It’s hard to get ready for bed when you have to first individually unplug all your videogames. To make it easier, Kooluris rigged a single button that turns them all off. He tries not to play before bed. It gets him too hyped up. He bought a memory-foam topper for the fold-out couch to make it slightly less uncomfortable. ¶The games aren’t the only thing that keep him up at night. He’s been doing a lot of thinking about how to find true happiness. “A lot of times, once you get what you were chasing after, it’s not going to change your life,” he says. “It’s just sitting in your house, and then you sometimes can go through a depression,”

KLOV, he says, isn’t providing much support anymore. He posted pics of the finished arcade; they accused him of wanting attention. “I’ve seen your type before around here. So have a lot us who have been here for a while,” one wrote. “Your self-esteem is tied up in material possessions, your trophies.” Others were more succinct: “Poser.” But when I search through the forums I find plenty of people who came to his defense; in every thread he had a few allies. He just couldn’t see them anymore. “It got to the point where no matter what I said, I was vilified by the same bunch of people,” Kooluris says. “It’s a silly thing. No one owns this hobby. No one is more entitled to these games.”

Kooluris has had more social success in real life, inviting friends over to play in the arcade. Once a week he hosts arcade happy hours. He invites coworkers, friends, the guys he used to play Street Fighter II Champion Edition with at Nathan’s. He’s even invited some local KLOV guys but none have shown up so far. He thinks that if they ever met face to face, he’d get along with them.

He’s up for visits from strangers, too. “If there are any Street Fighter II players in the New York area,” he says, “they should come over and play here. I want this to be their hub.”

I ask: Do you still hope that you and your ex might work things out?

“I hope so,” he says. He’s still eating her raw food diet, to feel close to her.

A week later, on the phone, he’s not as hopeful. “It’s fucking perfect that the Lord of the Rings pinball is getting here the same night she’s going on her first date with someone else, which means I won.”

We ease off the subject and onto the unexpected news that he bought a pinball machine.

It won’t fit in the bedroom, so it’s going in the living room, over the boundary that he once promised would separate his hobby from the rest of his life. But there’s a silver lining: Now that the arbitrary limit has been crossed, Kooluris can start buying more pinball games and hanging out on pinball forums—Pinside, he tells me, is a really positive community.

“Arcades are a gateway drug for a pinball collection,” he says matter-of-factly, as if this had been the plan all along.