Atari Age by Michael Z. Newman

Author:Michael Z. Newman
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: gaming; cultural history; social identity; consumer electronics; arcade; handheld games; Odyssey; Intellivision; 1970s; 70s; 1980s; 80s; game studies; new media; television; TV; computers; domesticity; age; gender studies; class; PC; technology; culture; US; cultural studies; domestic; feminine; masculine; society
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 2017-03-07T16:00:00+00:00

Similar to the “into the game” representations of the commercials, Time magazine’s cover from January 1982 represents a male player’s body entering into a fantasy realm. Its headline blares “GRONK! FLASH ZAP! Video Games Are Blitzing the World,” and the illustration below is of a lone male figure exchanging gunfire with a flying saucer in the screen of an arcade cabinet, picking up on the same appeal as in the Atari commercials of a player entering game space (see figure 1.1). Like the Electronic Games illustration, this image promises that for the male player, video games would be not merely diverting and exciting, but transporting. The real-world self would slip into a new identity, far from the scenarios of home and family used most often to position video games as the latest iteration of companionate rec room leisure.

To arrive at these images of masculine identity play, we have traveled far from the cheerful rhetoric conveying the unity and inclusiveness of video games, in which players of different ages and genders come together in the home even as the boy is most centrally addressed. Early game imagery was not unified in its messages about space and identity. In some ways it inserted video games into an already established scenario of family play in the suburban rec room, but in other ways it extended another play tradition located more often outside than in. The contradictory appeals of early game promotion, at once harmonizing the family in the home and offering the boy a virtual escape hatch, not only reveal the challenges of domesticating a new medium of electronic leisure, making familiar its uses and meanings. They also express the contradictions of American family life and childhood development during the later Cold War years, as boys were confronted with the electronic mediation of their adventuresome culture in the confinement of the domestic sphere.

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