The Sacred and the Mundane: Video Games in the Convenience Store

This extended abstract, presented at DiGRA 2018, argues for a spatialized approach to digital game research by examining coin-operated video game cabinets in corner shops, bodegas, and convenience stores. Its central thesis is that these cabinets produce a distinctive mode of consumption with an intimate, ludic, and sacred quality. The author frames the cabinet as a small shrine or altar sitting apart from yet embedded in everyday commerce, while the gameplay it offers functions like the other small consumables on the shelves, such as snacks and necessities. The analysis draws on theoretical work on play and the sacred, including Huizinga and Caillois, alongside Anna MacCarthy's concept of ambient television and Dominic Pettman's description of arcades as spatialized Sabbaths.

A key claim is that the coin-op cabinet is tensioned between two roles: an object of consumption and a site of potentially transformative play. Unlike televisions, these cabinets remain in an "on" state through their attract modes, which the author reads as signaling to shoppers that they could be playing rather than only shopping. The paper situates these machines within a wider ambience of ludic objects in such stores, including lottery tickets, playing cards, and informal games, and it argues that play in this setting is neither fragile nor purely radical but contingent and persistent.

The scope is conceptual and theoretical rather than empirical; the document does not present survey data, sample sizes, or quantitative findings, and its geographic focus is implied through the North American context of corner stores and bodegas. It concludes by calling for further research into the cultural practices and ideologies emerging from arcades and commercial play spaces, and it cautions researchers to attend to differences between play contexts as well as similarities.