Where are all the arcades at?

Thing is, if I wanna chill and meet gamers I can go to Gamestop. It's like a bar for gamers. You roll into the parking lot after a hard day at work and saunter in. You walk around, and the dude behind the counter asks if he can help you. Unless you've got a preorder to pick up you head over to the bargain racks and demo stations and start browsing. Someone else will walk in and maybe strike up a conversation about what you're looking at or what they're into. If you want you can relax and talk shit. Or you can tell that person you don't particularly care to see his pokemans and pay no attention to him. After a while you might drop a sawbuck on a couple used Gamecube titles and head home.

Arcades on the other hand are more hardcore.

That is to say that if your local game store is the videogame version of a neighborhood bar, the arcade is like a bar that caters entirely to serious alcoholics. It's loud. it's poorly lit. The crowd there knows each other and you are an Outsider, doubly so if you happen to have tits. There are four or five guys who look like they haven't shaved in two or three days chain smoking over the Super Turbo machine. They want you to play a round against them. This is not friendly. They want to know where you stand, because hierarchy is everything and these sad bastards are not capable of being a part of the social standings in the normal world.

The only other woman in the place is an Asian girl in her mid twenties wearing a baggy deerhunter jacket. While not playing a game she stands there unblinking, rocking forward and back from heel to toe, over and over again. Her face is the face of methamphetamines, and she lurks next to the Dance Dance games, never playing until someone else tries to play, because there is no point except to interrupt and beat someone.

A kid is credit feeding a bootleg Metal Slug 3 cab which the marquee calls metal Slug 6, paying around ten bucks to feel like a badass for beating a game in the arcade. He is silently mocked by the DoDonPachi crowd for even thinking of inserting a credit to continue. He will never attain the coveted 1cc. He does not respect Cave. He does not respect true arcade culture. He will never know real japanese STG, and he will never understand.

They are going to think the same of you, as they watch to stretch the moments here beyond the moments they can afford to pay for. Maybe you'll move away from these denizens to the front of the arcade and drop a few coins in a UFO catcher that will never give up ther iPod which is sitting so tantalizingly in the center of that plexiglass case. Maybe you will go home afterwards and think back on your day as you crack open the case on Gradius V and you will close it again, having the sort of grim feeling like you have just met the Ghost of Christmas Future.

Or maybe you will stay at home browsing videogames forums on internet and wondering what happened to the glory days of arcade.