Pinballers, Videoits, and the Arcade: Race, Segregation, and Leisure Space in Twentieth Century Los Angeles

Summer Institute Colloquium delivered online in the Summer of 2022 and is an expansion of those ideas and an exploration of some preliminary research about leisure and arcades spaces in 1970s and 1980s Southern California that is part of a larger digital history project that Jeffrey Lawler (see "Lacking for Leisure" in this issue) and I are currently working on.Like much of video game history, the history of the arcade and its cultural meanings have until recently been the domain of gaming journalists, gaming magazines, and enthusiasts who have treated these histories through the lens of nostalgia, remembrance, and celebration.Informed by the work of Carly Kocurek, who explores masculinity and masculine identities in arcade spaces and gaming and by the work of Kishonna Gray, and Aaron Trammell who explore racism in contemporary digital spaces and in play, the project attempts to historicize the arcade, explore the evolution of gamer identities, and look at the arcade's positionality in Southern California geography and cultural landscape.Thus far we have concentrated on mapping arcade spaces from 1978-1983 and to date, we have built a database of more than five hundred gaming spaces throughout Los Angeles and Orange Counties.Our data and preliminary maps suggest a connection between arcade/gaming spaces, segregation, popular notions of who were allowed to play in and occupy those spaces.As we worked with the data from the 1970s and 1980s, I was struck by a consistency in how leisure spaces in Los Angeles have historically been policed, racialized, and made safe for white residences while criminalizing and racially othering those deemed unsafe by popular culture and racist traditions in the city.Thus, the first part of this paper attempts to align our findings with that history and explain the creation and legacy of Southern California's popular image, explore the origins of the segregation and the ghettoization of LA's minoritized communities, and examine the racial controls over leisure spaces in Los Angeles and Southern California that impacted the evolution of arcades or gaming spaces in the city and the attitudes of LA residents to them.This history reveals a long-held animosity towards gaming spaces rooted in notions of criminality and racism in the public's perception of gaming parlours.A perception that would come to inform where arcades in the 1970s and 80s were constructed and how they were segregated, policed, and viewed by the broader public.The second half of this paper returns the reader to the 1970s and 1980s and reflects the project's first maps and the conclusions we have drawn from them.These initial maps reveal that gaming spaces were consistent with Los Angeles' suburbanization and segregation of space along economic and racial lines.As a result, gaming in the arcades of the 1980s continues already developed patterns as it was culturally defined as white, suburban, and middle-class.A definition that found expression in a variety of popular media, in the legal restrictions faced by arcade operators in minority communities, and the overall racist attitudes that Angelinos took towards arcades. 1As Los Angeles's population swelled in the 1920s and 1930s, LA officials, civic boosters, realtors, developers and concerned citizens conspired to maintain a fantasy of whiteness under a Mediterranean sun sold to Midwestern migrants who flocked to the region.