Observation

Observation occurred at 7:45 – 8:42 p.m., 9/19/2013; Worlds Games Store

Field Notes written at 11:12 a.m., 9/21/2013

               I should begin by acknowledging that I have a small history with the place I observed. The store I spent time in—Worlds Games—is one I’ve visited many times before. I went with my boyfriend Peter, who had some things he wanted to trade in.  We’re both known in the store; we could be considered regulars. For the past year, I have found myself in the store for one reason or another about once a week and sometimes more than that.

               Worlds Games is a general video game store in Salt Lake City. As an independent shop, they stock old and vintage games, systems, and accessories as well as new titles and systems. They also buy products—anything that is even tangentially related to video games. The store features everything from video and computer games ranging from the 70s to present to card games, cardboard standees, and other licensed merchandise (think statuettes, lunch boxes, plushes, masks, posters, and more). Many things in the store don’t have a price, and it’s clear that the amount of merchandise is testing the capacity of the store. Every wall has shelving, and all of the shelving is full. In the center of the store, there are displays—many of them made simply by stacking merchandise on top of other merchandise until it makes 5- or 6-foot towers.

               I enter the store from the north side of the building. Worlds Games is on the north end of a small, 3-store strip mall. In the middle is a barber (where I’ve only once seen a customer), and at the south end is a print shop. Walking into Worlds Games, you travel through a short hallway made by eye-level bookcases stocked with games and merchandise. Once inside, a counter and a small office is to the left. The counter is essentially a wood and glass display case that has been fit with Christmas lights and filled with old and rare gaming systems. Straight ahead, in the southeast corner of the shop is an area that is walled off with bookcases and plywood. Inside, they have several couches and a projection system set up. The area can be rented out to hold gaming tournaments, but more often than not, one of the many employees of the store is in there watching a movie or playing a game. In the southwest corner of the shop is the area for new(er) games, featuring stock for the Nintendo Wii, WiiU, 3DS, DS, PS3, PS2, and XBOX 360. New and used stock are placed on the shelves together. Often, there will be multiple copies of any title, all at different price points due to new or used status and condition. This trend holds true for the wall of PC games found along the eastern wall of the shop. Here, new games are interspersed with software made as early as the late 80s. One can pick up a copy of Diablo III as well as an unopened copy of Windows NT.

               The people who work in the store seem to be on an ever-revolving basis. The owner of the store is constant, even if he isn’t present all the time. He appears to be in his early 30s, and all of his employees seem to be of early high school age. It’s a running joke with my friends who shop there that you can never go to Worlds Games without seeing a new employee. Frequently, the employees outnumber the customers, and this is why they’re so often hanging out in the projector room. The employees are also predominately male—I only remember seeing a young woman working there once, and it has probably been a year since that happened. Nonetheless, they’re usually very talkative and happy to give their opinions on anything and everything. There is a large flat screen TV set up on the counter, plugged into an XBOX 360. When the employees aren’t talking to customers or in the projector room, they’re messing with the counter system.

               September 19^th, 2013 was a Thursday night, and the store didn’t have many customers. When I came in, there was an older man—thin, tall, with a white/gray beard and glasses—accompanied by two boys, both of whom were probably around 10 or 12. He was talking to the employee currently at the register (one I didn’t recognize) while one of the kids he was with played the 360 on the counter. He was playing a fighting game, something put out by Capcom featuring superheroes beating up other superheroes. The other kid spent the time back in the section of newer games. When the transaction was finished, the older man and the kid who had been playing the 360 went and joined the other kid in the newer games section. One of the boys had picked up a special edition boxed copy of Call of Duty: Black Ops and was talking about how much he loved that game. The older man asked the other kid how he liked Black Ops, and the kid gushed that he “loved it!”

               While the Black Ops conversation was going on, another event was taking place. When I’d first walked into the store, I could hear that someone was using the projector room. Because it isn’t really a room, any sound made by the system in that corner floods the entire store. Someone was in there playing the newest Grand Theft Auto game (GTA V), which came out on Tuesday (9/17/2013). The game series is infamous for its violent, raunchy content, and while the man and the two boys were talking about Black Ops, you could hear the dialogue of the game playing out across the store, a long string of F***s and N*****s, accompanied by what sounded like beating someone to death with a baseball bat. The owner of the store suddenly appeared from the office, and he dashed into the projector room. Immediately, the sounds stopped and the owner went back to the office. Another employee (one I had seen before) emerged from the projector room a few minutes later, looking a bit peeved. He wasn’t made to shut off his game entirely, though. You could still see the game map projected on the wall through the doorway to the room. As long as I was there, though, it didn’t start up again.

               It seemed to me that the owner was trying to keep offensive content to a minimum with young kids in the store, but at the same time, those very kids were professing their love for Call of Duty: Black Ops, a game that consists largely of indiscriminately shooting people to death. Fans of the game would say that it is not indiscriminate—you are given missions to kill people. Nonetheless, it’s a game about killing. However, the cultural taboo that was violated in the store was not the kids that played violent games, but rather the loud broadcasting of certain words. The older man and the two boys didn’t really seem to acknowledge what was going on, and given current gaming culture, I wouldn’t be wholly surprised if one of those kids didn’t already own a copy of GTA V. When the man and kids went to leave, they walked by one of the cases that held older systems. One of the boys pointed to a Virtual Boy that was set up, and the older man had to explain to him that it was a Virtual Boy and it came out before even the Super Nintendo. After this exchange, the man knocked into one of the towers of precariously stacked merchandise, sending a half dozen or so games flying to the floor. Immediately he shouted out, “Nothing’s broke!” The kids scrambled, picking up all of the cases and putting them back onto the stack.

               Another person that had been in the store when I arrived was a young man in his late teens or early twenties who seemed to be alone, drifting through the store picking up items. He wore a black and white shirt with a graphic of a turntable on it and thick-framed glasses. He walked among the stacks and bins of merchandise, picking up things here and there and digging around in the bin of empty game boxes. After about half an hour, he approached the counter. He was holding maybe 8-10 cases, some of them with games and others empty. He started explaining that he was hoping he could get some kind of bulk discount. Because Worlds Games is independent, it is more likely for them to cut deals with customers. For this customer, however, it wasn’t to be. He’d picked up a lot of extremely cheap items, and the owner was called out. He couldn’t justify giving any kind of a discount when his margins on each item were already so low. The customer paid for his items and quickly left.

               The store was empty for a while, save for myself, Peter, and the employees. Eventually, a young man and young woman entered. Both were blond and dressed in unusually formal looking clothes— black button-up shirt, red tie, and black slacks on the man and a short black dress on the woman. They approached the counter immediately, and the woman asked the owner (who had come out to work the counter) if they sold any N64 expansions. The owner asked her if she knew which model of N64 she had, and she responded that she didn’t. She went on to explain that the man’s parents owned a cabin at a lake, and the cabin had an N64. I assume that it was far enough away or so infrequently visited that they didn’t know much about the N64 system. The owner replied to her that he couldn’t really tell her which expansions to buy since he didn’t know the model, but that expansions were fairly rare anyway, so he might not have what she was looking for. The woman took the news well, and went on to look around the store. At one point, she exclaimed “I can’t believe anyplace sells these anymore!” while looking at some Super Nintendo peripherals. At this point, it was clear that the shop was getting ready to close for the night, so I left before the N64 couple had finished browsing.