Thoughts
What bothers me about the over representation of the arcade cabinet and Atari-era video games in culture is that they’re inherently used as
an appeal to nostalgia. In Ready Player One or The Minecraft Movie, the 8-bit game is not just a symbol of what video games have come from, but it’s idealized as pure and perfect. And that’s just not substantiated or relevant to my experience playing video games. Playing the games is secondary to looking at them as an icon of a better time. In contrast, Brandon Mull has several scenes where the main character’s adventures are contingent on their ability to play arcade games (second Candy Shop War and third Five Kingdoms), but it works because there’s not historical baggage associated with the games. They are treated as if they are modern because in the context of the fantasy universe they are.