Game After: A Cultural Study of Videogame Afterlife

When I saw this book, the first thing I thought of was the Alamogordo, New Mexico landfill, where thousands of ET game cartridges are buried. The author does indeed go looking for them, and finds that they’re a major part of local lore. In fact it’s a major part of video game lore for anyone feeling nostalgic about 1980’s video games, which have, thanks to all the mania for everything 1980’s, enjoyed something of a renaissance. As for the author, he sets out to find what happens to old video games, and what he finds is a history of a hype. Video games are, according to this book, a symptom of fads.

Raiford Guins is not a video game expert, but a professor of cultural studies, specializing in technology and culture. He goes throughout the country looking for old arcade games, and the businesses that still supply them. Most of the arcade games are kept by cheap entertainment venues in areas with low rent. Though he doesn’t mention it in this book, you could find 1980’s arcade games in the Coney Island amusement park, most of which were still running by 2009, when I last visited. The old free-standing games appear to have faded out for several reasons, ranging from mechanics to improvement. Firstly, electronics only last a few years before the parts burn out, as often happens with laptops. Secondly, what kind of teenager in 1990’s USA would’ve wanted Pac-Man, when Streetfighter was widely available? Even Streetfighter was eventually outdone by Mortal Combat, and then came Tekken, Area 51, Doom, and Grand Theft Auto. As newer games come out, the old ones take up space.

Guins’ research seems to find that arcade games have more to do with nostalgia than enjoyment. Most of the people he sees playing them are 35 year old, people who grew up in the 80’s. By 1991 I remember how arcades were disappearing, pressured to close by mall operators who didn’t want kids around. In 1995, the local candy/magazine store had two games, Streetfighter and Mortal Combat, and he hated the kids who hung out there to play the games. Was it worth it, to have foul-mouthed kids in the store all day, just to bring in some extra quarters?  I would love to hear what he had to say about it.

One of the things that disappoints me about this book is that he doesn’t research on a personal level. It would have been interesting to hear the individuals tell their stories about their experiences with arcade games, and what it meant to the people who played them. He researches the Alamogordo video game dump extensively, but doesn’t do a lot of interviews with people who ran the old arcades. I wonder what had to say about the arcade phenomena of the 80’s, with all the corny video games that were really just blips on the screen. There’s also the issue of how the games got more violent by the 1990’s, and the Gameboy must have cut into the arcade market. Video games went from being an amusement-venue product to a more solitary one, the way we switched from movie theatres to VHS. Maybe video games tell you a lot about US history?