On several occasions, William Gibson has noted that his inspiration for console cowboys in Neuromancer wasn't necessarily contemporary hacker culture, but instead the kids he saw in video arcades who became experts at the games, so immersed they mastered these new pieces of technology.
Before video games became a home phenomenon, their greatest popularization was through arcade machines. I, myself, remember spending far too much time and my parents` money on these machines in the 90s, but at least overseas the first wave started in the late 70s, and author Martin Amis wrote a very illuminating contemporary account published in 1982, Invasion of the Space Invaders. It is interesting to see how much closer to the grimy entertainment culture of dive bars, drug dens, and porn theaters. He describes his relationship to them as addictive, and interprets their design in the context of getting as many quarters from players as possible. He then also describes the people who have mastered some of these games, the aces, how they exchanged tips with each other, and in fact spends a third of the book describing tips and strategies for the most popular games. Another third is dedicated to home and hand-held consoles, comparing them with the arcade experience.
Sol Yurick's 1965 novel The Warriors obviously predates the video game arcade phenomenon, but one of the Warriors encounters an arcade full of mechanical games in the same Times Square station in which he earlier has an experience at a brothel, and feels quite at home in that milieu.
This kind of social, ubiquitous but subcultural view of gaming seems very distant now that "Gamer" has been so heavily molded by ads and marketing. Ironic that the "barcade" is in fact a lot closer to the origin of video games as a cultural phenomenon, although it's obviously quite gentrified.
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