I suppose one of the things that makes encounters with these guys so painful is how much better we feel we could do in their shoes, and how much fun we imagine we'd be having. Working at the mall: It's a high school right of passage that, I admit, I, too, lived through. And I know I, for one, sat and drooled over my GameStop application - dreaming of minimal hard work and maximum time chatting about games. Where did I end up? Stuffing teddy bears and shouting "Happy Birthday!" on command. That's probably why videogame store cashier-dom still sounds so glamorous to me.
Beyond our idealistic projections of employment stardom (because, quite honestly, it's probably an enormous pain to work at a games store in the mall, just like it's an enormous pain to work at any store in the mall), there's something deeply jarring about the indifference we meet when we shop for videogames. Many of us are gamers in more than one sense; we play videogames, certainly, but we're also involved in an online gaming community, one hosted by innumerous news sites, blogs and forums. We might easily spend hours each day reading about and discussing videogames. When there's an important title on the horizon, it gets everyone talking. To us, these things are crucial. We feel comfortable, substantial, within our own social bounds. We've developed our own way to understand life, to measure the importance of events: by posts, by hits, by Slashdot.
Then we go out into world, to the one other place we feel certain videogames should be a big deal: a videogame store. Yet, once there, instead of camaraderie, we're met with the lifeless stare of our own consumer status, as our hobby, our passion is knocked down to size by its real-life reflection, by what it really is: disks in boxes that can be purchased. After all, you can't have gaming without shopping. What then, if the experience of shopping is empty? Again, you can't blame the employees; they may be working in a small space, but the reach of their company is huge. Still, the visceral impact of that divide - the seemingly un-navigable fissure between meaningful, virtual community and meaningless, physical reality - can only be described as a feeling like falling.
Too Cool for School: Hardcore Culture in Defiance of "Mainstreamization"
What could simultaneously dissolve that unsettling disconnect and fix our good advice problem? What would make shopping meaningful again? How about a store where videogames actually were important, where the clerks - and the entire establishment - were themselves part of the gaming community. Somewhere you could go to browse, to ask questions, to enjoy being a gamer. Somewhere you weren't reduced to a mere consumer, where you could hand over your money without feeling like one more cog in the big business wheel. Somewhere not yet sterilized, depersonalized, by the gaze of pure capitalism. Somewhere, in short, that doesn't exist anymore: local fanboy shops.
You know the ones, run by your neighborhood geek squad, always a little dusty and a lot over-crowded, but loved by a dedicated few just the same. When was the last time the world saw one of those? We still have similar stores here and there dedicated to other "dorky" (and equally wonderful) interests, like tabletop gaming and comic books. But these subcultures, lucky as they may be to still have unique, lovingly run shops to offer their patronage to, suffer from other setbacks. For one thing, the physical components of their cultures can be hard to come by if you aren't fortunate enough to live near one of these fanboy shops.
