Losers, this way (1996)

The A Word in Your Ear column from the October 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nothing is amusing about amusement arcades. Rename them Depression Arcades. Distraction Arcades. Escape Retreats for the desperate. Losers’ loitering places.

Only this mad system can assume that there is amusement in pushing coins into a slot and hoping that more will come out than you put in. There is nothing amusing about money. Only when we don’t need to pay to become happy will there be true amusement.

There is a smelly tackiness about these arcades where flashing neon lights illuminating pound signs and ceaseless bleeps and pings contaminate already dingy streets. Boys who might just be men push and pull on the lever of the machines with the ferocity of warriors fighting not for gold but brass. They fight for their coins with the deranged rage of people who have a repressed awareness that they are competing for the loser's medal. Anyone who needs to bet with small change has lost before they start. Menacing-looking louts who look like they failed the audition for a home in Albert Square patrol the aisles of amusement and stare at the losers with the look of prison guards attending serial killers. Rent boys mingle with dribbling old drunks and prematurely old women who drag on fags, not sure whether their purses will be empty before their stomachs are. Nobody looks remotely amused. They look so unamused that they could be in church.

And in a sense they are. They are in the Temple of Mammon, pursuing the ultimate amusement of the jingle-jangle money system. Rules of the game: no money and you’re out—down and out.

Sitting in one of these stinking places—the smell is either urine or sweat, but not a sniff of happiness—it is tempting to defy the rules and insist on amusing yourself. Take out a good novel and read it; pull out a whistle and play a tune; tell a joke. “You trying to take the piss?”, the menacing oafs would ask. “I thought this was an amusement arcade,” you say, “and I’m amusing myself. Yes, I must say I feel decidedly amused.” The amusement guard turns out to be a black belt in random street violence.

Of course, in the good old days workers used to sit round the old piano and sing songs. What a load of old tripe people come out with; the foolish illusions of nostalgia. Most wage-slaves never had pianos—and those who did tormented themselves with hymns about Jesus and damnation and silly ditties about being happy. “Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag and smile, smile, smile!” Hardly a prophetic overture for being sent down a trench to kill other poor stuck-in-the-mud mugs singing German songs of distraction. The past was much like the present, only they were less sophisticated at building the amusement machines.

Not that many years ago fruit machines were straightforward. You put in your sixpence, pulled the handle, waited for three plums to appear, they didn’t and you either put in another sixpence or went away feeling miserable. Two cherries meant you got your sixpence back— only to lose it with the next pull of the handle. At least you knew where you stood.

These days losing money is an elaborate business. The game screens are like modern battlefields and the would-be loser is faced with an array of buttons requiring at least three hands to operate with any skill. My father used to lose ha’pennies pushing marbles into one another. I was a child of the one-pull fruit machine. Kids today watch their coins orbit the galaxies and commune with other life forms before they finally see them disappear into the magical sphere of the arcade owner’s bank account. The thieving coin-collector-state-licensed gaming operator, no less—is well amused. As ever, our loss is their gain. The poor man in his amusement arcade, the rich man (or his errand boy) in the Stock Exchange. We’re urged to gamble for pound coins. They’re gambling on the wealth which we produce. Their jackpot is announced in small print on the share pages of the newspapers every day. The compensation prizes are in the £3-an-hour Jobs-Vacant column. Which might just leave a few quid over at the weekend for a trip to feed the amusement meter. 

Steve Coleman