JOYSTIK: Why did you consent to this interview?
FRANK: Because I don't have anything against video games and I do have something against people who keep kids from playing them.
JOYSTIK: Do you ever play them?
FRANK: No, but I love to listen to them. I like rooms full of that sound. It's a very interesting environment. When I was coming back from my European tour I had a layover in New York. I went into the video-game room at the airport and walked around with a tape recorder, recording the whole room going at once. Then I listened to it on earphones on the plane home. It was great. But I'm not interested in "plooking" buttons and blowing things up.
JOYSTIK: Do you think it fritters away quarters that could be better spent elsewhere?
FRANK: No, it's entertainment, and you have to pay for it. You just have to decide if the quarter you spend on a video game is worth the amount of fun you get out of it.
JOYSTIK: How about its effect on poorer families?
FRANK: If you had to choose between spending the afternoon in an unpleasant house with a bunch of other kids, where the family argues all the time, and the air conditioning doesn't work, even if you're poor you're gonna find the quarters to go play video games. If you don't have the quarters, you're gonna go hang out there so you can mooch a game from somebody or at least talk to someone, which will make you feel better.
That's the other thing about a video-game parlor: it's a gathering place, which lends a sociology to it that transcends what the games are. And if you're good at video games, it's okay to be smart. An arcade is one place where it's okay to show some intelligence.
JOYSTIK: In what way?
FRANK: Most people in America do everything they can to disguise the fact that they're intelligent. There's no other race of people on earth that wants to pretend so hard that they're stupid. That's because in high school you learn that if you're smart, you're not gonna get laid. The girls pretend just as hard as the guys. "Nobody wants to pooch a smartie." So you pretend to be dumb. Pretty soon, you're really dumb.
[...]
FRANK: I'll tell you the only problem with video games – the mentality of the people who are scared of them. Parents who won't let their kids play them. That's the crux of the biscuit.
MOON: There's now a law here that says you can't skip school to play video games. During the school year there's this one place that won't let anyone under 18 play them. I don't know anybody who would skip school to play a game of Pac-Man. It's so useless to even worry about it! I mean, get serri-oss!
(Moon excuses herself. She's going to her first Van Halen concert.)
FRANK: Listen. I don't like puzzles. I don't do games, don't do sports, don't do chess or checkers, don't do pingpong. I don't jog. But I think everybody should do that stuff if they want to. Same with video games. Any kind of electronic device that a kid can become friends with is good.
