The cultural importance of the video game arcade

Once upon a time the arcade was the only place in which the video game could be encountered. Now that games are more often found in our homes and pockets, the National Videogame Arcade in Nottingham hopes to give games a physical venue again.
Britain’s video game arcades, having been at last evicted from our cities, are now mostly found chirruping on piers in lonesome seaside towns. It’s been a lingering decline. Once upon a time the arcade was the only place in which the video game could be encountered (aside from, perhaps, a date with a squatter on one of the room-sized mainframe computers found on affluent university campuses in the 1970s).
This performative aspect to games has now moved to the stadium arena, where young, semi-professional cyber-athletes compete in video games on stages loaned from real world sport (for example, last year’s League of Legends final was held at the Sangam Stadium in Seoul, the cavernous location in which the 2002 FIFA World Cup final took place). But the local pitch has, in the arcade’s decline, almost entirely disappeared. We now have to face the wilds of Twitch or YouTube if we want to see similar acts of virtual genius.