Figure B. Parker Brothers’ Jedi Arena ad, 1982. Source: Newsweek
he advertisement in Figure B from 1982 was clearly targeted at an upscale adult audience. The central figure is a professional who enjoys playing video games, especially as a way to relax after a day at the office. The ad copy reads: “After treating patients all day, Dr. Grayson puts down his stethoscope, picks up his LIGHTSABER and prepares to do battle with anyone who’s up to the challenge. Maybe some day you’ll be good enough to be called a JEDI MASTER too.”
But by the end of 1981 and early 1982, these adults began to be framed as ashamed of their game play. A Time article provides an example in framing an attorney who felt ashamed of his habit: “I’d really rather you didn’t use my name. This is my secret place. It would drive my wife crazy. I really don’t come here very often” (Skow, 1982). Through a series of similar articles, it quickly became clear that adults were no longer permitted Jedi training.
By the peak of the Atari boom and throughout the Nintendo era, there was a prevalent “adults aren’t able to understand games” frame, reinforcing games as the exclusive province of children, and adult play as deviant. Children were described as more able to play and as adults comparatively clumsy, as in Newsweek’s commentary on ability: “Aptitude, however, seems to decrease with age” (1981). By the early 1990s, games were so prominently framed as child’s play that adults were said to be wholly uninterested. For example, Time’s game writer stated “The kids get it right away. Nobody has to tell a 10-year old boy what’s so great about video games . . . Grownups, as a rule, don’t get it” (Elmer-DeWitt, 1993a). This framing was firmly at odds with actual use. As noted in Figure A above, adult home game play was at 43% during 1993, the year that grownups were said to “not get it.”
 Figure C. Who are games for? Age. Number of articles by year.
But where adults were framed as furtively hiding their illicit habits in the 1980s, adults in the 1990s were seemingly able to come out of the video games closet. Much of this stems from sense of social cache (and disposable income) that Generation X members gained upon entering independent adulthood. This trend was also likely reinforced by a transition within news magazines to younger writers for the video games beat. As thirtyish Los Angeles Times technology reporter Alex Pham put it, “most publications I’ve worked for tend to see it as ‘people who play games are acne-ridden adolescent boys who are socially inept’” (Liatowitsch, 2002). Even while some older players were still framed as hanging on to their childhood longer than they should—“The Dad-needs-a-sports car syndrome has hit the desktop” (S. Thomas, 1996a)—many writers began to actively resist this frame, especially for young adults. First was the acknowledgement in the late 1990s that adults once again found games pleasurable. Gradually, fewer articles (by percentage of total articles in a year) mentioned the age of users at all, a sign that game use is no longer as age coded as it was previously.
Figure D. Effects reporting by age. Number of articles by year,
As with what age games are “for,” the framing around the effects of games shifted in 1981. Before the shift, children were shown either enjoying a new pastime or experiencing an improvement in social status. Initially, this was a gain in status for disenfranchised minors. An early story featured a homeless boy in Times Square able to find validation through his game play: “This is my world—it stinks, don’t it? When you start to think you’re a loser, you come here and get 4,000 at Space Invaders, and you ain’t a loser anymore” ("TV's New Superhit: Jocktronics," 1976). Later stories focused on the high status of ace players, but with the vilification of arcades, the ace gave way to the “computer nerd” stereotype or the awkward boy who turned to machines because he was unable to connect with other human beings. With later acceptance of gaming, such frames decreased.
Several surprising findings in the sample merit speculation. Since the game industry and its proponents so often feel like social pariahs or are defensive about the merits and negative effects of video games, it was surprising also to see positive frames. This may simply be a function of the journalistic norm of two-sided balance in reporting (Gans, 1980). The positive frames appeared to function as defenses against the sorts of fears that Wartella and Reeves predict. They peaked in 1982 and 1983, the same years that the dystopian frames hit full stride. Instead of games taking children’s time from valuable activities, proponents argued that children playing games were safe. Eventually, these frames appeared to be the hallmark of a more mature medium, and at least partially as the result of a maturing cohort that grew up with video game technology: “The kids who fell in love with Mario when they were 6, they’re now 26” (N. Croal, 2000). Both the writers, and one might presume the readers, are now less focused on defending video games rather than on simply accepting their presence and liking or disliking them as readily as other mainstream media. This is also consistent with the stability of attitudes over time since most opinion change occurs through mortality and generational change, not within cohorts (Jennings & Niemi, 1981). Given the surge in leisure spending, the search for more convenient forms of entertainment, and a new generation without a predisposition against the medium, the rising popularity of video games should not be surprising.
Uppity Women
The research shows a clear gender gap in video game play, but one that has only been measured for adolescents. Nearly every academic study and survey of the social impact of games, regardless of its focus, has noted that males play more often than females (Buchman & Funk, 1996; Dominick, 1984; Fisher, 1994; Gibb et al., 1983; M. Griffiths, 1997; D. Lieberman, 1986; Lin & Leper, 1987; McClure & Mears, 1984; Michaels, 1993; C. A. Phillips, Rolls, Rouse, & Griffiths, 1995; Scantlin, 1999). These differences have been consistent in both home and arcade settings. The one exception was Creasey and Myers (1986), who reported no difference in the amount of play between genders. Government data are on the side of a substantial gender gap: by 1992, 19.2% of public high school male seniors played some type of video game more than an hour a day, compared to only 6.8% for females.1 In 1996, Buchman & Funk found that eighth-grade boys still played roughly twice as much as girls. Research findings on preference have been more mixed. Griffiths found definite differences between genders, with boys preferring more violence and sports (M. Griffiths, 1997), but Braun and Giroux found no differences (1989). Some of the gender preferences may be a result of socialization and parental influence. Griffiths found that interest in sports games dropped off dramatically between grades 4 and 8 for girls, and that most gender-based preferences had changed by age 11. Why have boys played more than girls? Parents may have been discouraging girls at the same time they were encouraging boys to play. Scantlin found that boys not only played more, but started playing earlier than girls (Scantlin, 1999). Ellis (1984) found that parents exerted far more control over their daughters’ ability to go to arcades than their sons’. Why should this be?
The explanation involves the gendering of technology. For males, technology has long been an empowering and masculine pursuit that hearkens back to the wunderkind tinkerers of the previous century. The heroic boy inventor image was first made fashionable through the carefully managed and promoted exploits of Thomas Edison and then Guglielmo Marconi (S. Douglas, 1987). Since then, technology has remained a socially acceptable pursuit for boys, and one that may offer them a sense of identity and empowerment that they are not getting elsewhere.
A reason for boys to associate more closely with technology is the psychological result of how boys and girls are socialized differently within families: boys develop with more emphasis on the cognitive and the rational because they are forced to form an identity early on separate from their mother, while girls are encouraged to retain their mother’s identity and to place more emphasis on the emotional (Chodorow, 1994; Rubin, 1983). The result is that boys are driven to technology in large part because it is rational and cognitive, and also because it helps them develop their self-identity at a time when they are being forced into independence. Male tastes are privileged through content as well, reinforcing the choice. This explanation fits the experience of the males, but does not fully explain the dearth of females pursuing technological interests, who continue to remain on the sidelines of science and technology. For example, women are dramatically underrepresented as engineers and scientists in college, despite outperforming men in science and math in high school (Seymour, 1995). The percentage of female engineering Ph.D.’s who graduated in 1999 was an all-time high of only 15%.2 This is partly because fields such as computer science are perceived and experienced as hostile to women (Pearl et al., 1990).
If there are fewer women in technology, it must be for one of two reasons. One, women are not capable or naturally interested in technology, or two, women have been systematically socialized away from technology. Despite media framing (see below), there is no evidence to suggest that biology plays a role in the gendering of technology. There is, however, ample evidence pointing to a social construction of science as a male pursuit (Jansen, 1989).3 Flanagan argues that this is a direct result of the threat that female empowerment through technology poses to male power; women who use technology are not only less dependent on men but less monitored and controllable (Flanagan, 1999). The world of video games is a direct extension of this power relationship (McQuivey, 2001). Men have been represented as technologically superior, leading to fewer female gamers (Bryce & Rutter, 2001).
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