Arcades on Wheels: The Materiality and Logistics of Itinerant Gaming in Socialist Czechoslovakia

This paper examines the traveling arcade of socialist Czechoslovakia as a mobile infrastructure operated by showfolk within the country's grey economy of tolerated private enterprise. It argues that this itinerant gaming culture, centered on the maringotka (a funfair caravan adapted for gaming in the 1980s), has been largely absent from histories that focus on the homebrew programmer and state-sponsored computer clubs. The authors position the arcade as a logistical and technical assemblage shaped by scarcity, improvisation, and continual repair, and they frame it as a counterpoint to the institutional narratives that dominate existing scholarship on Eastern Bloc gaming.

The study combines archival research, including period photographs and press coverage, with oral history interviews of former arcade operators and material analysis of a preserved caravan that the authors are restoring. Findings describe the maringotka as a deliberately designed sensory space, lined with mirrors, foil, and colored lights, that offered immediate, pay-per-play gratification at odds with the non-commercial logic of the socialist economy. The paper also documents an informal repair culture in which technicians, exemplified by Tomáš Smutný, adapted smuggled Western cabinets to socialist hardware in the absence of manufacturer support, producing hybrid artifacts that the authors read as generative rather than merely restorative repair.

Preliminary oral history findings suggest that operators viewed the arcade primarily as an economic engine, and that the closed "black box" cabinet contrasted with the open, modifiable home computer. The authors contend that showfolk, a group stigmatized by the regime, became unexpected gatekeepers of digital entertainment for working-class audiences who lacked the cultural capital or institutional access needed to join computer clubs. The conclusion argues that this evidence complicates a binary of state oppression versus individual resistance, and that the mobile arcade should be recognized as a distinct strand of socialist gaming history. The findings are presented as preliminary, given the limited number of interviews and the largely undocumented nature of the subject.