Figure 3.1 Atari commercial, “Have you played a game from Atari?”
Did you play with a friend on a rainy day?
Did you play with your dad?
Did you show him the way?
Did you play with your sis?
Did your mom always miss?
Did you play a game from Atari?
Have you played Atari today?
—TV commercial, late 1970s
The TV game that emerged in the early 1970s with Pong, Odyssey, and many other ball-and-paddle consoles, was by the later years of the decade becoming a fixture in the homes of American children and teenagers, such as those depicted in this cheerful Atari commercial. It presents members of a “typical” (white, middle-class, suburban) family engaged in sociable play around the console. The scenario is one of family togetherness, but the targeted consumer is clearly one member of this group: the son. The boy addressed by the ad is an ambassador of gaming, teaching his father to play, making room for his sister on the couch when a friend isn’t around, laughing with his mother over her failure to master the device. The ideas about video games offered at this time in television commercials, as well as department store catalogs, newspapers and magazines, movies, and a burgeoning fan culture, helped establish an identity not just for the medium but also for its typical users. “Anyone can get hooked,” the ad concludes, meaning that even a woman—a mother—could be susceptible to the product’s appeal. But the message is clear. Even though they are played in the family room, where they bring together participants of different ages and genders, video games are especially a boy’s amusement.
Figure 3.1 Atari commercial, “Have you played a game from Atari?”
In the later 1970s, video game commerce and culture expanded at the same time that games became more centrally identified with youth and masculinity. The more technically advanced game consoles released in the second half of the 1970s, known as the “second generation” of game hardware, included Fairchild’s Channel F (1976), the Atari VCS of this TV spot (1977), and Mattel’s Intellivision (1979). These were “programmable” consoles with game cartridges, whose quality and variety would expand the time and interest for play. Now a game could be contained in a single chip within a cartridge sold separately, rather than hardwired into the game console. TV games were sold and consumed not just as hardware but also as software, becoming commodities separate from the consoles that accepted them, and marketed as specific games rather than as devices to transform the television set into something new. The games themselves, in addition to the console device, were the objects for sale. And the sales pitch in ads for specific games like Berserk or Atari’s Basketball would include the same kind of representation as “Did you play a game from Atari?”—mixed genders or ages playing in the common space of a well-off family home, but also an address to young, male consumers.
Like Pong, many of the popular games for home play in the era of the first programmables were ports or imitations of well-known arcade titles. Many also had an aggressive, militaristic quality. Space Invaders was the biggest hit of these years for both coin-operated and home games. An Atari console could play Space Invaders, as well as Asteroids, Missile Command, Defender, and dozens of other video games, many of them familiar from arcades. Some of these products—consoles and games—became significant commercial successes and claimed more and more of Americans’ leisure time. As of 1976, Atari was part of Warner Communications Inc., and within a few years was earning the parent company a substantial amount of its revenue.1 Thus, in the first decade of their availability for play by the general public, video games went from being an unfamiliar innovation in television and electronics to a powerful economic and cultural force, part of most young people’s lives and of many older people’s. The arcade, home console, and handheld electronic games were also joined in the later years of this period by home computer versions, as electronic play proliferated and grew more varied and sophisticated.
Video games’ identity was established within a cluster of contexts. The arcade and home of the 1970s and early ’80s were distinct spaces, and in some ways opposites. In popular imagination, as we have seen, the arcade was a potentially threatening destination frequented especially by teenage boys. It was associated with pinball, an amusement with a historically low cultural reputation associated with gamblers and crime, situated within a masculinized public sphere unless banned, as it was in many cities.2 The home, by contrast, was idealized as a sanctuary of safety and comfort for the family, a feminized private sphere. But the two places could blur into one another as arcade games were reproduced for the home screen, and as home gameplay was offered as an experience similar to—or superior to—play in an arcade. Commercials for video games in these years often presented console games offering an “arcade experience.” Coleco ran an ad in the early 1980s in which a young male player is transported from the arcade to the home while playing a ColecoVision game in which spaceships emerge from the screen and hurtle forward, relocating play midgame from a public to a private venue. The player is so immersed that he does not notice that he has been moved into a living room while he plays. The voice-over promises “arcade controls and arcade graphics that let you have the arcade experience at home.” Rather than opposed, we might think of arcade and home games as a pairing like the movie theater and videotape deck, both offering experiences of the same kind but using distinct technologies, encouraging distinct practices, and defining distinct spaces. Ultimately the home consoles were to claim the majority of young people’s time and attention for video games, and were most central to the rise and fall of companies in the electronic games industry in this early stage.
As movies were with television and videotape, video games in the later 1970s and early ’80s were domesticated, a term with two related senses.3 Domestication of media is, first of all, akin to the taming of wild animals. Video games had to be made safe, familiar, and predictable. This kind of domestication is the process of new technologies becoming integrated into everyday life and passing from novelty to regular usage. Domestication also refers to the literal integration of games into domestic space, the space of the home, and in particular the idealized single-family home of white suburban America during the Cold War. The taming and familiarizing of games and the incorporation of games into routines of middle-class family life were part of the same process of video games coming into an identity as a medium with widely shared and stable meanings and purposes.
Thinking of the early history of video games in terms of domestication prompts the following contradiction. In the promotional discourses of the game companies, the console was to be a fixture of the recreation room, an instrument for bringing a middle-class family together in active, social play. Like television and radio before them, video games were often represented as the focal point of a family circle, a new electronic hearth. Like other forms of home recreation, such as playing cards, board games, and table tennis, video games were a way for the family to pass leisure time together, and also to entertain friends. However, video games drew extensively in their forms and representations on traditions of masculine play and boy culture, and offered a form of recreation and leisure quite at odds with the ideal of the family circle in feminized domestic space. A great many of the video games from the medium’s first decade include some element or combination of sport, space adventure, and combat.
This masculine character of video games would always be in tension with the settings in which games were typically experienced. Rather than integrating them harmoniously into family space, we might see video games in the home as an escape for children out of the domestic realm. This escape would offer a world of play in virtual spaces, and in particular a form of play deriving from a history of boy culture that resists the middle-class propriety and companionate leisure of suburban American ideology. The contradiction, then, is one of age and especially gender. Video games were at once an activity for families to do together and a way for the family’s children, and particularly its sons and their male friends, to experience their own modes of adventurous, competitive, and often violent play within domestic spaces from which otherwise they might have more literally escaped.
The space of the home gave meaning to video games, in some ways similar and in others different from the meanings produced through the space of the public arcade. The consumption of media is always shaped by the contours of their location, by the social organization of space.4 Representations of games and consoles in popular discourses of the time, as well as the forms of the consoles, cartridges, and games themselves, produced and circulated ideas not just about a new medium of video games, but also about masculinity and femininity, youth and adulthood, family and home. Representations of home video games, including magazine articles, retail catalogs, print and television advertisements, game cartridge and box art, and the forms and content of games themselves, offer traces of the domestication of the medium. So do secondary sources such as social scientific studies of early video games in the home, sources that reveal conceptions of home leisure and the gendering of play in this period and historically. The domestic material culture and interior geography of early games have much to teach us about the medium’s emerging identity.
Video game consoles like Odyssey, Atari, and Intellivision were played in all kinds of locations, including urban and suburban houses and apartments of many socioeconomic levels. They were idealized, however, similarly to many other consumer commodities of the twentieth century, by being represented in a great many instances in the bourgeois domestic landscape of the suburban single-family home. Like television in the 1950s, video games in the 1970s were sold to the public on the basis of advertising and promotional imagery of well-off white families coming together around the new medium as earlier generations might have gathered around a piano or fireplace. A pair of promotional images for Magnavox products (see figs. 2.2, 3.2) makes clear the semiotic linkage between TV and TV games in popular imagination: in an advertisement for a TV set from the 1950s and another for the Odyssey from the 1970s, we see remarkably consistent iconography. The details but not the underlying meanings have adapted to the style of the times, but both images are of an affluent, white, nuclear family circle brought together by electronics. Both images even represent the family enjoying a sporting event, though in the new version the competition is in the living room. In popular press imagery and catalog photography, as well as in game advertisements, the uses of the console in the home are frequently those of middle-class white family members of mixed ages and genders. One type of domestic space was especially important for the new medium of the video game, a room that would be known by a number of related names including family room, recreation room, rumpus room, or media room. In identifying the meanings and practices most directly associated with video games, it will be valuable to know something about this room and the practices and meanings identified with it.
Figure 3.2 A 1950 television ad by Magnavox.
Ideas about the private spaces of the home shape the meanings of the technologies used in those spaces. New media for domestic use, such as video games in the 1970s and early ’80s, emerge into a context of mediated leisure and work within or against the range of meanings already in place for leisure and media. As Erkki Huhtamo observes, “Domestic media, including video games, are intimately connected with the rituals and practices that constitute domesticity.”5 Video games were not only media, however, but also forms of play. Their significance in domestic space draws upon already established practices of watching television and playing board games, bridge, pool, or ping pong. It helps to know where in the home video games might have most often been used (or where their use was seen to be appropriate and typical), as the different rooms of a house have distinct meanings associated with identities, practices, and ideals. The design and use of the family home has a history, shifting according to economic, social, cultural, and technological needs. The family home of the 1970s and ’80s already functioned under a kind of economy of leisure-time activity, with certain identities and uses deemed appropriate and desirable for certain spaces.
The history of domestic architecture in the West since the industrial revolution is one of expansion and segmentation of space. It is also a history of changing ideas about domesticity, and the development of the notion of the home as a private, safe, and comforting sanctuary for the family in distinction to a public sphere of masculinized work in a field, factory, or office. A preindustrial home would often be a single room, but advances in heating and building and a separation of public and private conceptions of space and experience produced new configurations of domestic architecture.6 In Victorian times a middle-class house would include two rooms for leisure time, a front and back parlor. The front room was more outward-facing and ostentatious, showing off the family’s finest things and furniture to visitors as an advertisement of the family’s status and taste. The back parlor or sitting room was a space associated more with comfort and informality, furnished in a more utilitarian and less careful manner. Children would more likely be allowed to occupy the sitting room, and families might retire there after dinner to read or play or make music.7 The postwar suburban house reproduced this division of space with its more formal living room and more informal family or recreation room, possibly adjacent to the kitchen, or down a flight of stairs in a split-level design. The family room was idealized as a space of companionate leisure to include all members of the household. It was often the place for media technologies such as hi-fi stereo equipment and television, as well as tables for eating or playing cards or board games, and upholstered chairs and sofas suitable for reading and entertaining company. This room would be furnished to accommodate casual entertaining, but its most central and important use would be family togetherness. As one 1970s decorating guide put it, “The best entertaining in the home is the family entertaining itself—which is what the family room is essentially all about.”8
As the quintessential private space, the idealized house of the postwar American suburb was a key element in the abiding Victorian ideology of the separation of the spheres: masculine and feminine, work and family. As Lynn Spigel argues in Make Room for TV, television in the 1950s negotiated between the public and private conceptions of postwar family life.9 Representations of TV expressed the tensions and contradictions of a society marked at once by gendered spatial distinctions—women at home, men at work—and by efforts to integrate families together within a harmonious domestic sphere, which television was supposed to help accomplish. As a typical place for television viewing by the whole family together, a family room would be central to the spatial configuration of postwar domestic gender ideology, which involved the problematic integration of the male family members into a feminized sphere. As a technology requiring a TV set, video games would naturally be understood in relation to the meanings of television within the home. But also as a kind of competitive, skilled play, as a game, the new medium would be understood in the context of another tradition, of family leisure-time amusement in the form of games played by both children and adults.
One trend of twentieth-century home design in particular was to include dedicated spaces for children’s play within the single-family home, as well as in private yards or gardens. Children have always played in public and outdoors, often with a degree of freedom and autonomy that twenty-first-century middle-class American parents would regard as reckless and even dangerous, though girls would often be granted less of this opportunity to explore and take risks than boys. Children played in streets and alleyways of cities, as well as in woods and vacant lots. In Victorian and post-Victorian times, children’s play was also often accommodated in the home, and play spaces or even a dedicated playroom might be encouraged in twentieth-century parenting and home decorating advice. As the messy, boisterous, unruly family members, children would need durable and rugged interior play areas. The idea of a “rumpus room,” as opposed to other names for these spaces, suggests the unbridled, “anything goes” play of the young rather than the more all-ages entertaining suggested by “recreation room.” A rumpus room accommodating hobbies like electric trains was often located in a basement, which might be unfinished and rather makeshift, and which might be messy already from its uses for heating, washing, and storage. The shift from coal to cleaner forms of heating fuel early in the twentieth century made residential basements more hospitable to being lived in and used for leisure-time activity. A basement rumpus room could give parents a place to let children play in comfort and safety indoors, keeping them off the street, and perhaps allow for the separation of adults and children into their own spheres within the home. The image of the video game console as a fixture of a carpeted suburban basement, where children and their friends would sprawl on the floor and compete at Atari or Intellivision games, is a product of this history and context.
In mid-century American homes, we also see a migration of play space within the home and its overlap with other kinds of rooms. In his influential 1945 book Tomorrow’s House, George Nelson advised the designers and architects of what would become the postwar baby boom suburbs to include in the home a “room without a name” suitable for family leisure.10 In some ways this room’s purpose was similar to a basement rumpus room, but the room without a name was to be used by all of the family members rather than only the children, and was to be suitable not only for play but also for entertaining guests. Rather than locating this room in the confined or makeshift space of the basement, it was to be kitchen-adjacent and spacious, the biggest room in the house. Activities to be pursued here were virtually any kind of leisure, including games, media, and dining: “Ping-Pong, bridge, movies, dancing. The children can play there. Or you could cook in the fireplace. Good place for a dinner party too.”11 With a big room like this, the home’s living room becomes a smaller and more formal space for adults only. By making this comfortable and versatile big room central to the main floor of the home, the suburban ideal’s architectural designs spoke of the virtue of informal family togetherness and integration during times of leisure for family members of different ages and genders: a companionate ideal of pleasure in the company of one’s kin. Nelson proposed that the need for such a room was “evidence of a growing desire to provide a framework within which the members of a family will be better equipped to enjoy each other on the basis of mutual respect and affection.” The room without a name might “indicate a deep-seated urge to reassert the validity of the family by providing a better design for living.”12 On this basis, Nelson proposed calling this the “family room.”
“Family room” was not a novel term, however, having been used at times to describe the sitting or drawing rooms of the Victorian home. The postwar ranch-style house of middle-class suburbs like Levittown were often too modest in size to have both formal and informal living rooms, and either the living room would become a family room (rather than a space in the mode of a Victorian front parlor), or else the family might add another room, DIY style, when time and money permitted.13 A Better Homes and Gardens survey of more than 11,000 Americans in 1946 found that the typical respondent desired a house with a basement for doing laundry and for situating “a multipurpose hobby or recreation room.” In Clifford Edward Clark Jr.’s history of the American home, he quotes one survey respondent who desired to combine their living and rec rooms, “but yet have it warm and cozy looking.” The respondent described not only its comfortable chairs, but also a pool table easily converted for ping-pong, a refrigerator for drinks, a table for playing cards, a piano, and a fireplace for broiling frankfurters. In Clark’s description, this vision of the room “reflected the more informal life-style of younger families. Room design and furnishings had to be tougher to absorb the wear and tear of active family life.”14 In this vision of a house’s uses we can also appreciate the idea of the family home as a place for domestic leisure integrating all members of the family together in play.
The widespread interest in making space for play in twentieth-century interiors was a product of a number of social forces, resulting in a conflict in the early years of the century between conceptions of culture and leisure understood particularly in terms of class ideals. As commercial mass media and culture proliferated early in the century—associated in popular conceptions with young, working-class, immigrant, and less educated patrons—progressive and genteel authorities viewed it as a seductive threat to its audiences. An autonomous youth culture of public recreation was seen to be emerging during the 1920s, which guardians of middle-class virtue viewed as a harmful influence on the younger generation in tension with traditional mores. This friction between traditional and modern cultural ideals produced a sense of a crisis in the family, and a need to provide some of the appeals of popular amusements within the space of the family home reconceived as more modern and democratic than in Victorian times. In Raising Consumers, Lisa Jacobson argues that this new domestic family ideal made play its central value, and play was to be a pastime pursued by children and their parents together.15 As Elaine Tyler May has shown, progressives of this era frequently attempted to fight mass culture by domesticating it.16 By making domestic play educational and edifying, it could substitute in the eyes of progressives for the seductive but passive appeals of movies and popular music while also supporting healthy family relations.
Parenting advice of the 1930s, drawing on these discourses of family recreation, recommended establishing a dedicated playroom in the home, which we can see as a point of origin or precursor for the more familiar postwar recreation room. A playroom would be stocked with educational toys and games, as well as books and other media, to combat the supposedly passive spectatorship of popular amusements. Parents, and particularly fathers, were urged to join their children in play, becoming buddies fluent in the slang of their kids and enjoying their companionship. By engaging in this play, the middle-class dad was to “become a boy again,” an abiding trope of representations of domestic leisure uniting parents and children familiar from Atari commercials and promotional imagery for many toys and games through the years, including board games, ping-pong tables, and BB guns.17 Depression-era parents were prompted by Parents magazine, which began publication in 1926, to play checkers or billiards with their children and to teach them good taste. This would protect them from less wholesome Jazz Age temptations while also unifying the family in a newly masculinized domestic environment safe from the corrupting influences of the public sphere. “During the 1930s,” Jacobson writes, “the family rec room or family playroom gave spatial expression to the hopes that ‘the family that plays together stays together.’”18 In some ways, the recipe for the happy family’s playroom was to bring home the popular public attractions of the day and make them safe and morally upright as well as positive forces for domestic cohesion integrating male and female, adult and child participants in domestic living. Movie projectors, dartboards, and pool tables replicated experiences of the cinema and the saloon in the home, but without the threatening connotations of the younger generation pursuing its autonomous culture. We see a similar phenomenon in the domestication of arcade games in the 1970s and ’80s. In both instances, the relocation of popular leisure-time pursuits from public to private space functions, in Jacobson’s terms, “to reclaim the authority of the family and redefine its mission amid the growing popularity of public commercial amusements.”19
The family ideal that we associate with the postwar baby boom, prosperity, suburbanization, and the integration of television into the home relied on certain conceptions of a family’s common living space. The rooms of the idealized suburban home were designed and arranged to make possible specific activities, including media consumption and gaming. The newly popular split-level plan of the later 1950s would locate the recreation or family room down a flight of stairs from the kitchen, and sometimes in its line of sight. The mother, as commander of the family troops, would benefit from this arrangement by a view from her post in the kitchen down to the play space, making for both autonomous work and play and parental supervision. But this room would be suitable for entertaining, and not be strictly a kids’ “rumpus” room where anything goes.20 The inclusion of a bar in the standard design of a postwar rec room signals its intended adult uses. Along with wood paneling and wall-to-wall carpet, the bar was one of the fixtures of rec rooms. Entertaining, according to advice and trend stories, was moving from formal living rooms to more informal spaces. Articles of the later 1950s distinguished the recreation or family room from the rumpus room in terms of intended users (children only vs. all ages) and indicated that the rec room was becoming the most important feature of a family home, “taking over as the favored spot for family relaxation.” The rec room, not the playroom or living room, was the “pivotal feature” in home designs of the “split-level era.”21 Card tables, ping-pong, shuffleboard, and the standard amusements of prewar playrooms were present along with the bar and the newest addition to family leisure: the TV set. In addition to hi-fi stereo equipment, television was the media technology most essential to the rec room, making it a new “focal point of family life” and perhaps taking the place of the movie projector or piano.22
Wherever it might be located, the recreation room of the postwar suburban home was not marked off distinctly from other conceptions of domestic leisure space. “Recreation” might emphasize some uses, such as games, amusements, entertainment, and play, but the family room would still incorporate many of these connotations. In publications of the 1970s such as Popular Mechanics, readers would be encouraged to finish basements as “rec rooms with a family room look.”23 The accompanying photographs picture a card table, fireplace, upholstered seating, carpet, and wood paneling. A Popular Science story from 1975 described a basement rec room as an “extension of living space upstairs.”24 The influence might also flow the opposite way: after the trend of basement rec rooms for family amusement had taken hold, houses were planned with main-story rooms for family recreation, which had migrated upstairs from the subterranean space. “People are less interested in living underground than they used to be,” asserted Changing Times magazine in 1974.25 An issue of Old House Journal from 1992 portrayed basement playrooms as a short-lived trend as architects soon began to incorporate first-floor play spaces in their plans as a replacement for the less desirable basement rooms.26 But there is no doubt that a basement rec room, in some ways overlapping in design and ideal use with a main-floor family room, was a standard element and selling point in middle- or upper-middle-class suburban family homes beginning in the 1950s and continuing through the 1970s and ’80s. A house without a rec room might be regarded as inadequate to the family’s needs of home leisure and entertaining.27 An essential quality of this space was a function at once of uniting and dividing the family according to its specific needs. It could integrate the whole family together in play and entertainment as in the postwar family ideal, but it could also put distance between parents and the chaos of children’s amusement, lessening the pressure of the family’s confinement in their house.
A guidebook to home improvement published in 1979 situates the new medium of the video game squarely in this space. After describing the kind of rec room that its reader might build in their basement, DIY style, it offers some examples of activities to pursue there: “everything from the currently popular TV-video contests to the enduring challenge of Monopoly or Scrabble, from pool through darts and ping-pong, from model building to model railroading.”28 Along similar lines, a 1975 issue of Mechanix Illustrated published an article on “The New Fun World of Video Games” on a page facing another article, “How to Do Your Basement in Pub Decor.”29 The space represented on the left half of the open pages, a father–son dyad sitting on the shag carpet before an Odyssey plugged into a TV set with Hockey on the screen, is virtually continuous with the space on the right half with a staircase, dartboard, wood paneling, and comfortable sofas. These representations of video games position them as children’s amusements to enjoy with a playmate dad, but they might also be represented in more adult fashion, as the “pub” theme of the basement rec room would suggest. A 1978 Playboy shopping feature titled “Pinball … and Other Indoor Electronic Sports” offered home electronics such as Playboy’s licensed Bally’s pinball game for the home and video consoles such as the Odyssey2 and Atari VCS as a “great way to entertain,” encouraging the adult male consumer to practice on his own, the better to impress his friends when they come over.
Figure 3.3 Mechanix Illustrated, 1975: father–son gameplay on the carpet.
Along with “TV-video” contests came several other new electronics sold as family or rec room amusements in the later 1970s. Three in particular were closely related to the video game console: videotape decks or VTRs and big-screen projection color TV sets, which together were heavily promoted in the later 1970s as early adopter home-theater technologies; and personal computers, which were a few years later to emerge but, like video games and VTRs, used CRT displays. Along with earlier technologies such as movie and slide projectors and hi-fi stereos, video games, VTRs, and PCs contributed to a widening ensemble of home media, which led to reports of another popular description for a room once “without a name.” In many popular press accounts, the recreation or family room of the 1950s era was now becoming a “media room,” a term marrying the older meanings of the family and rec room with the more modern and cutting-edge connotations of the computer and electronics revolutions.
In many decorating and technology trend stories of the later 1970s and early ’80s, the media room was proposed as a place to combine and integrate the various forms of electronic gadgetry in the home, typically centering the space around a large TV set. The typical family probably would not have the means to convert a basement into a media room with screens on three walls, bar seating for five, and a “cockpit” control center, as pictured in a 1976 issue of American Home.30 But representations like these help us form an understanding of the range of meanings for video game technology and its place in the middle- or upper-middle class home. A 1976 New York magazine story advertised the media room as “one big custom container for the latest in video equipment,” which would make leaving home for leisure unnecessary and even undesirable.31 Time reported that Americans were becoming “chronic stay-at-homes,” while seeking entertainment outside of the home was now positioned as an old-fashioned practice of the pre-video age.32 Descriptions of media rooms often named a video game console as an essential component in an array of electronics to entertain the family, in addition to video decks, film projectors, and hi-fi equipment. “Almost every media room has at least one video game—maybe two or three of the top units. These games take on a whole new perspective when played on a giant screen. Imagine being Pac-Man!”33 One report noted that Atari games such as Space Invaders and Missile Command were now commonly being projected on screens measuring seven feet.34
The media room would be identified as an outgrowth of both the rec room and the living room, a place for the whole family, but it was also sometimes related to the den, a space carrying more masculinized and affluent connotations.35 In some accounts, the integration of so much gadgetry into the living space of the home was a problem to be managed, particularly for interior decorators. A New York Times Magazine spread in 1981 asked, “How do we make peace with these invaders? How do we integrate them into the home?”36 A typical solution was to familiarize electronics by adopting the terms of earlier conceptions of domestic leisure, or to anticipate a future of ubiquitous electronic mediation. One description positioned the media room as both a nostalgic throwback and glimpse of the future: “It was a room that would go backwards and forwards at the same time, back to the days when home entertainment brought families together, and ahead to the days when family fun depended totally on electric current.”37 As a place for the latest in electronics equipment, the media room took on some of the male early-adopter qualities of later “man caves” or “tech dens.” Sometimes during these years, the newly mediated home was renamed an “electronic cottage.”38 But as a place for families to experience electronic entertainment together, the media room also renewed the spatial significance of the rec room, becoming “the new family gathering spot.”39 In this process, some of the fixtures of the rec room, such as the ping-pong and card tables, gave way to high-tech gadgetry. But as remediations of ping-pong and cards, among other amusements, video games at once replaced and upgraded the older form of family amusement. Early games included not only Pong but many variations on card games, particularly blackjack, and many other competitive sports and games such as versions of pinball, hockey, basketball, baseball, and shooting gallery games, in many ways similar to the competitive amusements of the pre-electronic rec room. A media room was a container for not only the latest gadgetry, but for the fantasy of family leisure so much improved by new technology that everyone was happily entertained and contentedly integrated within the domestic sphere.
Images of console video games in the 1970s and early ’80s consistently represented the new product in a particular kind of environment, enjoyed by certain kinds of player groupings. In television and print advertisements, magazine articles, department store Christmas Wish Books, and game company promotional literature such as brochures, instructions manuals, and catalogs, games were often represented in a context of family or rec room play. These images might be spare and suggestive, emphasizing the hardware and the players’ enjoyment of it. But they generally would not abstract video games from the setting of the family room, recreation room, or media room. Rather, the mise en scène of the video game representation across these various media and formats was quite consistent with the image of the family at leisure in informal communal home spaces. This was likely a product of the audience for these messages being adults and especially women (particularly store catalogs). In many representations, family life is presented in a way that shows off the technology’s potential to please all members of the household and bring them together in play.
An image in a 1972 issue of Popular Science introducing the Odyssey pictures a man and a boy seated on a carpeted floor before a wooden console television set. The TV is in front of a stone-faced wall, perhaps part of a fireplace. Atop the television set is a floral arrangement.40 Mechanix Illustrated likewise pictured a father–son pair, as mentioned above, in a room with shag carpet, seated on the floor.41 Radio Electronics represented a father–son pair with dad on a sofa and child on the carpet, with the TV set in front of a wooden cabinet and a houseplant to the side.42 The players are looking not at the TV screen but at each other. A Popular Electronics story from 1978 was illustrated with a photo of a man and a woman playing together.43 Very unusually, these players are dark-skinned, but everything else about this representation is utterly typical: comfortable furniture, wall-to-wall carpet, wood veneer table, houseplants. In some of the images in Coleco and Intellivision catalogs we see no floor, but there is some combination of mixed-gender and mixed-age players, wooden panel or furniture, and greenery. As in many of these representations, one of the group, usually a woman, is looking smilingly at the others rather than at the game, indicating her delight taken in other people’s electronic amusement, which brings friends and family together in the space of the home. An illustration in the 1972 Odyssey manual pictures the boy and girl of the family facing the screen, and the father and mother on either side of them, each with a hand on a game controller, facing one another rather than their kids or the screen. As much as they show off the new form of home play, these representations also illustrate the family members, and particularly the mother, taking pleasure in family recreation.
The idea of the video game being a toy for boys in particular is rarely the singular message of these representations, though sons and fathers (as well as mothers) are frequently represented. Rather, the emphasis is on the company of one’s kin, as indicated by the photos on the Fairchild Entertainment System console box, which include both adults and children of various ages, including a comically grumpy elderly woman and a baby. The typical image of the video game in use in the 1970s was one of pairs, trios, or quartets of mixed age or gender family members at home.
Figure 3.5 Radio Electronics, 1975: a parent–child rec room scene.
On the cover of a 1982 Parker Brothers catalog aimed at retailers, we see a tableau integrating such scenes of domestic electronic play within familiar sights and experiences. The cover image represents a fictional Parker Brothers product, “The Christmas Caper Catalog Game,” and the booklet’s cover is made to appear like a board-game box. Five children of different ages are staged around a living room decorated for the holidays. One stands at the mantle examining an electronic Merlin game with a magnifying glass. A girl sits on a chaise working on the Orb puzzle. Another girl on an upholstered chair uses her magnifying glass to examine a Nerf ball. A boy in a tuxedo in the foreground stands over a Monopoly game. And central to this tableau, in the middle ground center, another boy sits on the floor in front of a TV set playing a Parker Brothers Atari game, Frogger. As a theatrical staging of these children of wealth fascinated by Parker Brothers toys, this image does not evoke the more middle-class simplicity of the shag carpet rec rooms in the magazines. But it does integrate the newest form of domestic play, the video game (along with another electronic toy, Merlin), within a familiar range of practices and meanings.
Images of family togetherness were standard in representations of home play long before video games emerged as a cultural sensation in the later 1970s. A 1972 Parker Brothers catalog pictured a nuclear family of mother, father, son, and daughter around a board game, under copy promising of Parker Brothers games that “they bring your family together.” Postwar advertising often made similar appeals, as in soda, beer, or carpet ads picturing families and friends in their rec rooms around basement ping-pong tables, or in television set advertisements emphasizing the unity of the family circle. What seems particularly noticeable in early game representations is the social dimension of play and the avoidance of picturing solitary players. Some games, like Odyssey Tennis, could only be played in pairs, but many early games could be played by one player against the machine, a setup we rarely see in photographic representations. Rather, these images assiduously mix identities by picturing male and female or child and adult competitors. The frame is often so full of human figures that not all can be actively participating, making some family members into spectators. As the family room was one in which spouses, parents, children, and siblings pleasurably compete with each other, the video game was the latest of the diversions and entertainments to facilitate this familial recreation.
Thus the introduction of electronic games into retail catalogs for stores such as Sears, Montgomery Ward, and J. C. Penney worked to integrate these new amusements within a familiar range of uses and functions. Rather than place such products alongside television sets, stereo components, and other electronic devices, catalogs of the 1970s more often placed video games in the “rec room” pages alongside ping-pong, “rebound” and regular pool, shuffleboard, air hockey, and miniature soccer (foosball) tables, dart boards, and pinball machines. Sometimes they were sold as sporting goods in retail stores, and their high price tags would have made them too expensive to be stocked in a toy store or among the children’s toys in a department store. They were marketed at adults rather than kids, who would not have the money for a programmable console, in publications including Playboy. In some catalogs the video games were a page away from camping gear like tents and in others they were sold alongside plastic shooting toys and plastic pachinko and pinball games and tabletop electronic football and baseball. They were often advertised using the same kind of pitches as board games from chess and backgammon to Scrabble and Monopoly, as “games the whole family can enjoy.” As products purchased most often as holiday gifts, they were aggressively promoted in the fall and early winter and presumably acquired as gifts intended not only for the children but also for the family.
The 1977 Sears Wish Book for the Christmas season opened with video games at the front of the catalog, featuring the newly released Atari VCS branded especially for that retailer as the Sears Video Arcade Cartridge System. The pages picturing these “tele-games” displayed an array of cartridges such as Blackjack, Tank Plus, Race, and Target Fun. But this section was labeled in the page corner (by the page numbers) as part of a wider “Family Game Center” theme, which included older, nonprogrammable video games such as Speedway IV, Tank, Motocross Sports, Superpong, Pinball/Breakaway, and Hockey-Tennis II, a ball-and-paddle console. Subsequent pages continue the “Family Game Center” label with more traditional products for the rec room such as darts, chess, checkers, backgammon, pool, ping-pong, air hockey, as well as electronic chess and handheld football games, an array of board games, and electric pinball and pachinko. These pages were filled out not with photographs of rec rooms but with color illustrations, some in a fantastical mode picturing adult athletes and open-wheel racecars alongside electronic sports and driving games. On pages with the more traditional rec room amusements like ping-pong, checkers, and darts, the illustrations were of typical ensembles of middle-class white family members of mixed age and gender engaged excitedly in play, arms raised in triumph or mouths forming contented smiles, with women sometimes observing more than participating.
Catalogs for toy companies bringing video games to market—such as the Parker Brothers “Catalog Game” aimed at retailers rather than consumers—represented similar themes. In Coleco catalogs from 1976 and 1977, that company’s Telstar ball-and-paddle console and shooting and driving video games packaged as “Telstar Arcade” are presented in the context of products including CB Radios, pinball and air hockey table games, and doll houses, toy strollers, and toy ovens. Pages representing the video games picture men and women rather than children, in the typical rec room spaces decorated in wood paneling or furniture and houseplants or flowers. Similarly, Mattel catalogs of the early 1980s represented Intellivision alongside Mattel’s other electronics products, many of which carry over the types and themes of rec room play into the microchip age. In addition to video game hardware and cartridges, Mattel offered battery-operated electronic versions of baseball, football, racing, chess, and Dungeons & Dragons, using buttons and LED or LCD displays on mostly plastic exteriors, as well as an electronic drum pad and a “Diet Trac” device for weight loss. The photography illustrating these products in use included a number of father–son pairs, and a number of girls and women, though the majority of subjects were male.
Figure 3.8 Coleco ’77 games catalog includes a variety of toys including TV games.
In so many ways, the video game of the 1970s was an outgrowth of earlier forms of rec room amusement, and was experienced as family play in the home, as established before the advent of electronic toys. The clearest and most direct point of continuity between older rec room games and the consoles of the 1970s was the Magnavox Odyssey, a device bridging two eras of home gaming. The original Odyssey game released in 1972 was primitive by comparison even to later ball-and-paddle consoles, and its creator, Ralph Baer, evidently thought that the way it straddled the board game and TV game forms was a failing. Historically, however, this ambiguity in form demonstrates how video games drew upon a tradition of games in the home in establishing their identity, and it reveals continuity as well as change in the history of domestic leisure.
The electronic component of play in Odyssey games was often simple, and the games required additional nonelectronic materials to be fully realized. In most of the original Odyssey games, each of two players could control a rectangle of light by moving it vertically and horizontally, and sometimes the player could put “English” on a ball that bounced between the rectangles, causing it to curve rather than travel straight. Odyssey had neither sound nor color. In some games, the image on screen could be made to move somewhat at random to come to a stop at a point on the display, an effect similar to spinning a wheel or rolling dice. To complete its representation of game spaces, the Odyssey came packaged with translucent overlay sheets that adhered to the glass of the CRT screen by its static electricity charge. Odyssey Tennis had a green court overlay, Hockey was a white rink, Football a green field, Roulette a red and black wheel, and so on. These overlays remediated tabletop rec room games such as various baseball and football board and table games, which had been popular for decades in arcades as well as the home. Odyssey also came packaged with a variety of paraphernalia including game chips, cards, dice, play paper money, and game boards. In Football, the electronics functioned as one component of a wider ensemble of devices and materials including a cardboard football field. Football players would sit across each other with this field between them on the table. Playing Odyssey Football also required a paper scoreboard, a roll of frosted tape, a football token, a yardage marker, and six separate decks of cards for different kinds of plays including passing, running, and kicking off. The manual spent six pages describing the process of gameplay, and players would have needed to keep it open while playing at least at first, as is often the case with board games.
Odyssey Tennis was essentially Pong, and it was self-sufficient even in black and white, though it lacked the onscreen scoring and the blip noise that we usually associate with electronic ball-and-paddle play. But like Football, other games were much less coherent as electronic amusements. Roulette used the screen as the wheel, but the betting was carried out using paper and plastic pieces. For the geography game States, the Odyssey would be used to float the electronic marker somewhat randomly until it would land on a state on the US map overlay. The rest of the game would be carried out using cards and an answer sheet. An Analogic game has the player moving the rectangle of light around the screen like the token on a game board. In many of these games, the electronic component is made to fit into a conception of gameplay and materials that has more in common with board or table games than with later video games. And to be meaningful, many of these games relied on the player’s prior knowledge and experience of various kinds of play and amusement. Like early cinema, which called on its audience’s familiarity with turn-of-the-century genres of storytelling and entertainment to make sense of its representations, early video games drew upon the tropes of pre-electronic arcade and rec room game genres, including casino-style games of chance and adaptations of popular sports. Even Pong, as simple and accessible as a game can be, has a meaning based in pre-electronic rec room play.
As its game titles suggest, the Odyssey, like many early consoles, was aimed at families. Haunted House, Cat and Mouse, and Simon Says are juvenile in their cartoonish representations and in their cultural associations. States and Analogic were meant to be educational. Shooting Gallery, a popular title using a rifle controller, was similar to the basement Daisy BB Gun ranges marketed to fathers and sons in the 1960s. Sports games might appeal to boys seeking indoor diversion on rainy days, perhaps in the company of parents, siblings, and friends. That most of these games were meant to be played by two players rather than one indicates the sociable intentions of the producers and advertisers. Like later video game consoles and titles, the original Odyssey appealed to the suburban, middle-class family as a means of bringing them together.
The identity of video games as a medium was a product of this appeal, which continued into the early 1980s particularly in television commercials, on which Atari and Intellivision spent many millions of dollars.44 Because of their expense, video games were marketed more to adults than to children, and their value and interest had to be made clear to parents. In one TV commercial from 1980, a white middle-class family of four sits in their family room playing video games in the evening, a stack of cartridge boxes next to the Atari on the coffee table. The son and daughter are on the floor, while their parents sit on the sofa. The father is nearer to the TV set and sometimes is playing. The mother, never represented holding the joystick, is by a telephone on the end table that never stops ringing. A voice-over intones sardonically, “This commercial is based on a true story.” While the TV set bleeps and blips and the kids and dad engage with Space Invaders, the mom picks up the phone as a succession of babysitters call to offer their services, which she declines again and again. “After a family bought an Atari video game,” the announcer explains, “they had no trouble getting babysitters … Everybody enjoys Atari because Atari has so many different games to enjoy.” Parents in this comical representation were so delighted by Atari that they preferred to stay home and play in the company of their children, overcoming any desire to have adult-only leisure away from home.
Other Atari commercials of this vintage showed boys and girls playing Atari games including Berserk and Pac-Man with their grandparents, and one portrayed a succession of family members (though not the mother) enjoying their favorite games, with a final shot of their pet dog manipulating an Atari joystick. A common image in the video game advertising of this period is of the family crowded around the player holding the Atari joystick, with some members on either side of him or her on a sofa and others standing over their shoulders or sitting by their feet. Video game producers and marketers, along with magazines and retail catalogs, strove to insert Atari and similar amusements into a familiar context of domestic play enjoyed by children, parents, and even grandparents all together, unified by their delight in this new amusement. If the reputation of video games developed in a different direction, it was against the background of this rhetoric of a cohesive, companionate family ideal.
In spite of the efforts of manufacturers and retailers to market early video games as family amusements for all, the culture of video gaming quickly developed in a different direction, one in tension with the meanings of the more inclusive discourses of these catalogs and advertisements. Video games did not become boy culture merely as a consequence of being a favorite pastime of male players. They also drew in many ways upon a history and context of masculinist socialization and representation. To call this “boy culture” is not to deny the presence of female players or their significance in a history that often erases them. But it is to assert a masculinized identity emerging during this time, defining the medium by practices and meanings that are hardly neutral in terms of gender, but rather participate in reproducing patriarchal relations of difference and power. Boy culture is not meant to refer simply to the culture of boys and only boys, but to culture understood by association with normative youthful and masculine gender identities, defined largely in opposition to the feminine.45 The dynamics by which video games became boy culture played out in public, in the arcade, but also in the space of the home, the private, feminized sphere wherein video games struggled to establish a place as the province of boys and men.
All evidence suggests that during their first decade, video games in the home were becoming masculinized in terms of the identities and relations of players. Social science literature of the early 1980s found that video games in the home were more often purchased and played by fathers than mothers. Fathers and sons were often found to play together, but many mothers (half in one study) had never played them at all six months after acquiring a console.46 Fathers, however, were found often to compete at first, only to abandon video games when their children bested them. Boys and girls both played in significant numbers, though not equally: boys played for longer average times than girls.47 And in families with sons, Edna Mitchell writes, “possession by the boys was considered appropriate; and sisters had to request permission for access to the games.”48 With programmable games, peers could share and trade cartridges, but this developed as a male culture, and girls were not found to trade carts or take them over to each other’s houses.49 Mitchell’s study, published in 1985, described how video games, upon initial purchase, would bring families together as playing cards and board games had previously, but that after the novelty wore off they became the children’s amusement, and mainly the playthings of boys. A conference on video games held at Harvard University in 1983, at which a number of psychologists and other social scientists presented research, included discussions of the preference of male more than female players for this new form of amusement, a difference with sources in gendered play dynamics that apply in many instances of games of chance, physical skill, and strategy.50
A commercial for Atari’s Defender cartridge suggests the gender dynamics at play in the culture of early video games. For most of the thirty seconds, a man plays the violent spaceship shooting game with a woman sitting by his side on the sofa. At the end she finally gets to play, and the kicker is his expression of surprise and disappointment: “You did better than me!” This makes the address of the ad more expansive than just a young male player, but it also underscores the gendering of video games as masculine, as the interest and prowess of the woman functions as more of a punch line than a pitch.
By the early 1980s, the video game industry was aware that its primary market was males aged eight to eighteen, though it also continued to appeal to families.51 This appeal might rely on a distinction between the arcade and home, with the latter promoted as a safer alternative for children. Spots in a “Dear Atari Anonymous” TV campaign are narrated by a woman, the mother of a family in which Atari has taken over everyone’s leisure time. In a comical tone, she complains about how video games have transformed the family and made her children and spouse into addicts. But this complaint was gently satirical, and conveyed not only new media anxieties but also a sense of security that home video games would promise. One of their appeals was the advantage they offered as alternatives to arcade games. In a spot for Berserk, a boy’s grandmother wants to take him to play at the arcade, but he delights her when he says they can do it at home. With home versions of the arcade games, younger children would be safe from the perceived threats of the world outside, and parents would be relieved of worrying about kids squandering pocketsful of quarters in the coin-operated machines.
A 1981 video game industry survey found that 90 percent of American arcade players were male, and 80 percent teenagers, and the shady reputation of the arcade, along with the associations of teenage boys with unruliness, were factors in keeping electronic play within the sanctuary of domestic space.52 Many parents preferred to supervise their younger children’s leisure-time activities, or at least to keep it within the safety of the home. While one ideal of play was companionate leisure, games were very often played by a solitary child, most often a male one.53 By 1982, video game consoles were in 17 percent of American households. In homes with teenage boys, however, the percentage would be much higher.54 The most desired game titles, moreover, were home console versions of arcade sensations like Space Invaders, Missile Command, Asteroids, and Pac-Man, many of which featured aggressive and violent Cold War representations of space battle and heroic defense against overwhelming enemy forces. The image of good-natured play in family-directed marketing discourses was not the same as the typical everyday experience of games.
In appeals to the family market, video gameplay was represented as a sociable activity, but games were frequently enjoyed in solitude, as children’s toys often are. As Brian Sutton-Smith argues, video games are merely a particularly engrossing form of children’s amusement that can be pursued in solitude for seemingly unlimited amounts of time, an ideal toy for functioning to free parents for a time from the burdens of care and companionship.55 Console games might have substituted for TV watching when little of interest to children was on the air, or for other forms of mechanical play. Most games, such as cards, board games, and table games like ping-pong, require two or more players, but video games could be enjoyed by one person alone. Sutton-Smith’s explanation for the appeals and functions of video games connects them not so much with sociable, companionate ideals of the rec room as with children’s toys such as blocks, dolls, and trains used to pass the time while parents take respite from attentive care or do housework. Such solitary amusements, Sutton-Smith proposes, also function to prepare young people for any kind of future work in which “individual and solitary concentration on the task at hand is a requirement.”56
Whether experienced in solitude or in the company of peers, siblings, or parents, early video games drew in a number of ways on a history of children’s play in which boys and girls have been socialized into distinct and opposed worlds of fantasy and activity. As Steven Mintz describes in his history of American childhood, since the nineteenth century, middle-class children’s play has been divided by gender as boys and girls were assumed to differ in many fundamental ways, both physical and psychological, and as they were preparing for adult life in societies of marked gender-role divisions. Girls were encouraged to see themselves in their mothers, making virtues of “self-sacrifice and service,” while boys’ identities were defined by negation of femininity, stressing “aggression and daring” and condemning girlish boys as sissies.57 The nineteenth-century American home was feminized, and boyhood was “defined in opposition to the confinement, dependence, and restraint of the domestic realm.”58 The play of girls and boys was a product of the social relations prevailing in industrial society, with feminine pursuits training girls for care of home and child, and masculine pursuits stressing adventure, courage, competition, battle, and physical strength. Boy culture of the nineteenth-century United States inculcated autonomy and independence in male children, contrasting the freedom of masculinity in contrast to the domestic confinement of femininity.59
In the twentieth century, typical experiences of childhood changed in some ways, with more schooling for children of both sexes and expansion of cities and suburbs. The gender roles of children’s play continued, however, as commercial culture drew on the Victorian era’s meanings and practices, and as play became an escape into fantasy worlds far from the realities of classrooms and families dominated by adult authorities. In books, movies, and television for children and in consumer products tying in with them, girls and boys were often divided and their cultures of play maintained. Boys were sold Buck Rogers pistols, plastic soldiers, and Davy Crockett hats and rifles. Among the most successful toy products for girls in the twentieth century was the Barbie doll, which modeled adult feminine appearance and pursuits. According to Mintz, children’s literature and children’s toys provided a “simulacrum of reality for increasingly structured lives,” a characterization that fits well with the fantastical representations of early video games. It also functioned to socialize young people into prescribed gender identities.60
The meanings in children’s play can be regarded in relation to patterns of childhood development, but they can also be read as symptoms of wider social and political realities. The Cold War gave rise to a gendered children’s culture in which boys in particular were socialized to act out symbolic struggles of good against evil, emphasizing a heroic and active conception of masculinity. The simplistic morality of movies and television for boys, particularly in the western genre so popular in the 1950s and ’60s, was mirrored by the development of masculine children’s culture emphasizing aggressive, competitive, physical activity. Being considered tough was the highest honor for young male children. Boy culture in this period was at least in its ideal form a free-ranging outdoor culture, and by contrast the postwar girl culture of slumber parties was more confined to indoor space. Iconic 1970s video games such as Space Invaders and Missile Command, with their science-fiction confrontations in defense of humanity against fearsome foes, reproduce the Manichean morality and aggressive confrontation of Cold War boy culture. Most of the very popular games of this era married the us vs. them moral universe of westerns with sci-fi scenarios, as in Star Wars, the most successful cultural phenomenon of the time. Some were more traditionally masculinist in their generic representations, however, including the Activision title Chopper Command, a game in which the player is in control of a helicopter engaged in military combat. In a commercial for this title, a drill sergeant yells at his troops and the voice-over addresses the player: “If you’ve got the guts, we’ve got the game.” The sergeant in his tent plays Chopper Command, clutching the joystick like a weapon and using the fire button to control the game’s helicopter as it engages in a dogfight.
The genres of early games drew heavily on boy culture scenarios and iconographies of long standing, including many kinds of competitive sports and shooting games with settings in theaters of war, the American West, jungles and deserts, and especially the space opera backdrops of post-2001 sci-fi. Graphics were often quite abstract in the first and second generations of consoles, but box, cartridge, catalog, and advertising imagery would flesh out the settings and characters and more generally the connotations of a game’s representation. The illustrations in this imagery fixed a meaning for sometimes vague or inscrutable onscreen representations. These images located experiences of video games in a recognizable world of popular culture narratives and imagery familiar from books, magazines, comics, movies, and television. Atari’s shootout game Outlaw represents stick-figure cowboys firing across a simple cactus plant. The cartridge box art shows paintings of a covered wagon drawn by a team of galloping steeds, a pair of bearded gunslingers with their revolvers drawn, a smattering of gleaming gold coins over the bottom of the image, and an orange sun setting over Monument Valley in the background. Combat, another Atari title, offers twenty-seven games around two main concepts: fighting with either tanks or planes. The onscreen image represents an overhead view of a pair of tanks that maneuver around a maze to shoot at one another, and an overhead view of planes against a cloud field in the flying version. Its cartridge art pictures military tanks in a line along a desert landscape of dust and fire, as well as a warship, biplanes, fighter jets in formation, and missiles, all in dynamic action. And Atari’s Maze Craze, true to its name, represents one figure pursuing another through an intricate labyrinth. The cartridge box fixes the meaning of this chase as “cops and robbers,” picturing a police officer wielding a nightstick hounding a robber around a warehouse, both figures shown in active mid-stride with excited facial expressions.
Some games were so abstract as to allow for much interpretive embellishment, though the various options would all derive from the imagery and ideals of masculine play. Super Breakout, an update of the earlier Atari arcade and console hit Breakout, is a kind of sideways Pong in which a paddle at the bottom of the screen moves right and left to bounce a ball against lines of colored bricks on the top of the screen, which vanish when hit. Breakout had been narrativized in commercial representations using a jailbreak scenario, with the bricks of the game standing for the wall of a prison cell. But Super Breakout was narrativized in its cartridge box art with a representation of astronauts in space suits playing a racquet sport against a backdrop of planets and stars, combining imagery of two boy culture standbys: space adventure and competitive athletics. An audio book set released in 1982, The Story of Atari Breakout, combines a story in text and illustrations with an audio recording to be used in combination with the book, telling yet another version of a Breakout scenario. In this account, the game represents a space shuttle transporting valuable ore from a moon of Jupiter to a space center called New California orbiting Venus. In this narrative, Breakout is about firing missiles against the colored layers of a force field obstructing the path of the shuttle. Upon the astronaut’s success at penetrating the force field, the book narrates: “He was doing it, breaking through, he had won! What a triumph for a son of earth, for Captain John Stewart Chang!”61
Figure 3.12 Story of Atari Breakout, audio book set cover, 1982.
Historically, boy culture meant a free-ranging, outdoor experience of exploration and autonomous play in streets and alleyways, woods and lots. It gave independent young men the freedom to learn the values of courage, bravery, stoicism, and daring, far from the watchful eyes of mothers or teachers. In the era of video games’ emergence, however, middle-class American children’s play increasingly moved indoors under the supervision of adults fearful for children’s safety. Beginning in the 1970s, American media has provoked strong moral concern over the welfare of children and the dangers of unsupervised, autonomous children’s play. These fears have centered on sexual and violent dangers posed by strangers in public places, such as abusive adults, reckless drivers, and kidnappers. As a consequence of worries over children being left alone, Mintz argues, young people since the 1970s have rarely been allowed the freedom to explore on their own in “unstructured, unsupervised free play.”62 The children of such fearful societies have often been confined indoors to amuse themselves under adult supervision, and have spent more of their childhoods alone rather than among peers, to be amused by electronic media. Video games emerged just as middle-class families curtailed the freedom of their sons to venture off on their own, and those sons substituted the mediated adventures of Atari games for earlier experiences of outdoor exploration and discovery. Video games participated in the “islanding” of childhood, as kids were confined in the security of the domestic sphere, protected from the perceived threats of a morally corrupt society.63
Thus video games came to function as “virtual play spaces,” in Henry Jenkins’s apt formulation, reproducing indoors many of the qualities of outdoor boy culture.64 The independent, tough and aggressive, competitive play of boy culture, with its emphasis on speed, strength, and endurance, continued in the forms of representation and gameplay present in many early games, with their spaceships, explorers, racecars, athletes, tanks, cops and robbers, and western gunslingers, their joysticks and fire buttons. A measure of the freedom lost as a product of childhood’s islanding was regained in the imagined fantasy environments suggested by the rather abstract representations of 1970s and ’80s TV games. Like children’s literature and popular culture of earlier Cold War forms, video games of this period represented life-and-death struggles and elite athletic competitions. Mastering such games was no small feat, and won players admiration and status among their peers. But this way of understanding early games, these associations with boy culture and gendered play, sit uneasily with the meanings of the rec room and its association with companionate family leisure and a gentler brand of competitive play.
As a consequence, representations of gameplay in some discourses opposed the integration and harmony of many catalog and advertising images. Rather than finding their place in the comfort of family gathered around a new electronic hearth, video game discourses aiming at young male players in particular rejected the familial and the domestic. In one Atari ad for Space Invaders, a family plays inside while outside, at night, their house is comically besieged by the descending alien lines of the game. This image of the domestic sphere under assault by murderous invading hordes is a fitting emblem for the counterdiscourse of the more masculinist rhetoric in Atari game ads, fighting the image of the home as a comforting sanctuary and threatening it, however humorously, with disruptive violence.
Figure 3.13 Atari commercial: Space Invaders descending on the family home.
Such discourses also positioned gaming as an escape from domestic space into boy culture fantasies, leaving the home behind. Similar to the later PlayStation ads Bernadette Flynn describes representing games as an “electronic portal to a virtual exterior,” outside the feminized domestic realm, representations of video games in earlier discourses also offer imagery of departure or escape.65 Often the body of the male player is removed from the scene of the home or becomes enveloped in the world of the game. The images of the male player addressed by these ads is often of a soul lost to electronic microworlds, totally absorbed in the representation, leaving everyday reality behind to enter completely into the identity of whatever agent is implied or pictured in the game (pilot, astronaut, racer, fighter, etc.). The boy or man is transformed by video games into someone else, somewhere else. What he most clearly and centrally leaves behind is the home in which the Atari console was located. Time magazine referred to video games in 1976 as “Jocktronics,” and described the games in terms of masculine identification: you are an athlete, a race car driver, a blackjack high roller. Several cartridge advertisements of the late 1970s and especially the early ’80s literalize this departure and transformation, picturing destruction of interior spaces and physical changes in the player.
Atari cartridge ads, particularly in the early ’80s, often addressed a young male player directly with voice-over narration in the second person. An ad for the game E.T. (a notorious failure) pictures a player resembling the movie’s central character Elliot, implying that you can become the young hero through electronic play, and instructs the boy to have his parents hook up the console to the TV set. Another commercial is scored to a new wave song with vocals made to sound electronically generated. The lyrics put the player into the game: “You’re a starship captain in an asteroid field, blast away your lasers or put up your shield.” These lines are sung over cinematic images of a spacecraft followed by a screenshot of Asteroids. It continues with a screenshot of Missile Command: “And a missile commander defending your city, if you’re not breaking up they’ll show no pity.” Then it cuts to Space Invaders. “Invaders won’t stop us from the sky they drop.” Only at the end of the spot do we see children playing the game, as parents look on, smiling. The combination of these three sci-fi shooting games unifies the masculinized experience of Atari play around the same themes of battle and defense as the boy is assaulted and urged to fight back. Often the player is assumed to identify with the game, even to the point of losing a sense of self located in external reality. A Tunnel Runner Atari ad shows a teenage male running through a computer graphics maze, and the voice-over describes how, when you play, “you don’t look down on the maze, you’re in it.” The first shot is of a TV set on which an image of the player is superimposed on the game, showing the male figure transported into diegetic space.
In some representations, ordinary life is shown undergoing transformation through game experiences, making for dramatic consequences. The Activision game StarMaster was advertised in a minute-long spot representing a young man returning home, dropping his keys, and petting his cat. When he begins to play the space-themed game, the lights in the room extinguish and the player seems surprised; beams flash in his face as a deep-voiced male narrates, “Fight and fight again, retreat to refuel, battle and be blasted right out of your senses.” The player relaxes by playing and becoming totally absorbed in the game, achieving “flow.” Then a computer graphics effect connects the player’s head to the screen in bright rays of light. Extreme close-ups of the player’s face alternate with the game screen making for a sense of very close connection and total absorption in the space adventure and battle depicted; his eyes widen with amazement and intensity.
Figure 3.14 Activision StarMaster commercial: the player is being brought into the game.
The ad for a 20th Century Fox Atari game from 1982, Beany Bopper, went deeper into the absorption theme. Johnny is a boy playing Atari alone in his room to the scoring of new wave synth music, with a lyric that begins, “Winning takes your total concentration.” A female sing-songy voice calls, “Johnny, telephone, it’s Susie … Johnny, Daddy is here with your new puppy … anybody seen Johnny?” The camera pushes closer and closer on Johnny’s face, framing him tightly in intense concentration, coming to an extreme close-up on his eye. The song lyric goes, “The only way to win it is to really get into it.” At the end of the ad, Johnny’s parents enter the room to find him absent, and they peer into the television set and the game contained within it. This is where their son has gone, and the spot finally cuts from their gaze into the virtual realm, which has claimed their boy, to the cartridge box, the product promising such experiences of absorption and escape to the sons of the American family. This representation of gaming relays parental anxieties about electronic play, but also the possibility for video games to transport their male users, separate them from their socialization among parents, siblings, and peers, and take them elsewhere, escaping from domesticity, heterosexual courtship rituals, and familial bonds. Through video games, they might leave all of these behind for a world of masculine adventure.
Some images of escape also were images of destruction. A 1982 ad for the 20th Century Fox Atari game Mega Force was typical of a number of ads made for products on this label, using a contemporary rock score and a male player of late teen or early adult age. The young man enters a bedroom with posters on the walls and a guitar on the bed and begins to play Mega Force, straddling a chair. Immediately his head is shown covered in a motorcycle helmet and quickly it cuts to the game screen. But within a moment we leave the game imagery in favor of cinematic representations of motorcycles, tanks, explosions, and smoke. When we return to the home, the bedroom wall has been blasted away to reveal a landscape beyond of the fantasy imagery of the game, with wind making the lamp and clothes hanging from wall hooks swing back and forth. As in many ads for early ’80s games addressing male players specifically, the mise en scène shows a violation of domestic interiors, invasion from the game narrative, and breakdown of the reality/game distinction.
A minute-long MTV-style spot for Atari’s 1982 cartridge Centipede crystallizes a number of these appeals, showing the male player leaving the family or living room of the middle-class home to enter a different space, another story world, upsetting the comforting image of home. It begins with a young man sitting on the family room floor playing the game, in which you fire from the bottom of the screen, as in Space Invaders, at creatures descending down from the top. Rather than aliens reminiscent of The War of the Worlds, the enemies in Centipede—an arcade hit at the time—are creepy-cute bugs. After a few moments of absorbed play, an insectoid appendage emerges out of the TV set and pulls the player inside. We then see a tabloid newspaper headline: “Centipedes Invade!” A pastiche of images follows of various film genres: horror, documentary, silent melodrama, all of them depicting something frightening or unsettling or panicked. Generically this is a mashup, but conceptually it shows the influence of killer bug films of the 1970s such as Bug, The Swarm, and The Giant Spider Invasion. The new wave theme, a sound-alike of the Phantom of the Opera title song, is set to a chorus of “Centipede!” sung in a portentous, breathy whisper. In one scenario, a starlet is asleep beside a human-size bug, and when waking to discover who is in her bed, she bolts upright and screams. The ad cuts to another image of a screaming woman’s face, this one in black and white. Quickly we see another headline, “Marines Battle Insects!” followed by newsreel footage of soldiers, warships, and bombs. When the commercial cuts back to a screenshot of the game, the rhythmic fire of the guns seamlessly blends into the fire of the game’s weapon against the descending Atari creatures. Finally, after displaying the cartridge box, the young man returns to his family room from inside the TV set, but by playing Centipede he has undergone metamorphosis into a bug the size of a man and calls out, “Help!”
Like the “Atari Anonymous” and “Johnny” commercials, this spot gently satirizes games for ruining the lives of their players, but it also delivers a pitch to players eager to be seduced by the power of the new medium. As in many of these representations, we see rather little imagery of the game itself, which is pedestrian by comparison with the lively pastiche of film styles. The rhetoric appeals more on the basis of associations players might make with the game’s scenario, here with cinematic rather than computer iconography. But most centrally, the experience of a game like Centipede is shown to afford an escape from everyday reality into a movielike realm, an experience so profound as to transport the young male player away from home and family, and to transform him into something else.
The idea of video games effecting a transformation of the male player’s identity was one of the most common tropes of visual representations of the new medium in the late 1970s and early ’80s. These Atari cartridge commercials often figured such a change as confusion between domestic and game space, but the notion of the player becoming someone else or being transported someplace else was also visible in many representations less invested in negating domesticity explicitly. Illustrations in the magazine Electronic Games, which began publication in 1982, often represented the fantasy elements of video gameplay. One illustration from an early issue shows a pair of boys sitting facing each other, their hands gripping joysticks. They are pictured seated on a white cloud against a sky blue background, and below the cloud their joystick cables lead into a pair of football linemen, who they control and effectively become through the fantasy of play. The boys above are light-complexioned, while the adult athletes are dark-skinned, adding an element of racial fantasy to the ideal of play as departure from everyday identity.
Figure 3.15 Electronic Games, winter 1982: a boy fantasy of play as escape.
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.