Lacking for Leisure: Spatial Constraints in Non-White Communities in Los Angeles

This essay focuses on the historical forces that created functionally different gaming spaces and their placement in white and non-white communities in Los Angeles County, exposing and reinforcing the inherent problems with community investment. 1 While I focus on structural changes in racially segregated communities and the dearth of normative game and recreative spaces in black and minoritized communities, Sean Smith's work highlights how and why those spaces were imagined as principally white and associated with a safe environment.In combination, we look to demonstrate that both policy and social constructs helped to create functionally different types of gaming spaces in white suburbia that also looked to police and control those from outside the community.Our work explores not only the segregated history of Los Angeles, but the interplay of race and leisure over the 20 th century.The principal ideas were inspired by a variety of digital works, including Abigail Norris' "Mapping Memphis" that examined the spatial connections of a black owned mortuary and the surrounding community in Memphis, Tennessee.Similar digital history projects map communities that are under-represented and help visualize economic and social connections and how historical spaces are often problematized by conscious and unconscious bias and racism. 2 I am primarily concerned with varied game and leisure spaces such as arcades, access to those game spaces, and their creation, lack of creation, or differential creation in relation to historical economic and structural racism throughout Los Angeles.In order to situate why and where gaming spaces were placed, this essay principally maps factory closures in relation to census data to situate the economic difference between communities and the extent that the changing economic structure of older neighbourhoods affected investment in leisure spaces, in this case gamed spaces with arcade cabinets, within those communities.To help understand the reach and relevance of gaming spaces within communities, gamed spaces were categorized into four distinct types to visualize the qualitatively different types of spaces, the number of games they held, their associated attractions, and their proximity to a variety of communities (See Figure 1).Employing the term "gamed spaces" and a very specific definition of arcade has allowed us to differentiate a variety of spaces and their placement throughout Los Angeles County that highlights the intentionality of the location of different gamed spaces, whether or not they were nominally known as arcades or merely housed a few games.Primary game spaces or arcade spaces were distinctly that, arcades.Their primary and often singular attraction were the arcade games themselves.Secondary game spaces or gamed spaces would most often qualify as an arcade by most metrics, but the arcades were secondary, or at least parallel, to the main attraction.These sites contained larger arcades and were nominally family entertainment centres such as Chuck E. Cheese, Mini-Golf centres, or Go-Cart facilities.Tertiary game spaces or "spaces with games" may or may not have qualified locally as an arcade but housed games within larger businesses, such as bowling alleys, skating rinks, pizza parlours, or batting cages.These spaces often had fewer games and not only was the primary attraction something other than video games, but most activities were spent with the advertised attraction such as bowling or skating.The final space, quaternary, often what route operators referred to as "street," were housed in liquor or convenience stores, laundromats, and restaurants, among other locales.