George Mitchell and his family entered the Chuck.E. Cheese and were immediately assaulted by the roving trills of two dozen token operated machines. On top of that, there was the ugly crooning of a Radio Disney hit over a fuzzy speaker system, and some Spanglish barking coming from the kitchen. The Nickelodeon lights were squint-worthy, only a few beats away from being dangerously close to Seizure Town. There was something so clean about the place that it must have actually been very unclean, like a hospital or a kitchen.

“We’re late,” Cynthia, the second youngest Mitchell girl, said with a snap of her bubblegum. She pushed her younger sister in the back – a pair of frizzled ponytails bouncing around – and made her way towards the closest mirror to check her make-up. “We should’ve just parked in front of the K-Mart.”

“I didn’t like the look of those guys,” George said. “They looked like they might strip our hubcaps and use them for toboggans.”

His daughter would have rolled her eyes at her father’s tenuous grip on teenage delinquency if it wouldn’t have interrupted her emergency mascara re-application session.

George took the place in as the family took their seats at a long bright orange bench. The Chuck E. Cheese reminded him of the one and only time he’d been to a strip club. The place was called Flirts, and it was located on the fringe of Reno. He remembered the smell, like burnt neon and hair product. Everybody who worked there seemed three days into detox. The more he looked around, the more George realized that the only difference between this place and that was the kids.

Victor, George’s oldest son, summed it up: “This place is so fucking lame.”

“Language!” his wife, Angela, shrieked. She slid her purse off her shoulder and, as she opened it, gave George a long, exhausted shake of the head, as if to say, Who’s terrible idea was this? At that moment, one of the methadone zombies appeared and walked the family through the pizza menu.

“We’re actually part of a party,” George declared. “My nephew, Alex Bloki.”

The zombie pointed towards a small group of kids tucked away at the corner table, like they were being quarantined off for being too excitable. George recognized his gangly, awkward 11 year old nephew (by marriage), by the crown of his bright red hair. He was looking down into his lap, his hands folded in such a way that there was no mistaking it for anything else: he was playing a handheld video game. Three of his friends, each more awkward than the last, sat around the table too, looking equally pathetic taking bites from wedges of cardboard made to look like pizza.

Victor groaned. He gave a pleading look to his father. George returned the look doubly, saying, If I’m in this, so are you.

“Ang-e-la!” a woman screamed. George’s wife jumped out of her seat, stood up like a bullet. She stood at attention as she received a half-hug from Debbie, her sister. Half-woman, half-Avon lady.

“Debbie!”

Before he could drown in a high frequency swarm of chattering, George made a break for the restroom. On his way he walked the length of the restaurant, trying to follow the poorly displayed signs. He walked past the skeeball, basketball, Galaga, Robotron, Q-Bert, Ms. Pac-Man. Every game he played as a kid. All of them empty. There were even a few George had never heard of before, like Drum Mania and Time Crisis. George felt a rush of nostalgia and excitement.

He could play these games with his children!

George returned from the bathroom with a goofy look on his face. He found Victor playing with Deb’s gold plated iPhone. “Did you kids know there’s an arcade over there?” he asked. His question fell on deaf ears. “They have tons of games,” he continued.

“We’re not blind, Dad,” Cynthia said.

“Then why aren’t you kids having fun? Don’t you like games anymore?”

Alex, the birthday boy, who no one had seen or heard approaching the table, spoke up in his loudest voice, “YEAH, LIKE FARMVILLE!” The Mitchell family jumped in their seats, as if startled by a gunshot. “I DON’T LIKE PLAYING THOSE GAMES BECAUSE YOU DON’T GET ACHIEVEMENTS OR ANYTHING SO NO ONE KNOWS HOW GOOD YOU ARE AT THEM.”

“I think you get tickets,” George said.

“MAYBE THAT WOULD BE COOL IF YOU COULD SCAN THE TICKETS AND HAVE THEM IN YOUR CONSOLE, KIND OF LIKE VIRTUAL TROPHIES.”

“You can trade them in for prizes.”

“YEAH, BUT WHAT’S THE POINT OF DOING IT IF ALL OF YOUR FRIENDS DON’T KNOW YOU DID IT?”

George studied his nephew. “You could probably go home with a laser pointer if you spent all night on the ski ball.”

Alex looked at the ground, then back at his uncle. He looked ashamed, as if he didn’t know before that he was talking to a retarded person and was now replaying over the conversation in his head to make sure he wasn’t being mean. “I THINK MY CINNAMON STICKS ARE HERE,” he proclaimed, then took his Nintendo DS out of his pocket walked back to his friends.

George turned to Victor. “There’s a game where you can shoot people, but as a team. You play as partners.”

“Time Crisis,” Victor said.

“You can use pedals to take cover. Isn’t that neat?”

Victor’s lips parted. He looked up from his phone, at his sister, looking for help. His vocabulary was strained trying to articulate the crudeness of a pedal-based cover system in a post-Gears of War landscape. He finally decided on, “You’re right. That is really neat, Dad…”

George could tell his son didn’t find this at all ‘neat’. In fact, he could tell he was being humored, and, being a proud man who didn’t enjoy being out of the loop, he decided he wasn’t going to allow it. “I’m going to grab some change from the car and grab some tokens and we can play some games.”

“Sure, whatever.”

Minutes later, George guided Victor around the red carpet labyrinth. The tokens jangling in his pocket creating a joyous sound that reminded George of childhood trips to the corner store — or, at the very least, the TV shows he used to watch where people did that. George steered his son toward the technicolor epicenter of gun, where. he was overwhelmed by the sounds and the sights. He felt dizzy and drunk, but his son remained completely calm.

Victor squirmed a bit, knowing his father expected some reaction out of him. George thought the sheer technical prowess of the arcade’s full force would knock him out. Clearly, he had overestimated the power of the joystick. He walked over to a the cabinet playing the demo mode of Die Hard: The Arcade Game.

“Die Hard is a pretty cool movie, huh?”

Victor looked away. “Sure is, dad.”

George calmed himself. “All right. Fine. I don’t see how playing one of the best action of movies of all time wouldn’t impress you, but that’s neither here nor there.” George pointed to the two kids in the corner. “Those guys are having fun.”

“Dad, I’m pretty sure they’re stoners.”

“What?”

He spoke in a whisper, “They’re high.”

“Oh,” George shook it off. “What about pinball?”

He grabbed his son by the shoulders and brought him over to the official Chuck E. Cheese pinball machine. Different parts of the board lit up in a mishmash of colors, each triggering a burst of siren sound. Reds, greens, yellows screaming in a primal invitation: Never had the idea of playing with a giant rat been more appealing.

“What do you think?”

“It’s cool.”

“Stop humoring me!” George shouted and threw up his hands. “I know you don’t think it’s cool! You think it’s boring! Everything we do is so boring! I take you to the beach, it’s boring! I take you to Disneyland, it’s boring! We’re at the most distracting place on the entire planet and you’re still bored! Look at all of these games. You can be a space man, or John McClane, or Jimi Hendrix, or…whatever that thing is,” he said, pointing to the Q-Bert machine. “ What do I have to do to get you to get into something and not just humor me?”

Victor, a dark-eyed young man with a long, full face, had up to this point played the part of the adult to a T. Now, however, he shrunk in his clothes and became boyish. He looked about to cry.

George sighed. “What do you play, Victor?”

Victor shrugged, then George expected Victor to grab his PSP, but instead, he went for his phone. He fiddled with it a bit and turned it towards his father. “It’s called Mafia Wars.”

George stared at the numbers, trying to make sense of it all, but even if he could understand how the game was played. It wouldn’t explain how a spreadsheet had enamored his son, but Tekken 6 didn’t warrant a raised eyebrow. He listened attentively as his son explained the game to him on the walk back to the orange bench, where the family was finishing off their second Hawaiian style pizza.

When they left a few hours later, the family was shocked to find the Camry’s hubcaps missing. Standing there in the parking lot, his hands on his hips, George should have been angry. Instead, he smiled, and laughed to himself all the way home, content in the knowledge that he wasn’t completely out of touch with today’s youth after all.

Written by Hardcasual’s Canadian correspondent, Filipe Salgado.