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Should We Preserve The Rental Store Experience?

Should We Preserve The Rental Store Experience?

Gamers talk a lot about preserving the arcade experience. A now mostly dead business, arcades were where many of us got our first taste in video gaming. It provided a social experience that simply hasn’t been recreated by the online gaming options that are available to us today, and beyond that it also created a feeling of atmosphere and community that doesn’t get translated into online formats. In fact, many argue that it is the lack of arcades which has splintered the gaming community today on so many fronts.

I’d like to take these arguments and apply them to something else from my and many other gamers childhoods: the rental store.

I’m not talking about Blockbuster Video, although if that was the only store near you, I suppose it will do. I’m talking about the little corner mom and pop rental shop, run out of a space no bigger than your living room. I’m talking about the shop that would have rows upon rows of wood paneled shelves with VHS tapes and game boxes littered across them. I’m talking about the shop that used little plastic tags on hooks to show whether or not a game or video is in stock, the type of store where you could browse for days, while still always coming back to the same game.

This is an experience that I loved as a kid. I remember when brand new games would come into the shop. They would be kept in a case right next to the window, and the neighborhood kids would look through the window and wait patiently after school for their parents to pick them up. They always wanted to be the first to be picked up, because that meant that they might snag the only copy of Mega Man X that the store had.

This wasn’t just a place that allowed you to try games before you bought them. This was a community who collectively owned the games. For example, I frequently re-rented a copy of Super Mario RPG , and my file was never deleted. Heck, when it came to RPGs like that, sometimes other people who would rent the game would grind on your save file for you, just to try out characters and skills they didn’t have access to yet. They would never advance your plot, though, and you were always left in the same area, sometimes much more powerful than you were before.

Should We Preserve The Rental Store Experience?

It’s this sense of community ownership that I think people are missing out on these days. Games aren’t something you trade and sell anymore. Now, they are simply chunks of data that you and you alone access. DRM has become so prevalent that the very idea of trading games is seen as impossible. So many games now require extra online passes to play online or even operate if you get them used, let alone for free.

I think that this is actually harming the gaming community in the same way the lack of arcades is harming us. In general, the gaming community is becoming more isolated and individualistic, and we need these centers of community to pull us together.

What do you think? Are arcades and rental stores important centers of community? Let us know in the comments.

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