The multiplayer game: user identity and the meaning of home video games in the United States, 1972-1994
Date
2019
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
This dissertation analyzes the changing meanings surrounding home video game usage and consumption during the first two decades of their commercial presence in the United States. It explores the evolution of home video games as technological devices, consumer goods, and popular culture from 1972 to 1994. It also examines the evolution of video game users, focusing on the changing target demographics of game manufacturers and advertisers as well as changing perceptions of video game usage and ownership from non-industry observers, such as journalists, lawmakers, educators, social scientists, and media activists, as well as the users themselves. I argue that, conceptually, the identity and meaning of video games and game users were shaped by a wide variety of historical actors who offered competing, even contradictory interpretations of what it meant to own and use video games. While the adolescent male “gamer” emerged by the 1990s as the predominant identity associated with video game usage, his preeminence was far from a foregone conclusion.