by ConfigSys.boy!

I spent this past week trekking around the wilderness regions of North Florida, beyond the comfortable sub-urbanite boundaries of my natural habitat.  During this excursion I had some serious time to ponder my next project.  I also had time to rack up over 2400 unread items in my News Reader.  These two facts are related in that they both had their genesis in the same set of circumstances.Rather than lamenting the locations in my daily life where I experience limited or no connectivity, this trip to the Floridian interior afforded me the opportunity to instead be frustrated by the finite windows of connectivity I fleetingly enjoyed while in transit between the hardened bunker where I was laboring and the pre-historic cave we bivouacked in.  There was no high speed internet.  No WiFi.  No 4G.  No 3G.  There was in fact a distinct lack of G’s.

So in the sparse leisure time afforded me between the whip crack of our rising and our slumbering collapse at day’s end I read ancient lore burned into the skin of dead trees and stared skyward in thought.  The product of this pondering is what I hope will be a series of articles on the things we as Geeks are passionate about;  The cultural distinctives that unite and identify us.

The first piece I’m working on is about The Arcade – that hallowed sanctuary of coin-operated bliss that so many of us grew up sheltering, and losing many quarters (and afternoons!) in.  Arcades are on the decline in America, their pay-for-play experience having been largely supplanted by personal gaming devices in our living rooms, backpacks and even our pockets.  Their joystick adorned altars have mostly been absorbed into other entertainment venues to become part of larger smorgasbord-style playground experiences.

Over the next little while I and some companions will be taking a few field trips to re-capture the past glories of the Golden Age of the video game arcade, to get the creative juices flowing, and to find out just how much life our old gaming temples have left in them.  Stay tuned for photos, comments, and more.

And as always, I welcome your feedback.  Do you have a favorite memory from the Arcade?  What are your memories of the golden age like?  What did you love about escaping to these temples of neon, plastic and pixels?  Hit the comment links, or throw me a trackback and let me know!

Geek Out.