Poverty Attendant Part 3: The Games

A lot of kids from my generation probably thought of working at an arcade as some sort of dream job. You could just play games all day and get paid for it, right? Of course this isn't true. The companies that own arcades don't want to pay employees to sit around and play games, they should be helping customers. When I got a job working at a mall arcade in 2008, I had no misconceptions about this, and I didn't really mind because this particular arcade had absolutely no games I had any interest in playing. As it turned out, nobody at this arcade cared if you played games, and it was only a matter of time before the boredom broke me down and I ended up playing some of them. In this third, and probably final, part of this series I will detail just how broken almost every machine in the place was.  Part 1 and part 2, for those that are out of order.

Poverty Attendant Part 2: The Company

Working at a mall arcade in 2008 was an enlightening experience in some weird ways. While the general stupidity displayed be the people who walked into the arcade was dismaying, the stupidity of the company that ran the arcade was downright depressing. I used to think that the death of arcades was simply caused by the rising quality of consoles and online play, but after working for this unbelievably cheap and stupid company, I think that companies like the one I worked for were also detrimental to their own success.

Poverty Attendant Part 1: The People

"Gift of the silver tongue.  It's the mark of a good suit salesman. . . and of a liar!"

I spent about 8 months of 2008 working at an arcade in a mall in suburban America. If you haven't been to an arcade in a mall in the past few years I wouldn't be surprised, but if you have you know that they have become the definition of poverty. It may have been minimum wage at a shitty arcade, but it was a pretty solid easy job up until the place closed. I mostly just read books and played portable games. I walked away from this little excursion with four A Song of Ice and Fire books read, a couple of dark knights in Final Fantasy Tactics for PSP, a vague idea of how to play Marvel Vs. Capcom 2, and a lot of stories.