We spoke to Mikolai, editor of Forgotten Worlds Magazine about how gaming culture originated in public spaces.
The 90s urban landscape was dotted with arcade cabinets.
A Street Fighter 2 coin-op outside the local fish n chip shop. A Neo Geo MVS at the bowling alley. A battered Simpsons machine under a glowing Blockbuster marque.
These arcade cabinets provided a generation of kids with a ‘third place’ outside the family home and school to call their own. In the process, they added a physical dimension to the gaming experience.
ACMI’s Game Worlds exhibition allows a new generation of kids to make that same connection.
A time and place
Ray Oldenburg coined the term ‘third place’ in 1989 to mean a place between home and work that can help foster community.
“A familiar public spot where you regularly connect with others known and unknown, over a shared interest or activity,” is how the internet describes these locations.
Now, as 12-year-old kids we obviously didn’t think about our world in those terms. We were just happy to find our own little spots where we could dodge authority, sample the latest video game releases, and exchange gameplay tips as we searched our pockets for spare change.
These unofficial hubs became our third place. And in doing so they created a physical connection to the games we played and the environment we played them in.
I can still remember the very first time I played Street Fighter 2. I was maybe 12 years old and on holidays when I came across the machine outside a beachfront takeaway on the Gold Coast. I had seen Street Fighter 2 in local arcades before, but there were always lines of kids waiting to have a go. Here, finally, I could try it myself. So, I chose Ryu, steeled myself, and instantly had my ass handed to me by a CPU controlled Dhalsim.
Thirty-something years later, I can still remember all of this like it was yesterday. And if I’m up that way on holidays and happen to drive past, I still half-expect to see the machine there. For me, Street Fighter 2: The World Warrior occupies a physical place in time and space.
Spare change and street corners
When we talk about gaming worlds we usually think about Mario bouncing his way through the Mushroom Kingdom. A Fortnight map. A Minecraft landscape.
The suburban arcade cabinets of old added a fourth dimension. A timestamp on a physical experience. Or to put it another way, individual games were tied to locations. And if you’re like me, you now associate those games with a specific time/space memory.
Golden Axe is a takeaway on the way home from school. Ridge Racer is the small arcade under the stairwell at the local shopping mall. Shinobi is the local swimming pool on summer holidays.
Albert Einstein's theory of relativity argues that space and time are interconnected. And that we exist in a four dimensional ‘spacetime’. That may be a strange segue in an article about gaming worlds, but it’s one that neatly summarises the lived experience for a generation of kids. Growing up in the 90s, our gaming worlds were both digital, physical and stamped to a point and time on a map.
These days, we tend to play games at home. A PS5 or Switch on the couch. A Mobile phone in bed. Maybe a dedicated ‘gaming rig’ in a corner office. Point being, gaming is generally confined to a single location. And while the games may change, the space doesn’t.
We don’t associate games with physical spaces anymore, because it all blurs into a single, homogeneous background.
Remember Second Life?
There’s an argument that today’s ‘third places’ are more likely to exist online. They’re the gaming lobbies before you play Call of Duty, Fortnite, or countless other ‘games-as-a-service’.
As Lawrence Adkins, writes in his article for SuperJump, these online places, “Permit a much greater sense of self-expression, allowing people to express themselves with varying amounts of character customisation options, and abstract forms of communication.”
Back when Second Life was still a thing, there were countless think pieces about virtual worlds and online avatars allowing people to interact and express themselves in a way that freed them from the confines of their bodies and location. To transcend time and space.
Nobody writes those articles much anymore, because they really don’t need to. Online worlds and virtual lobbies have become so ubiquitous that they’re the default social hub for a generation of kids. These interactions have long superseded the need to leave the house and slot coins into a battered arcade machine outside the local 7-11 while your friends look on.
That’s fine. Times change. Progress is inevitable. I’m obviously getting old.
But it also feels like we’ve lost something in the process.
Because arcade cabinets in the wild weren’t just a chance to play new games you might not otherwise encounter. They served as urban totems. Nodes on a grid. Unofficial ley lines that connected people and places.
Nostalgia for something I never knew
For kids today, it’s hard to be nostalgic for something they never knew or experienced.
Mention Friday nights scouring shelves at the local Blockbuster to a younger niece or nephew and you’ll get blank stares. Start up about old arcade cabinets outside takeaways and you’re basically Grandpa Simpson with an onion around your belt.
Which is why the Game Worlds exhibition at ACMI is such a welcome addition to the local calendar. For those of us who grew up propped against Street Fighter 2 cabinets with a handful of coins, it’s a reminder of simpler times. An excuse to leave the house and interact with games the way we once did.
And for those who never got to experience the land before time, it’s an opportunity to sample iconic games and create memories that could last a lifetime.
Mikolai Napieralski
Mikolai is a writer, editor, and publisher based in Melbourne.
He fell into the arts sector by accident and spent several years working with museums in the Middle East, where he developed digital content and edited exhibition microsites — including projects featuring Takashi Murakami and Damien Hirst. He later wrote a book about his time there: God Willing: How to Survive Expat Life in Qatar.
More recently, he’s been looking at the lasting impact of video game magazines and media on a generation of (pre-internet) kids. You can read his anthropological take on old video games and print media