Pac-Man Fever

Ok, I know today's been pretty prolific for posts, but just one more before bed:

If you're a Generation Xer like me, odds are you have at least one specific arcade you can recall, where you probably spent your weight in quarters every summer. Don't you miss it?

On the beach at Hayling Island near my grandparents' house :-)

This is a really interesting article by Wil Wheaton about game arcades. It reminds me of the piece by Seremetakis on the physical constitution of memories ('The Memory of the Senses, Part 1: Marks of the Transitory' in Seremetakis, C. Nadia ed. The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity), which I connect to the Gibson quote about the cybernetic loop between a player and the arcade machine:

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, neurones moving through their bodies, and electrons moving through the video game.

(Lister, et al., New Media: A Critical Introduction, p. 370)

In Wheaton's case the memories of his passing culture are richly associated with the physical senses too, but rather than being absorbed through food, they enter the body through the cybernetic feedback loop: game -> eyes -> hands -> game, and hence are retained as memories in the brain.