of tweets and facebook wall updates she
received each day, and she began to age more rapidly. At the end she
was wearing four pairs of reading glasses. The coroner reported that she
had the body of a 93 year old. In the space of just three months she
had aged 70 years.”
Angela Welds from the
anti-cyberviolence charity - Stolen Moments - has followed the
increase in accelerated ageing among female internet users and
identifies an escalation in online harassment as the root cause of
this disturbing trend:
“There is an erroneous
but widespread belief that these women are ageing prematurely as a
result of a bad diet, a lack of exercise, or an allergic reaction to
brightly-coloured hair dye, rather than as a direct consequence of
sustained trolling.
“Make no mistake: This
is a violent crime on a par with being dragged, kicking and
screaming, into an alleyway by masked assailants, wrestled to the
ground and having your handbag wrenched from your grasp. Although in
a sense it's more serious since time rather than money is being
stolen.
“The fact that, in 100%
of all observed cases of online harassment, men are the perpetrators
and women the victims, points, not so much to a gender gap than a
gender canyon. At the heart of this coordinated campaign of
harassment are cells of Men's Rights Activists who are jealous of the
longer average lifespan enjoyed by women in developed countries, and who
are seeking to address this imbalance through unscrupulous methods.”
According to C Drive
sources cited in a recent UN study*(see
footnote) every minute a billion seconds is lost as a
result of internet trolling.
Many of these purloined
moments find their way onto the black market where they are sold by
criminal gangs, with the profits being used to fund real world
terrorism.
Time extracted from
trolling celebrity social media accounts is valuable and can be
auctioned at a premium. Ironically the key market for this so-called
'prime time' is fading celebrities looking to extend their waning
careers.
Seconds accumulated from
the online hoi-polloi – unflatteringly referred to in underworld
circles as 'the meat cloud' - is trafficked on the dark web where it
is processed and sold in bulk to disguise its origins.
One of the main consumers
of this 'standard-grade' time are the manufacturers of arcade
machines, who use it as a crucial ingredient in the extra-time
bonuses in their games. Usually these rewards for competent play
grant a gamer no more than 30 additional seconds. Typically only
10-15% of this time will be human in origin with the remainder padded
out with time harvested from female rabbits or mice who are given
Twitter accounts and then relentlessly trolled. On average an arcade
machine will need to be topped up with extra-time every 12 days.
A growing number of
anti-harassment campaigners are calling for tighter laws governing
the industry, to ensure that extra-time bonuses incorporate seconds
obtained from ethical sources. Some are appealing for a percentage of
the revenue from arcade games offering these bonuses to be
donated to a fund aimed at combating online trolling. Others are demanding the abolition
of extra-time bonuses altogether:
“Time is precious,”
says Mothers Against Mario and Double Dragon founder, Chloe
Decker. “We shouldn't have to tolerate it being stolen out from
under us, just so some latch-key kid who can't afford a proper console can enjoy a few extra seconds playing a
racing game.”
While some are willing to
take the legislative route to industry reform, a vocal minority on
the extreme fringes favours a more-direct approach. The twitter
hashtag #PushPlayerOne aims to discourage gamers from playing arcade
machines offering extra-time bonuses by 'accidentally' bumping into
them or nudging them at crucial points during the gameplay.
The response to these
concerns from the hardcore videogaming community has been sceptical with
most regarding the claims made by Remy and the UN as far-fetched:
Mathematically it doesn't
seem possible that someone with no coding experience could cram an
additional 6000 hours into a standard earth day. The most I've managed is 45.” says Twitter user @Goatface_killah12.
In Sunspot Amusements on
Southend seafront, battle-scared videogames patriarch, Paul 'Cressy'
Creswell, takes a break from kicking-arse on the unfathomably
challenging smooth-scrolling beat-em-up - Total Bain - to
explain the philosophy behind arcade gaming:
“Arcade
games speak to something at the centre of the human condition: The
unpalatable truth is that some of us get more life than others and
everybody's preoccupied with delaying the inevitable. Even if we are
not aware of it, we are all looking for a little extra-time on this
planet - a way to progress a little further into the game.”
~
*
Defending Safe Spaces from Space Invaders (Buckenham
& Mear 2012)
Skate Or Die:
Deflowered On The Horns Of A Digital Dilemma (Lambert 1998)
Micro-Aggressions So
Small They Cannot Be Seen, Even Using The World's Third-
Most-Powerful Microscope (Dunmall
& Chamberlain 2014)
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