Tucked between a bodega and a bar in a former industrial neighborhood on the border of Brooklyn and Queens, an unassuming door leads to New York’s newest, most radical punk scene.
But the slouched-over kids and bearded scenesters who slide into the cavernous space, known as Silent Barn, aren’t just here for the fine underground music. They really come for the video games.
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This is the home of Babycastles, an underground collective and gallery dedicated to pressing the reset button on the concept of the video game arcade, with loving help from a growing culture of independent developers, players, and fans.
Don’t expect any change machines, prizes, or incessant video game musak wafting across a linoleum-lined room full of pale adolescents. Descend into the basement of Silent Barn on any given night, and you’re likely to encounter a rowdy scene that looks more like CBGBs if it had been founded by hackers with a predilection for florescent neon.
That’s how you might describe Kunal Gupta and Syed Salahuddin, who met each other through the independent gaming scene after college and launched Babycastles with a smattering of music- and beer-soaked events in 2009. They grew up in the 1980s and 90s, as a steady stream of home gaming consoles were eclipsing the arcade – and the privacy of the living room was replacing a lively, if not completely functional, public space.
“It was a dark, dingy place with a lot of teenagers who were really into arcade games,” Salahuddin says of his favorite arcade from childhood, the recently-closed Chinatown Arcade. “There were a lot of random strangers and friends you made that night. People stood around these machines discussing the games, talking about the games, deconstructing these games.”
In Babycastles’ cozy underground space, visitors gather around homemade games, installed on often aging computers that are embedded inside ramshackle cabinets. The games – often constructed around an array of silly, bizarre and downright fascinating conceits, and told in a vibrant, minimalist aesthetic – are designed by young developers from New York and around the world, whose clever antics are more accostumed to internet message boards, blogs and IRC channels. The cabinets are lovingly decorated in all manner of artwork, from intricate painted cardboard panels to collage-covered wood panels.
For the opening exhibition at a temporary space near Times Square last year, Thu Tran, the inimitable maestro of the IFC show “Food Party,” turned a former storefront into a veritable zoo of brightly-colored furniture and cabinets. In painted wood and styrofoam, it was a masterful and whimsical refusal to answer that pesky question of whether games can be art. Here was a kind of proof that you don’t have to choose.
Nor do you have to play by the rules; in fact, often no one knows what they are…
Read the rest of the article over on Motherboard.tv.
