Table of Contents

  1. Title page
  2. Copyright page
  3. Acknowledgments
  4. Preface
  5. Introduction: Early Video Games and New Media History
  6. 1 Good Clean Fun: The Origins of the Video Arcade
  7. 2 “Don’t Watch TV Tonight. Play It!” Early Video Games and Television
  8. 3 Space Invaders: Masculine Play in the Media Room
  9. 4 Video Games as Computers, Computers as Toys
  10. 5 Video Kids Endangered and Improved
  11. 6 Pac-Man Fever
  12. Select Bibliography
  13. Index

List of Illustrations

  1. Figure 1.1 Time magazine’s January 18, 1982, cover pictures a young man fighting an alien invasion within the representation of an arcade game.
  2. Figure 2.1 Fairchild Channel F brochure.
  3. Figure 2.2 Magnavox Odyssey flyer.
  4. Figure 2.3 Catalog detail: “tele-games” from the Sears Wish Book for the 1979 Holiday Season.
  5. Figure 2.4 Intellivision catalog.
  6. Figure 2.5 Marx T.V. Tennis game.
  7. Figure 2.6 Sony Betamax advertisement: “Watch Whatever Whenever.”
  8. Figure 2.7 Atari advertisement: “Don’t Watch TV Tonight. Play It!”
  9. Figure 2.8 Changing Times, 1978, showing the tension between games as TV and as participatory activity.
  10. Figure 2.9 A Blip comic strip, positioning games between conceptions of good and bad television uses.
  11. Figure 3.1 Atari commercial, “Have you played a game from Atari?”
  12. Figure 3.2 A 1950 television ad by Magnavox.
  13. Figure 3.3 Mechanix Illustrated, 1975: father–son gameplay on the carpet.
  14. Figure 3.4 Popular Science, 1972: playing the Odyssey.
  15. Figure 3.5 Radio Electronics, 1975: a parent–child rec room scene.
  16. Figure 3.6 Odyssey manual detail.
  17. Figure 3.7 Parker Brothers catalog, 1982.
  18. Figure 3.8 Coleco ’77 games catalog includes a variety of toys including TV games.
  19. Figure 3.9 Atari Outlaw cartridge box and game.
  20. Figure 3.10 Atari Combat cartridge box and game.
  21. Figure 3.11 Atari Maze Craze cartridge box and game.
  22. Figure 3.12 Story of Atari Breakout, audio book set cover, 1982.
  23. Figure 3.13 Atari commercial: Space Invaders descending on the family home.
  24. Figure 3.14 Activision StarMaster commercial: the player is being brought into the game.
  25. Figure 3.15 Electronic Games, winter 1982: a boy fantasy of play as escape.
  26. Figure 4.1 In an early scene in Vacation (1983), the use of a home computer to plan a trip is hijacked by the children’s video games.
  27. Figure 4.2 Time “Machine of the Year” cover, 1983.
  28. Figure 4.3 “TV Typewriter” cover of Radio Electronics, 1973.
  29. Figure 4.4 Time covers: “The Computer in Society” (1965) and “The Computer Society” (1978).
  30. Figure 4.5 Magnavox Odyssey2 advertisement: “Mind of a Computer” signified by a QWERTY keyboard.
  31. Figure 4.6 Isaac Asimov in an advertisement for Radio Shack’s TRS-80.
  32. Figure 4.7 Apple II advertisement in Byte, 1977, establishing normative gender roles for home computing.
  33. Figure 4.8 Picturing the home computer and its adult male user at work, Changing Times, 1977.
  34. Figure 4.9 Commodore VIC-20 advertising showing the appeal of the technology for play, with Star Trek’s William Shatner as pitchman.
  35. Figure 4.10 Commodore 64 advertising with the nuclear family sharing the home computer at different times of day.
  36. Figure 4.11 Commodore 64 advertising recalling Atari’s “Don’t Watch TV” campaign.
  37. Figure 6.1 Pac-Man cabinet with cartoonish characters.
  38. Figure 6.2 Illustration from Martin Barker, I Hate Vidiots, sexualizing Pac-Man and its female players.
  39. Figure 6.3 1982 Bally/Midway flyer showing Ms. Pac-Man and its intended market.
  40. Figure 6.4 Ms. Pac-Man marquee with its feminized representation of the character and the game.

Guide

  1. Cover
  2. Table of Contents