Game Studies

Feeding the Iron Pimps: The Golden Age of Arcades in Black America

Abstract

Dominant narratives of video game history present 1980s video arcades as the birthplace of popular American video game culture, but the stories told about this “golden age of arcades” tend to emphasize the contributions of young white men and boys. This article diversifies histories of the golden age of arcades by examining how Black Americans encountered and understood arcades and video games during the 1980s and 1990s. Drawing from archives of Black-targeted newspapers, the article demonstrates how Black communities viewed video arcades and video games as dangerous objects that would push Black children and neighborhoods into economic and political disempowerment. However, the emergence of Black gaming cultures out of arcades in neighborhoods of color attests to the creativity and persistence with which Black gamers pursued gaming futures that served their needs and desires, despite their marginalization within broader American gaming culture.

Keywords: video game history, archives, video arcades, Black gaming cultures, digital divide

Introduction

In the 2014 documentary film The King of Arcades (Tiedeman, 2014), eponymous arcade king Richie Knucklez explains his passion for restoring 1980s video game arcade cabinets in this way:

What’s important about this is that it’s part of our American pop culture. It’s part of our history. It’s part of what we enjoyed as kids. This is the first stage of a billion-dollar industry, and we were there! We were the first gamers.

His explanation echoes popular narratives about video game history. Nostalgic historians, fan and academic alike, hold up the late 1970s and early 1980s as the “golden age of arcades”: the time when people (particularly Americans) first encountered games as a new technology and a new kind of cultural object. Media from and about this period portray the “first gamers” as pioneers of a new technoculture. Yet Knucklez’ quote invites listeners to question the identity of the “we” he invokes. Whose history is he trying to preserve? Who were the first gamers?

The first gamers, The King of Arcades suggests, were young white boys. The film’s central figures are middle-aged white men whose passion for the games of their childhood earned them congratulatory titles like “the king of arcades,” “legendary gamer” and “video game player of the century.” In its B-roll, the film shows these men passing their love of classic video games on to their children: little white boys and girls who dress up in Super Mario Bros. costumes and promise to spread the word about classic gaming to their friends. Few children of color appear in the film, mirroring other media about 1980s arcades and arcade nostalgia. In this media, white men are portrayed as the first gamers. They saved the world in films like Tron (Lisberger, 1982); they set world records in popular arcade games; and they now work to preserve the culture and technology of their childhood. Arcade history appears to be white men’s history.

Like most histories of computer technocultures, video arcade history is very white. TreaAndrea M. Russworm (2019) argues that academic video game historians have consistently ignored how people of color contributed to the development of video games as a medium, an industry and a cultural force. The stories of Black game creators, entrepreneurs and players are ignored or relegated to footnotes, creating “a color-blind history that happens to star mainly white men (and sometimes white women) as its key players and innovators” (para. 2). Colorblind histories support and justify colorblind video game studies scholarship, in which gamers of color, and Black gamers in particular, are rendered invisible and unimportant. Diversifying video game histories, then, is an important step in diversifying the kinds of people and ideas that are represented in game studies work.

In this article, I contribute to the diversification of video game studies by writing a new history of video arcades. I turn attention away from the narrative of the “golden age of arcades” to instead spotlight how Black Americans interacted with and understood video games and video arcades. I draw from archives of Black newspapers, publications targeted specifically at Black populations in large American cities. Arcades appear in these newspapers as an object of profound ambivalence. Black adults -- politicians, educators, religious leaders, community leaders and parents -- viewed video arcades and video games as stumbling blocks that threatened to drag Black children into poverty, ignorance and disempowerment. While arcade entrepreneurs and forward-looking educators argued that games could turn children into computer masters, most Black adults roundly rejected the idea that games could do their children or their communities any good. Yet, I argue, the persistence of dynamic Black gaming cultures attests to the creativity with which young Black gamers imagined and paved alternative paths toward pleasure and empowerment within a video game culture that marginalized them.

Video Arcades and American Racial Politics

Arcades and coin-operated entertainment have long been enmeshed in debates around the morality of and access to public recreation and leisure in American culture. Michael Z. Newman (2017) explains that urban penny arcades of the early 20th century drew criticism for offering cheap, salacious fun. Coin-operated amusements like peep shows and slot machines were said to attract “tough street children,” code for working-class immigrant youth (p. 24). Coin-op machines, especially slots and pinball, also had ties to illegal gambling operations. As a result, “arcades were feared as dens of crime and depravity… under the control of criminals with crooked politicians in their pockets” (p. 20). And yet, David Nasaw (1999) argues, these dens of depravity brought people together. At penny arcades, “there were no restrictions as to gender, ethnicity, religion, residence, or occupation.” Fun included “laughing, dancing, cheering, and weeping with strangers with whom one might -- or might not -- have anything in common” (p. 9). According to Dmitri Williams (2006), early urban arcades were “populated with a wide mixing of ages, classes, and ethnicities,” creating social spaces that were “popular, energetic, and ultimately threatening” (p. 199).

As people of all stripes came together in commercial entertainment businesses, they forged a common American identity across religious, cultural, and economic differences. This identity formation process was possible because of the exclusion of Black Americans (Nasaw, 1999). Victoria W. Wolcott (2012) explains that, even before the institution of Jim Crow laws in the post-Reconstruction South, “whites were more likely to enforce racial separation in recreational spaces than anywhere else” (p. 16). In response, Black civil rights activists launched legal and political campaigns to integrate places of amusement. Desegregation efforts yielded victories that became potent symbols in the post-World War II Black civil rights movement. Yet as Black Americans were fighting for the right to visit and enjoy public amusement, commercial entertainment businesses were moving out of cities and into newly-built suburbs. Urban amusement industries experienced a decline starting in the 1930s, as the Great Depression, World War II and suburban development led many white Americans to tighten their wallets and move out of city centers. Commercial entertainment businesses were “reconceived, repackaged, and transported out of town” to follow the dollars of new suburbanites (Nasaw, 1999, p. 295).

Migration to the suburbs had racist motives. Kevin M. Kruse (2005) argues that white flight to the suburbs was “the most successful segregationist response to the moral demands of the civil rights movement” (p. 8). White Americans fled cities not just in search of larger, less expensive homes but to escape urban areas that were quickly becoming integrated due to political, legal and social change. Entertainment business owners had similar motives. Owners of urban amusement parks, sports fields and arcades feared that white patrons would balk at driving into cities to visit businesses located in Black neighborhoods (Nasaw, 1999). Relocating to white-dominated suburbs put entertainment venues near their ideal customers. Safely tucked away from Black neighborhoods and far from public transportation lines, commercial entertainment businesses could continue to exclude Black patrons without formally breaking anti-segregation laws. These patterns can also be seen in businesses that catered to early geek subcultures, like model train building and hobby gaming, as Aaron Trammell (2023) has tracked. Early geek and gaming culture, he shows, grew up in stores and communities that followed patterns of white flight and established footholds in white suburbs, far from Black neighborhoods.

Arcades, too, migrated out of cities, though it took until the 1980s for this to happen in earnest (Williams, 2006). The arcade industry saw the new medium of video games as a powerful tool to reshape its seedy image. By catering to young patrons who were fascinated with video game cabinets, arcade owners were able to rebrand their businesses from penny arcades to video arcades. In so doing, they “moved play away from the social, communal, and relatively anarchic early arcade spaces and into the controlled environment” of suburban malls and family fun centers (Williams, 2006, p. 200). Unlike dangerous penny arcades, video arcades purported to offer sanitized, controlled, and age-appropriate environments for suburban kids to enjoy while parents shopped at nearby stores. Sam Tobin (2016) points out that arcades were, of course, never fully controlled and secure; guidance from trade publications urged arcade owners to train their employees to scout for loiterers and other ne’er-do-wells who used the dark space of the arcade for activities apart from gaming. Surveillance technologies like closed-circuit televisions and security guards purported to offer a higher degree of control over space, reassuring parents that these suburban sanctuaries of play would keep their children safe (Riismandel, 2013). Nestled securely in car-centric suburbs and protected by surveillance systems, video arcades were, at least discursively, far removed from the unsavory and unruly penny arcades of the cities. As Carly A. Kocurek (2015) notes, this also meant that video arcades were far removed from Black children living in city centers.

Physical separation from Black neighborhoods dovetailed with public relations strategies that tied video gaming to notions of wholesome white boyhood. Media stunts coordinated by arcade entrepreneurs like Walter Day cultivated an image of video arcades as the newest site “in a long history of sport as a way to deter young men from criminal activities and prepare them to participate appropriately in civic, familiar, and corporate life -- in short, to make them into men” (Kocurek, 2015, p. 58). These efforts paid off: video arcades and the games within them have since become synonymous with 1980s boyhood, effectively erasing from American popular memory the grimy, populist urban arcade spaces of earlier decades. Yet as Kocurek (2015) underscores, the image of the video arcade remains heavily gendered and raced, “bound to certain ideals of white, middle-class identity through the exclusion of diverse narratives of gaming and through the exclusion of gamers who did not fit assumed notions of race and gender” (p. 51).

Aside from Kocurek, few scholars have explored the racialized undertones of the arcade industry’s image rehabilitation. Even the language of “sanitizing” arcades evokes images of racial purity and racial hygiene that underlie America’s love affair with cleanliness, cleaning products, and cleaning regimens (Berthold, 2010). By moving out of the city, cleaning up the arcade space, and sanitizing the arcade’s reputation, video arcade owners erased the traces of Blackness and Brownness that dirtied arcades in the American imagination. This is not to say that video arcades and video games were rendered uncontroversial just by following patterns of white flight and suburbanization. As the figures of the “arcade addict,” “mallrat” and “hanger” attest, suburban parents found new things to worry about: their children might become addicted to video games or learn violent tendencies; delinquent peers might draw children away from arcades to smoke cigarettes or engage in underage sex (Rissmandel, 2013; Tobin, 2016). These worries, however, lack the tinge of dangerous Blackness that haunted the reputation of urban arcades. The persistent whiteness of video arcades in American popular memory demonstrates the tremendous success of the arcade industry’s image reset. In ushering in the “golden age of arcades,” the darkness of urban spaces and their racial diversity were effectively purged from the cultural meaning of arcades.

Alternative Archives: Arcades in Black Newspapers

The golden age of arcades brought with it a codification of the connection between video games and young white men. Even decades later, media about arcades from the 1970s and 1980s is overwhelmingly white. As Kocurek (2015) notes, people of color did sometimes appear in arcade media. Black contestants on the arcade-based game show Starcast, for example, prove that children of color were playing arcade games somehow and somewhere. However, these brief appearances do not provide much information about how Black children experienced games and arcades differently from their white peers. In their failure to capture the experiences of Black children, shows like Starcast provide what Kristen J. Warner (2017) calls plastic representation: visibility “that approximates superficial ‘visual’ diversity” without speaking to what is unique and rich about the Black experience (p. 35). The same can be said of sources that scholars often use to write video game histories, including and especially hobbyist magazines. If, as Michel Foucault (1972) argues, “the archive is the first law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events” (p. 129), it is unsurprising that video game histories do not feature Black participants. Common sources do not record the experiences and perspectives of Black people, so those experiences cannot be woven into historical narratives.

It is a fact that Black people played games at video arcades. It is also a fact, as the work of Russworm has so clearly shown (2019; Russworm and Blackmon 2020; Russworm and Holmes 2021), that Black gamers experience games in ways deeply influenced by their cultural contexts. So where can scholars find evidence of the unique thoughts, feelings, and experiences of Black people who encountered games in the early days of American gaming culture? My answer to this question, and the dataset for this project, materialized by chance. While searching for sources about Black contributions to game history, I stumbled upon Jeremy Saucier’s (2018) post “Video Game History is Black History,” written for the Strong National Museum of Play. In the post, Saucier mentions Delores Williams and Delores Barrows, two Washington, D.C. arcade owners who were featured in the business magazine Black Enterprise. He laments that “outside of these newsletters and magazines, there are few sources to document the workers and business owners” that made games accessible to Black consumers (para. 2). What Saucier points out as a major limitation of the historical record seemed to me an opportunity: if one of the few mentions of Black arcade owners came in a non-gaming magazine targeted at Black readers, what might I find if I looked through similar Black-targeted publications?

To explore this possibility, I turned to the ProQuest Black Studies Center database and its archive of Black newspapers. The archive holds digitized issues of Black-targeted newspapers from around the United States, including publications from Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Los Angeles, New York City, Newark, Norfolk, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. I searched the archive for articles about video arcades, video games and other venues of public leisure including penny arcades, amusement parks and amusement centers. My searches yielded over 160 articles covering a timespan from the 1920s to the early 2000s. The articles provide a picture of how Black communities talked about and understood public leisure and entertainment before, during and after the golden age of arcades.

Through these articles, I was able to situate video arcades within changing attitudes toward public leisure in Black communities. The new history of video arcades that I have pieced together begins well before arcade game manufacturers introduced video game cabinets to their product lines in the 1970s. The narrative begins in the 1930s, when Black Americans began campaigning for access to public areas of recreation and entertainment as a matter of civil rights. I trace how opinions on public and social play soured as arcades became associated with crime, school truancy and other sorts of suspicious activity. This ambivalence mirrored the skeptical views about coin-operated entertainment and video games held in white communities, but it persisted in Black communities well into the 1990s, even after arcade owners’ concerted public relations campaign in the 1980s. I show how video arcades and video games came to seem like threats to the futures of Black children and their communities. While white children had opportunities to engage with games as tools for building confidence and fluency with computers, Black children on the “wrong side” of the digital divide lacked those sorts of educational opportunities. Games seemed less like a fun portal into the digital future and more like a stumbling block that would keep Black children from fully engaging in an increasingly computerized economy.

However, I argue that the persistence and flourishing of Black gaming cultures suggests that Black gamers were not operating on the wrong side of the digital divide, but on what S. Craig Watkins (2018) calls the digital edge. The digital edge challenges scholars to rethink the idea of the digital divide and investigate how “the digital media practices of black, Latino, and lower-income youth are influenced by broader social and economic currents that give rise to distinct practices, techno-dispositions, and opportunities for participation in the digital world” (p. 2). The fact that Black gamers continued to access video games in arcades well into the 1990s and 2000s can be read as an outcome of inequitable access to video game and computing technology. When read through the lens of the digital edge, however, the enduring relevance of arcades pushes scholars to consider how Black gamers used what they had to build gaming cultures that catered to their desires and needs better than white gaming cultures could.

This history, while grounded in primary sources, is not meant to stand as an authoritative history of arcade culture in Black America. Rather, I follow Laine Nooney (2013) in doing gaming history as “speleology” rather than “archaeology.” According to Nooney, “media ‘archaeology’ implies an excavation that brings objects into the light of knowledge, constructing a larger skeleton from the wreckage of bones scattered across the history field. Spelunking, in contrast, is a phenomenologically imprecise encounter” necessitated by the paucity of records about marginalized people in gaming history (para. 7). Speleology, or doing the best with what we can find, allows scholars to write histories of marginalized people despite the “inability to apprehend the historical field in its wholeness” (para. 7). Like Tobin’s (2016) reconstruction of the social and physical space of arcades, whose materials are the worries and warnings of arcade owners recorded in trade publications, my use of newspaper articles allows only partial, and at times even speculative, access to arcades in Black neighborhoods. As a result, the history I present here is “fundamentally messy, rough, and incomplete” (Trammell, 2023, p. 42). Even so, it is a key starting point for research about the racial dynamics of video game history and video game cultures.

Arcades and Amusement in Black America

As I explained above, segregation has been a part of American leisure culture since the rise of the commercial amusement industry. For Black Americans wanting to engage in public recreation in the first half of the 20th century, having fun required navigating legal and social exclusion. Black citizens of southern states were, in most cases, barred from entering white-owned entertainment venues by Jim Crow laws. In some northern states, civil rights laws prohibited de jure segregation, but as Wolcott (2012) points out, these laws went largely unenforced until the 1940s. Even so, young Black people boarded city buses, subways and trolleys en route to city centers where movie theaters, penny arcades and other bustling businesses awaited them (Kittrels, 2004). Certain kinds of businesses, such as penny arcades, were easier for Black patrons to access and enjoy than others. Unlike amusement parks or movie theaters, where white workers might turn Black people away or assign them to a segregated seating area, penny arcades had minimal staff and thus fewer obstacles to having fun. One Edward Robinson wrote in 1931 that at arcades, “everybody, regardless of color, pays the same prices, because the slot machines do not know their ‘color line!’” (Robinson, 1931). Even arcade-related crime could cross the “color line”: a 1927 article reported on a group of interracial bandits who “dropped racial distinction” to rob arcade machines at New York City’s Coney Island (“Colored and White Bandits,” 1927). Whether in city centers, amusement parks or public beaches, penny arcades and their coin-operated amusements represented an ideal version of recreation in which Black patrons’ coins were welcomed.

Edward Robinson’s (1931) praise of penny arcades contrasts with his caustic evaluation of other amusement businesses: “Jim crowism and segregation is rampant… and worse this year than ever before.” Though he wrote from Baltimore, a city in the American north, his invocation of Jim Crow evidences the growing awareness in northern Black communities that racism and segregation were problems facing the whole country, not just the South (Wolcott, 2012). Racism also manifested in ways more serious than segregation and exclusion. Black pleasure seekers could face violence, as demonstrated by two killings of Black soldiers by white military police officers that occurred only months apart in 1942 (“Soldier Slain by M.P. at Fort Dix Theatre,” 1942). In both killings, integrated places of amusement (a movie theater and a penny arcade) became deadly sites of racial tension. Instances like these made clear that, though the legal framework of Jim Crow was absent in the North, the attitude and ethos of white supremacy were deeply rooted in American culture.

Still, civil rights laws in the North provided hope that societal ills could be cured. Legal pressure from Black civil rights activists and lawyers during the 1930s and 1940s succeeded in opening some amusement businesses to Black patrons. An amusement park in New York, for example, provided an important test case for how far civil rights laws could reach. Playland, an amusement park funded partially by taxpayer dollars, racked up accusations of discrimination against Black visitors throughout the 1930s. White workers were accused of denying Black visitors entrance to the park’s pool, casino, ice skating rink, locker rooms and concession stands (“Darling Defends Playland Policy,” 1933; “War on Darling May Open Again,” 1933). The county board declined to sanction the park for violating New York civil rights laws, prompting the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to intervene (“Action is Delayed on Park Prejudice,” 1933). Through two test cases in the New York courts, the NAACP succeeded in opening all of Playland’s facilities to Black visitors (“Citizens Win Second Suit on Playland,” 1935). A year after the legal victories, one concerned New York Amsterdam News reader wrote in to urge their neighbors to visit the park. “Let them get accustomed to seeing some of us around,” the writer argued, or else “our work [to gain access to the park] will be somewhat in vain” (Gunthorphe, 1936). Having fun in the newly integrated Playland was, for this writer, akin to a civic duty.

Because discrimination was so prevalent in American leisure culture, legal wins like the Playland cases became important symbols in civil rights activism (Wolcott, 2012). Even so, it was not completely clear whether free access to cheap amusement was an overall boon for Black youth. Penny arcades attracted criticism because they enabled loitering. Black community leaders expressed concerns about crime and juvenile delinquency similar to those that Newman (2017) identified among white observers. Newspapers often reported on theft and violence at arcades (“Colored and White Bandits,” 1927; “Photo Story of Penny Arcade Shooting,” 1946). Harm could come accidentally, as happened when a young girl was hit by a BB gun pellet at an arcade (“Girl Student Shot Below Eye in Accident at Penny Arcade,” 1956). But most concerning were the deleterious effects that coin-operated entertainment could have on Black youth. A 1921 survey in Chicago identified penny arcades as part of the city’s supposed “boy problem.” Young Black men were, according to the study, snubbing “opportunities for wholesome body and character building in recreation” in favor of hanging around at arcades. Arcade-goers were said to “lack the privileges more fortunate youngsters possessed,” making them even more likely to fall into crime if they hung around other unsavory elements and played coin-op games (“Neglect of Boys Shown in Social Service Report,” 1921). As penny arcades emerged in discourse as pipelines to prison or gang membership, newspapers recorded campaigns to ban arcades from opening in Black neighborhoods (“TWO Scores Win Against ‘Coinarama’” 1964). Closing down arcades would not, however, solve the root problem that penny arcade patronage represented: a lack of nourishing activities for Black youth.

At the same time that arcades were blamed for channeling youth into violence and crime, they were also welcomed as part of community-centered recreation. Festivals and carnivals organized by community groups featured penny arcades to attract and entertain children and teenagers who loved coin-op play (“Morgan YWCA Holds Second Penny Arcade,” 1936; “College Park ‘Y’ Sets Indoor Carnival,” 1956). In southern states, community-run penny arcades offered mechanical fun to Black youth who might otherwise be barred entrance to local arcades by Jim Crow laws. The embrace of coin-operated entertainment at community festivals suggests that it was not the technology of arcades that worried adults. Rather, it was the environment of penny arcades -- dark rooms, unsavory loiterers, unsupervised activities -- that put Black kids in danger. When integrated into community-centered leisure and situated alongside more “wholesome” pursuits, penny arcades could be part of safe, flourishing Black communities.

Video Arcades: Friend or Foe?

In Black newspapers, journalists and community leaders talked about penny arcades as a symbol of the lack of edifying activities for Black youth. Children and teens went to arcades when they had little better to do and, in so doing, exposed themselves to the dangerous influences therein. The introduction of video games to arcades did not change this impression. Following the 1980s image rehabilitation of the video arcade industry, some arcade entrepreneurs operating in and around Black neighborhoods attempted to reboot their businesses as well. In Philadelphia, for example, two entrepreneurs tried to open family-friendly video arcades in the 1990s. One owner promised that his arcade would “not be a simple arcade.” His business would be “a place [for Black children] to have fun and learn about their culture” through educational activities like field trips to museums and ski resorts (Brazington, 1991). Another entrepreneur proposed to bring a suburban, Chuck E. Cheese-like experience to the inner city and make it possible for Black kids to play safely after school or hold birthday parties in their own neighborhood. There was no reason, the white owner argued, that Black children “should have to travel to a white neighborhood… to be able to have this kind of facility” (Jones, 1994).

In both cases, however, the child-safe video arcades faced significant pushback from politicians, community leaders and parents. Detractors argued that video arcades, even ones targeted at children, “would attract teen-agers more interested in selling drugs, consuming alcohol, and vandalizing cars and property than in playing video games” (Brazington, 1994). Like penny arcades before them, video arcades were seen as hotbeds for crime, delinquency and disorder throughout the 1980s and 1990s. These perceived harms led to concerted efforts by politicans and community safety groups to rid the streets of arcades. Crusades against arcades spurred concerned citizens to learn more about political activism: people circulated petitions, attended city council meetings, lobbied politicians and untangled arcane city zoning processes, all to stop the spread of arcades. Their zeal did lead to some success. In Detroit, citizens successfully advocated for an ordinance requiring arcade owners to hire security guards and limit operating hours (Goodin, 1984). As late as 2002, Chicago politicians passed a rule barring minors from entering arcades during school hours (Brazil-Breashears, 2002). The extent to which such regulations were actually enforced is unclear. As some politicians and lawyers pointed out, the rules may have been unconstitutional, and enforcement required a great deal of manpower from understaffed municipal governments (“Newark lawgiver wants stay on video game law,” 1983; Brazil-Breashears, 2002). Regardless of the tooth behind anti-arcade ordinances, they highlight the serious reservations that many Black adults had about video arcades and the games they housed.

In many ways, reservations about video arcades echoed earlier concerns about penny arcades. The environment of video arcades seemed to encourage bad behavior. For example, police blamed the unsavory nature of arcades and movie theaters for an Easter weekend “riot” in Philadelphia. Officers argued that black teens “[pour] onto the streets” after getting bored with games and films (Wilson, 1986). Similarly, the association between arcades and crime remained strong. Even when filled with video games, arcades remained fertile environments for illegal activity ranging from drug dealing to homicide (“Sweeps Target Drug Hot Spots,” 1989; “Youth to be Tried as Adult in Slaying,” 1992; Boyd, 1997). Incidents of crime drew the attention of law enforcement onto video arcades, adding the risk of police-related violence to the litany of problems with arcades. In Detroit, a police offer was killed while investigating an arcade burglary (“Breakthrough in Slaying of Officer,” 1983). When a young Black man was shot and killed by a police officer in Miami, outraged Black Miamians rioted outside the arcade where the shooting took place (Speck, 1982). In an eerily familiar story, the police officer’s acquittal by an all-white jury drew national scrutiny from Black citizens concerned about over-policing and police violence (“Delay Jury Selection in Cop’s Manslaughter Trial,” 1984; “Miami Cop Won’t Face Federal Charges for Killing Black Man,” 1984). For Black communities, video arcades were more than just dens of depravity for young people with too much time on their hands. They could become the sites of serious crime, violence and even unjust death.

Video arcades had one additional element that made them even more dangerous than penny arcades: video games. Like in white communities, depictions of violence in video games became a hot topic for Black politicians, community leaders, educators and parents in the 1980s and 1990s. Highly respected figures like Coretta Scott King spoke out about video game violence (“Mrs. King Condemns Violence,” 1994), while community authority figures including religious leaders warned parents that video games might teach children “that violence and aggression are the best ways to handle conflict” (“Church Battles Violence,” 1984). “The majority of video games involve some type of violence,” one church report argued. Leaders of the United Church of Christ condemned scenes of violence in arcade games by pointing to comical examples: “a frog being hit by a cart or a man smashing things with a hammer” (“Video Game Violence Deplored by UCC,” 1984). Black communities were, this discourse underscores, just as suspectible to hyperbolic rhetoric about the danger of video games as their white counterparts. Concerned editorialists told parents that games trained kids to kill (Berry, 1993) and suggested that Mortal Kombat (Midway, 1992) might better be titled “Moral Dilemma” (Macias, 1993). Detractors of video games peddled worrying stories about dangerous children to illustrate the significance of their otherwise unfounded claims. In one case, an eleven-year-old girl stabbed her friend after a dispute over a video game (Oshodi, 1982). In another, an eighteen-year-old boy burned down his new home because it was too far from his favorite arcade (Harris, 1983). Such stories seemed to confirm warnings that video arcades exposed children to a very dangerous new technology. Video games were an “aberrant attraction” to “youngsters whose sense of self-worth and value [was] crippled in some way” (Harris, 1983). They held the power to turn innocent tween girls and docile young men into murderers and arsonists.

The moral panic about video games extended beyond worries about violence. Much discussion about games focused on how video arcades and games might affect the social and economic futures of Black children and their communities. There was some hope that video games could inspire children to learn more about computers and digital technologies. Arcade owners seized on this hope and argued that their businesses exposed children to computers in a fun, approachable way (Wilson, 1992). In Los Angeles, an entrepreneurial Black mother opened a “math gym” that used games to improve kids’ math and critical reasoning skills (Taylor, 1984). The same religious leaders who decried games even experimented with using computers and games for catechesis (“Video Game Violence Deplored By UCC,” 1984). These efforts followed in the footsteps of experiments in states like Minnesota, where school districts tried to democratize computer access and make learning fun through computer games (Rankin, 2018). Gaming, educators hoped, would not just bring fun into the learning process. It might also, as Sherry Turkle (2005) described, help children see themselves as creative agents in computing cultures. According to Turkle, games helped students “[enter] into a new relationship with the computer, one in which they [began] to experience it as a kind of second self” (p. 90). Math gyms and video arcades, Black entrepreneurs argued, would give Black children similar opportunities to enter into relationship with computers as a technology of creation.

Not everyone agreed with arcade owners and electronic entrepreneurs. Newspaper coverage of video games tended toward skepticism about whether gaming had educational value. Skeptics did not doubt that computer games could help students learn, but they did doubt that Black children had the access to the curricula and skilled teachers required to turn gaming into computer education. Data collected in the mid-1990s indicated that most Black families living in urban areas had yet to purchase a computer for their home (“Black Economics 101,” 1996), even after a boom in United States home computer ownership during that decade. As a result, children mainly used computers at school. However, schools that served Black children lagged behind wealthier suburban schools in funding for computers and computer education classes. Educators were not trained to incorporate computers into their classes, creating a context in which “the mere mention of technology and media to most educators and inner-city teachers [caused] them to shutter [sic] in their boots” (Gill, 1993). Games, then, seemed “incompatible with campus life and learning” (Connors, 1982). Without teachers guiding students in how to turn play into educational experimentation with technology, games were nothing more than a distraction to Black children. The consensus in newspaper pages of the 1980s and 1990s was that parents needed to pull their kids away from games and remind them that “just because you know how to operate a computer game, does not mean you know how to program a computer” (Owusu, 1983).

In this context, video arcades seemed especially useless and even harmful to Black children. Adults told cautionary tales of game-obsessed family members dropping off the honor roll (Owusu, 1983). Politicians, community leaders and educators blamed arcades for high school truancy rates (Powell, 1983). Video arcades, they argued, gave bored students a place to “play hooky and lounge around… without fear of an official challenge” from authority figures (Williams, 1986). Students who strolled out of school and into arcades lost more than important learning time. Truant students were also exposed to the crimes that many associated with arcades (“Video Games: Friendly or Hostile?” 1983). Parents of all races worried that games might tempt children away from their textbooks, but for Black parents, truancy and educational underachievement had higher stakes. As Ronald Reagan’s economic policies slashed government funding for social services and the War on Drugs sent Black people to prison at higher rates and for longer sentences than white offenders (St. Pierre, 1991; Tucker, 2017), Black adults sought ways to correct the troubling trends of increasing poverty and incarceration rates that were ravaging black families and communities. Video arcades were an easy scapegoat for more complex issues of educational inequality, enabling neoliberal calls for Black families to ignore the games and pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Editorialist Jim Ingram’s (1983) perspective is worth quoting at length:

The overwhelming inference is that too many of our children are content to feed their quarters into the iron pimps which populate video arcades but shun any knowledge of how they work, etc. “Let the White man fix it,” we seem to hear them saying, but the mute editorialization also says, “Let the White man make it, make the money, and make the money repairing them.” Children these days are flying backwards if they’re standing still. But try to get that across to some of our parents.

In an increasingly computerized world, Ingram argued, Black children were being left behind because they did not know how to work with computers. Contrary to arguments like Ingram’s, the disparity in computer literacy between white and Black children was not the fault of Black kids’ disinterest or Black parents’ negligence. Nonetheless, by pinning the blame for educational inequities on parents who let their children go to arcades and play games, an easy solution emerged: keep kids away from games. Like Ingram, many adults during the 1980s and 1990s believed that games and arcades would only lead Black children to a future of “nearly total economic disenfranchisement and subordination to their technologically literate white peers” (Ingram, 1983).

Detractors of video arcades and games cited little empirical evidence for the worries and woes they peddled. Underfunded schools, drug use and violent crime existed in Black neighborhoods long before the appearance of video arcades, and they have persisted after arcades disappeared from street corners. Complex histories and systemic inequalities, not games, were the culprits behind these issues. The anti-arcade and anti-video game discourse in the pages of Black newspapers was not unique to Black communities. Fervor against seedy arcades and violent games animated parents of all races. Yet for Black communities, the stakes of these perceived issues were higher. Debates about arcades and games, their benefits and their dangers, point to the deep anxieties that Black adults felt as they tried to swim against socioeconomic currents and build better futures for their children and neighborhoods.

Playing on the Digital Edge

Anti-arcade regulations and warnings about the dangers of video games did not stop Black youth from visiting arcades and playing games. Black children’s voices were rarely featured in newspaper articles, but their interest in games shines through in how passionately adults discussed how and whether kids should play. Kids spent pocket change on arcade machines, so their parents worried; arcades opened to serve children in new areas, so politicians sought to ban them. Even if the discourse around games verged on technological determinist fearmongering, it developed in response to real trends in how young Black children were using their leisure time and interacting with a new, sometimes frightening, medium. More positively, though, newspapers also evidenced changing patterns in how Black consumers accessed games: images of at-home gaming consoles peppered advertisements starting in the early 1980s, and articles discussed how Black Americans were being “forced to join the millions to have become computer literate” in the late 1990s (“Black Economics 101,” 1996). Despite these changes, most Black families remained on the “wrong side” of the digital divide. As home computer ownership and internet access grew rapidly during the 1990s, “the gap in PC ownership between white and African American and Hispanic households widened, as did the gap between the rich and poor” (Papadakis, 2000). The US Department of Commerce (1998) named Black families as one of the “least connected groups” at the turn of the millennium. Even as at-home gaming became more accessible for Black children, they still had less access to computers and computer literacy education than their wealthier white peers.

Many video game histories place the end date of the golden age of arcades in the mid-1980s, but as I have shown, video arcades remained relevant in the pages of Black newspapers and the lives of Black youth well into the 1990s. For many adults, arcades signified societal neglect of their children and teens. They were places that kids only frequented when their parents and communities could offer them nothing better to do. They symbolized the inaccessibility of the new computerized world to Black children, who played games in arcades while their white peers learned to code in computer classes. Video arcades, in short, stood as a physical reminder that Black youth were to be consumers, not creators and leaders, in computerized cultures and economies. For Black adults, then, games did not represent a mode of playful, empowering engagement in emerging technocultures. They were obstacles to be torn down in pursuit of better futures for Black families and communities. Viewed through this lens, the golden age of arcades becomes a little less golden.

Media about video arcades and gaming reflected this disparity. White boys could look up to Walter Day’s teams of professional gamers or dream of saving the world like the protagonists of Hollywood films like Tron (Lisberger, 1982). Black children were not represented among the elite of video gaming, nor were they envisioned as computer masters. Black youth may have played classic arcade games with gusto, but they were not presented the same images of glorious gaming futures offered to white boys. If Black gamers were going to have a gaming future that was not, as cynics predicted, one of “economic disenfranchisement and subordination” (Ingram, 1983), they would have to imagine and craft that future on their own. And imagine they did. Research on the experiences and creativity of Black gamers has elevated Black gaming cultures as diverse as Sims 4 (Electronic Arts, 2014) modders and fighting game professionals to disabled Black gamers and adult and elderly players (Gray, 2020; Russworm and Blackmon, 2020; St. Fluer and DeWinter, 2021). Black gamers also document their own histories. From documentary films like The Lost Arcade (Vincent, 2015) to digital preservation efforts like Red Bull Gaming’s arcade history YouTube videos, players themselves are doing the work to ensure their stories are celebrated as important milestones in gaming history. The task of those interested in video game history is to build upon this work: to seek the stories behind these cultures and uncover how they came to be, as Black gamers dreamed up and built communities in a video game culture that for so long ignored their presence.

The history I have presented here is rather pessimistic. It focuses, as so many narratives about Black people and technology do, on the consequences of being on the “wrong side” of the digital divide. Yet my aim is not to validate or replicate the discourses of gloom and doom that I have explored here. This new history of the golden age of arcades is a provocation: what video game histories can we write if we look at how Black gamers played, connected and created on the digital edge? The digital edge invites us to reframe the idea of the digital divide, to seek out innovation and creativity where we might at first see deprivation and exclusion from mainstream technocultures. Writing histories about Black gamers on the digital edge requires innovation from game historians as well; we must critique standard historical narratives, search for new documents, and construct new archives. It is my hope that the pessimistic story I have told here will challenge game historians to prove the naysayers wrong and write histories that show how Black gamers built gaming futures of their own, even when so many believed that such futures could not possibly exist.

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