Underground (literally) gaming in Chile

Way south in the southern hemisphere, gaming is thriving in Chile. Although video games cost at least 1.5 x as much (and sometimes as much as twice as much), and the average Chilean is far poorer than the average American, there are no shortage of video games and consoles in this country. All of the major department stores sell them, and they have their own Gamestop-type chain stores. However, these outlets are far fewer in number than the small, independent game stores that interestingly appear in large clusters.  Consequently, I was at once overwhelmed and confused while wandering around in the underground mall in El Paseo Las Palmasin Santiago, Chile. We’ve all been to malls that have 5 Gamestops and wondered why it was really necessary to have 5 Gamestops in one mall. The Lyon mall takes that to a new extreme: save for a few stationary and video shops, it is an entire large floor of game stores, all with seemingly the same stock and services. The stores could only be differentiated (by me, anyway) by their varied displays and wall decorations. All of them offer console repair and modification.  This is not the only mall with a big clump of small game stores: I’ve been to several in the city, and the Bio-Bio flea market offers a similar (albeit sketchier) experience.

How does the discerning Chilean shopper decide which game store to go to in one of these malls?

Perhaps it’s …the personal touch… like the shopkeeper who gruffly refused an interview with me. I just wanted to talk, Mr. Shopkeeper: I wasn’t going to report your bootleg PS1 games to Sony of South America (that exists, right?) . I decided to interview some of the locals, who were either milling around or actually buying things, to try and get a feel for the gaming scene in the Providencia neighbourhood.

Carlos Quintera, left Carlos and Ivan Valenzuela, right

Everyone that we approached (other than the shopkeeper) were quite happy to do a short interview, and luckily for me Chilean gamers are pretty good with their English speaking. (I can’t say the same for their flight attendants, unfortunately…) Carlos Quintera, 18, was the first person that I interviewed. Although he’s primarily a PC gamer now, his first console was the PS1 and his first game was Super Mario Bros. on the NES. At the moment he plays Diablo 2 online a lot with his friends, but he wants to buy Starcraft 2. He said that the most popular game in his group of friends was World of Warcraft, but he finds the game too complicated. I asked him if there were any locally-developed Chilean games that he liked to play and he seemed confused by the question. Needless to say, the answer was “no.”

Carlos (popular name!) Valenzuela, 25, on the other hand, was a more casual gamer. He was just at the mall to peruse Wii games, and if anything he just plays Silent Hill with his brother, Ivan.  (I embarrassingly mistook Ivan for his son and not his brother, but they didn’t seem too upset…) Like Carlos Q., his first game was Super Mario Bros on the NES: it would become clear to me that the original Super Mario Bros has had a very large cultural impact in Chile, too. Ivan, 14, favours C.O.D. Black Ops and did not seem as sold on the Wii as his older brother is …

(to be continued…)