It probably seems as if a lot of my “Why Pro Gamers Are Assholes” series is nothing more than bitching at the fact that I can’t find other people to play games with me, and it is. Though the internet is letting people stay connected across long distances at light speed, would you believe that it is actually slightly harder to find other gamers in your area than it was a few years ago? I’m sure that a lot of you are calling “bullshit’ on me right now, but hear me out.

When I was formulating this article, I postulated my “pickup basketball game” analogy to one of my casual gaming friends. For those of you who don’t remember part two, the analogy was “you don’t go to a pickup basketball game and then act surprised when there are basketball players who are better than you there. Everyone is there to play basketball and everyone has trained long and hard to do so. If you aren’t good enough, that is because you haven’t been training hard enough.” I made the analogy because I wanted to find a clever way of saying you can’t expect to always be the best without practice. Essentially, if you partake in a game that by its very nature is competitive, like a fighting game, then you should expect people to play to win, rather than be content with randomly mashing buttons.

Well the rather expected response from my casual gaming friend was “I’m not at a pickup basketball game.” Now, this is about the time I would normally throw my hands up in the air and shout “You missed the whole point of the analogy!!!” followed by smacking my casual gaming friend in the face with a fish, but he actually has a good point. He isn’t at a pickup basketball game. He is at home, in his living room, with a very small and select group of friends. A better analogy would be, say, backyard basketball, where a few friends play a simple game of horse around a stand up hoop. You could reasonably assume that everyone in your friendly little backyard game is around your skill level, most notably because you probably wouldn’t invite the semi-pros from the neighborhood park pickup games to your house.

This got me thinking. If the random splatter of friends sitting down to some games of BlazBlue is not the equivalent of a pickup game, what is? The answer? The arcade. An arcade is filled with a bunch of like-minded gamers who are willing to actually spend money on the prospect that they are better than the other gamers around them. It’s all cutting room floor at the arcade. If you lose a game, you lose your hard earned money. Gamers are basically forced to be competitive or be poor, which, is pretty much exactly what pro gamers are looking for.

So when my casual gamer friends tell me to fuck off and go to the arcades if I am looking for the hardcore gaming experience, they actually have a point. There is only one problem though. Arcades are rapidly failing. How many of you have an arcade nearby that has any sort of modern competitive games. Heck, I live in Jersey, and I’ll be lucky if I see anything other than skeeball or crane games in my arcades. I have to go to New York to find even one BlazBlue cabinet. The fact of the matter is, I can’t go to arcades to get my competitive gaming fix because they don’t exist anymore.

There are lots of reasons why arcades are failing. Inflation has caused arcade games to go up from 25 cents a pop to a dollar or more for recent releases, which has discouraged many people from bothering. It is not only cheaper in the long run to pick up a console version and an arcade stick, it is also more accessible and carries less of a penalty for losing when you are still learning the game. Add to this the fact that home console ports of games generally feature a plethora of new modes, stages, characters, and other extras that make arcade ports basically null and void. The home version of Tatsunoko VS Capcom for example, features 8 new characters that you simply can’t play in the arcade. Arcade ports don’t benefit from balance patches, nor do they allow for online play. They don’t allow players to enter training mode, or most of the time any other mode other than the appropriately named arcade mode. They are, for all purposes, worse than home console ports, and even if you stay in and beat every challenger, when the day is done you will have still lost the dollar you spent to play the game in the first place.

Not only that, but arcades are primarily a social gathering and gamers are getting less social by the day. The internet allows us to find suitable opponents all over the world without leaving our living room. Not only that, but we can turn off the sound on internet opponents if they are annoying, something you can’t do in real life. Gamers are also getting poorer by the day. With the economy steadily tanking, losing a dollar here or there due to bad play is just not an option. In short, as much as it would be cool to have a place to hang out and game on a regular basis, it just isn’t economically feasible.

So pro gamers have basically been driven out of their natural habitat and have stepped into the realm of the casual gamer: the living room. It’s the only place we can go, and there we meet the inevitable resistance of the casual gamer. The sad truth of the matter is, pro gamers don’t have a place that naturally accepts their competitive nature, and have to work extra hard to find a playgroup that wants the same thing.

So no arcades means less competitive gaming and more casual gaming. Does this mean that the world of videogames is fated to get more and more casual as we push on toward the future? Has the noble pro truly lost his place in the world? What does it all mean?

Well stay tuned for the conclusion, where I put all of my rants together and figure out just what this has taught us all.