I’m a science fiction writer. I really dig your site and all that your doing, keep up the good work. As for the “Get-up-late yawn scratch-my-nuts yeah whatever” style ‘critics’ – as Henry Rollins said in the song Shine: “If I listened to everything they said to me I wouldn’t be here / If I took the time to bleed from all the tiny little arrows shot my way I wouldn’t be here / The ones who don’t do anything are the always the ones who try to put you down.” (Little do these intellectual giants realise they’re conforming perfectly, as predicted, to John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.)

Anyhow here’s my own 50c worth on your Arcades documentary project, I hope it helps some:

1. Are you going to write a Blog / Diary about the EXPERIENCE of making this Arcade project?

RE: Process over Product (Some thoughts on Projects generally)
- I often find that the Process of making a work of Art, is as interesting and relevant on a narrative, and simple human-scale level as the ‘end product’ itself. (It’s often why the Extras Disk on a Hollywood production is often better than the actual film..) The ‘background story to the main story’ so to speak. What’s often missing in a project is the author’s in-the-moment Feelings about his direct role to his work – those everyday, in-flux, ‘mundane’ thoughts and observations which often actually mean a lot. Too often, a production seems like it ’sprang fully grown from the forehead of Zeus’ when what would really be important / interesting to one’s fellow primates are the fuzzy underlying human motivations (in all their illogical & contradictory glory) for it’s creation, those strange unseen interlocking processes by which I.T was made..

2. RE: The core underlying concept / feeling / mood-tone / psychology behind the whole ‘arcade experience’:
- For me it’s all about the notion of ‘Inhabiting and exploring a (secret, personal) Virtual Space’.. Whenever I think of “Arcades” in all their bleeping magnificence, two things immediately stand out; “Tron”, and William Gibson’s notion of “Cyberspace.” What I would personally find interesting is the degree to which a documentary about Arcades (and watching that documentary) generates a feeling of “Other new strange [ie 'kinda trippy' / psychedelic] new electronic worlds just around the corner.” (If you ask me you can never have too much hot pink or freezing blue neon and diffused volumetric lighting, heh.)

..Yeah, you read right. I’m making the direct connection between computers and psychedelics. In fact I’m saying they are one and the same thing. (And just what is this thing anyhow??)

Ahem. Here’s an awesome William Gibson interview quote (from http://project.cyberpunk.ru/idb/gibson_interview.html):

“I was walking down Granville Street, Vancouver’s version of ‘The Strip,’ and I was looking into one of the video arcades. I could see in the physical intensity of their postures how rapt the kids inside were. It was like one of those closed systems out of a Pynchon novel: a feedback loop with photons coming off the screens into the kids’ eyes, neurons moving through their bodies, and electrons moving through the video game. These kids clearly believed in the space games projected. Everyone I know who works with computers seems to develop a belief that there’s SOME KIND OF ACTUAL SPACE behind the screen, someplace you can’t see but you know is there.” [Emphasis mine.]

3. RE: (Virtual) Wor(l)d-Associations

Check it out. The following are closely related (especially in a Visual sense):

arcade(s) / retro 80’s / futuristic / hyperreal / neon / blocky / sim / video / lo-fi / glitch / virtual / pixellated / electronic / ZX84(??) / ‘home-grown’ (as in ‘garage culture meets Macgyver’) / cheesy

Perhaps ‘cheesy’ needs a bit of explaining: Here in merri old Endland, ‘cheesy’ is a word associated with anything that’s a bit past it’s sell-by date, perhaps a bit tasteless, often ‘unconsciously self-parodying’, something which is run down, cheerily obsolete – but often still very popular, with it’s own unique ‘charm’ (American tourists always seem to call England ‘charming’, which is utterly confusing for the humans forced to actually live on this tepid little island.) David Hasselhoff, Benny Hill, the Eurovision Song Contest – and indeed most cult teen films from the 80’s (and indeed ALL oldskool kung-fu films) can all be seen as having this ‘cheesy’ aspect or quality.

Some History: The primary experience of Arcades in England was almost always at these really awful, utterly depressing seaside towns on the lost coast, where it’s always raining and there’s a smell of cigarette smoke and old greasy fried potato ‘chips’ on the cheesy 70’s style striped orange carpets. Pensioners shuffle about listlessly, playing the fruit machines and mumbling to themselves. A man with weird/bad hair in a band called The Smiths once wrote a song about such places, called “Everyday Is Like Sunday”. An article entitled Britannia Moribundia (http://www.classiccafes.co.uk/moribundia.html) mentions the phrase “melancholy poignancy”, which perfectly sums up the experience of going to these seaside towns (often having being dragged there on holiday with one’s parents) and experiencing the sublime electronic joys of these strange, run-down places for the first time. A kind of “seaside surrealism.” For me the two things cannot be separated: the everydayness, the poverty of the souls of the people who hung out at these places, these shuttered sea encampments of forced entertainments, their ambience of faded derelict obsolescence – and the eternal promise andor threat of digital nirvana glimpsed in the staring, scan-lined faces of the blaring arcade machines, screens angled like the inner walls of some ancient Mayan temple cult.

4. RE: A quote I just made up
- “To the 80’s MTV generation, Videogame Arcades are what LSD was to the 60’s; they are an retro-electronic version of DMT.”

5. RE: Digital Media influences and ‘that certain retro-80’s kinda look-feel’

* Buggles “Video Killed The Radio Star”
* The Wizard
* Night Of The Comet
* Liquid Sky
* Back To The Future
* Old Nintendo commercials
* Weird Science
* War Games
* Tron!

Note that what all these things have in common is they all have that unique videogamelike AESTHETIC – ie. a whole related set of visual mood-tones and feelings closely associated (at least in the Generation X mindset) with “the whole Arcadian experience.” In modern terms, the games “Rez” and remakes / dreams of “Tempest” strongly generate this ‘retro 80’s video-arcadian feeling’ in the viewer – that is, the feeling of exploring and being part of a whole new virtual world behind the HAL eye of the computer.

- Article on “Videogame Aesthetics”: http://modetwo.net/users/nachimir/vga/
- A band which uses retro videogame aesthetics: http://www.hexstatic.tv/

6. RE: Videogame Arcades as a form of “Scientific Visualization”
- See http://www-static.cc.gatech.edu/scivis/tutorial/tutorial.html)

Arguably, Video Arcades are a use of Science to generate, interact with, and understand data, and the flow of that data (in a bizarre virtual world of bleeps and hot neon) – a method of making or manifesting some kind of interior Vision of another world, perhaps..

7. RE: The term “Arcadia”:
- According to wiki-wack-pedia (heh I understand your feelings about this Jason), “Arcadia remained a rustic, secluded area, and its inhabitants became proverbial as primitive herdsmen leading simple pastoral unsophisticated yet happy lives, to the point that Arcadia may refer to some imaginary idyllic paradise.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcadia

Hmm for me this sounds like a hell of a lot why video arcades have such an appeal – the set of feelings we have about them (what I call “near future retro 80’s” in my own forever-forthcoming sci-fi novel) are often an attempt to mentally and culturally retreat back (to the near future!) to some imaginary ‘perfect childhood’ full of simple andor simplistic (electronic) pleasures..

8. RE: Walter Benjamin
- Walter B. was a fascinating writer and thinker who’s book “The Arcades Project”.. probably has nothing whatsoever to do with Video Arcades – but then neither has the term “Arcadia” – I just thought I’d mention them for the sake of completion – and because (as the Mugwump says in Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch) they have “mythic resonance.”
===

Anyhow. Hope this provides some tasty snack food for thought. L8ers.

Henry Swanson

But don’t despair. If you work your way up, you can undoubtedly be managing a couple of Starbucks if you start now.

Hahaha, this fucking nobody of an art school never-will-be is bagging on someone’s ability to write when he can’t even work up the energy to slob his pinky over to the left shift key. It’s so hard when the blood in your veins turns into liquid meh, isn’t it “ian”? I call shenanigans.

On the other hand, you will probably earn six figures on your first gig too, (assistant) managing that Big Lots! across town. You’re totally like jscott’s peer! He’s recording the feeling of checking your inventory and getting “Inside the Barrow,” while you will be checking store #7668’s inventory of wheelbarrows.

FUCK THIS I’M OUT!

I tend to agree with you that a bunch of “BBS geeks” is not going to work this time around… because it’s not about BBSes!

And, could you have a word with one of the directors I’ve worked with, who thinks that being a director he can operate a camera? Please?

I’ve seen the results of “a nobody”’s work. It is not a failure. Niche, yes. Failure, no.

I have not seen your body of work yet.

Jason, sign me up!