The Hidden History of Gaming

Abstract: This thesis examines how the early UK videogame magazine articulated videogaming as both a cultural industry and as a social practice. The research enquires into the function of the gaming magazine and asks how this function was performed. By tracing the evolution of the role of videogame magazines from arbitration to celebration, the study shows how these media texts provide a unique route to understanding early gaming culture in the UK. The theoretical framework for the thesis is partly informed by Bourdieu, specifically through his work on the cultural intermediary. Textually orientated discourse analysis is combined with content analysis to examine over 100 magazines from 1981 to 1993. The analysis approaches the magazines on a section by section basis: from the editorial manifestos often included in launch issues, to exploring the game review as a new form of quantitative media critique. The cover pages and advertising content are analysed as part of a distinct hyper-masculine gaming aesthetic, whilst the reader’s letters pages offer an example of how user generated content (UGC) can come to both represent and regulate subcultural discourse. The thesis confirms that the videogame specialist press played a defining role from the 1980s to early 1990s regarding the growth and consolidation of emerging videogame practices, both in terms of production and consumption.

The Formation of Gaming Culture, 2015

The book describes how games played on computers became computer games. By analysing the first gaming magazines it shows how a culture of reception and appreciation was produced around games produced for home computers and circulated in the hobbyist culture of 'bedroom coding'.

ICAI, 2019

This paper presents a history of video games as innovation form beyond entertainment, offering reasons to establish why it is important to know and study their history with regards its social and cultural contexts: making emphasis in the importance that the users have when creating video games through experience. The social and cultural context in which those video games were born is fundamental to understand the diffusion and popularity that video games had throughout the ‘80s and especially in the ‘90s. The objective of this study is to identify the communication and information strategies of video games prior to the arrival of the Internet, especially the way in which this information was shared in the Spanish context. In the first part of the paper, we introduce the theoretical and methodological framework in which this research is based, through the concept of cultural archeology. In the second part, we present stories created by the users to analyze the gaming experience and how to share it, using the concepts of playformance and play-world, to finish questioning the gamer’s identity as a white, young, middle-class male subject. Finally, we want to point out the importance of sharing knowledge and strategies as a fundamental part of the social interaction of the gamer’s experience. We observed video games as a tool to identify something beyond: the society and the uses that move around a cultural product.

Routledge eBooks, 2014

Games and Culture, 2006

Video games are a new art form, and this, the author argues, is one good reason why now is the right time for game studies. As a new art form, one largely immune to traditional tools developed for the analysis of literature and film, video games will challenge researchers to develop new analytical tools and will become a new type of "equipment for living," to use Kenneth Burke's phrase for the role of literature. This article discusses several of the features that make video games a unique art form, features that will, the author believes, come to play a role in analyses of games in the emerging field of game studies.

Gaming and Gamers in Times of Pandemic, 2024

The COVID-19 pandemic and the unprecedented government responses to this pandemic have impacted virtually every aspect of people’s lives. This edited collection brings in multiple scholarly perspectives to examine the impact of the pandemic and resulting government policies, on one particular cultural sphere: games. In the pandemics’ initial months, many industry reports noted the unexpected positive impact on online digital game sales. Subsequently, however, the deleterious impact of the lockdowns on game production and related practices also came to light. Developers and players had to rapidly adjust to remote work and play. Many large-scale industry events were canceled, postponed, downsized, or virtualized. This book’s eleven chapters divided into three sections aim to examine and discuss these changes. The first and the longest section groups together those chapters that relay stories of games, gaming, and game developers during the pandemic. Subsequently, the second section explores some instances of how the initial impact of the pandemic has become permanent, with effects to be felt for years to come. Finally, the third section brings together explorations of the lessons drawn from the pandemic. Consequently, this third section is more about noticing some possible changes, but also noting those that have failed to materialize. Overall, the book’s message is that the pandemic affected game players, game developers, game journalists, and game scholars alike in many different ways. Some effects are temporary; others are here to stay. All deserve to be studied, and this book contributes to this growing field of research.

Playful Materialities

gra.org/digital-library/publications/the-ideology-of-interactivity-or-video-games-and-taylorization-of-leisure/ 4 During the 1980s and 1990s, commercials or cinematic depictions of digital gaming situations usually showed screaming and laughing children or young persons in front 9