Video Game Arcades

An arcade, for anyone who has never walked into one, was a room full of standing-height video-game cabinets lit up with flashing screens, each requiring a coin to play a few minutes of something like Space Invaders or Pac-Man. They were the public place where teenagers went to play video games before the living-room console became standard, and in the early 1980s they were everywhere. They also triggered a transnational moral panic about the young people who hung around in them.

In the UK, the Labour MP George Foulkes introduced the Control of Space Invaders (and other Electronic Games) Bill in the House of Commons on 20 May 1981, warning of youth "addiction," school truancy and children being driven to "theft, blackmail and vice" to fund their Space Invaders habit. The bill lost narrowly, 114 votes to 94. In November 1981 the Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos went rather further, issuing Letter of Instruction 1176 under Presidential Decree 519, which ordered every video machine in the country dismantled within 15 days, on pain of a ₱5,000 fine and up to 12 years in prison. (The ban held, mostly in Manila, until Marcos was overthrown in 1986.) In the United States, the Texas town of Mesquite passed an ordinance barring unaccompanied under-17s from arcades altogether; the resulting legal fight went all the way to the Supreme Court as City of Mesquite v. Aladdin's Castle, 455 U.S. 283 (1982). On 9 November 1982, the US Surgeon General C. Everett Koop — the country's senior public-health officer — told a Pittsburgh audience that video games were producing "aberrations in childhood behaviour" and that children were becoming addicted "body and soul." He walked it back within days, calling the remarks a "purely personal judgement" and denying he had ever said games were "per se violent in nature or harmful to children." The medical journals joined in too, tongue somewhere near cheek: the New England Journal of Medicine printed a 1981 letter about "Space-Invaders wrist," and the papers soon had cases of "Pac-Man elbow" to report.

The panic faded as arcades themselves faded mid-decade and the battle moved to the home console, where the argument stopped being about the room and became about the content on the cartridge. What was left behind was a generation for whom sitting in front of a screen and pressing buttons to make things happen had become completely natural, and that shift — from audience to interactor — is arguably one of the defining things that happened to the human relationship with computers.