I spent Sunday hanging out at an arcade at the mall. It almost felt like my weekends in the early aughts—except, now apparently you swipe a card to play games? A digital card is infinitely easier to manage than rolls of quarters pulling down my wide-legged, low-rise strappy Tripp pants—but there's something undeniably satisfying about the clink, clink, clink of feeding individual coins into the machine...

Somewhere between finding that I’m still a champion Skee-Ball player and realizing I was the...