The Formation of Gaming Culture

UK Gaming Magazines, 1981-1995

G. Kirkpatrick

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137305091
• eBook ISBN: 9781137305107
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Social Sciences

This book analyses gaming magazines published in Britain in the 1980s to provide the first serious history of the bedroom coding culture that produced some of the most important video games ever played.

1

Approaching Video Game History

Abstract: This chapter describes the theoretical ideas that inform the work. The approach taken emphasizes the social and cultural mediation of computer games. We have the games we have because people have understood games played on computers in culturally specific ways. The formation of gaming culture in the 1980s was a process through which a discrete class of objects were singled out and made into the locus of a new cultural practice with its own meanings. This in turn opened a range of possible identity positions, including that of the ‘computer gamer’; one who is invested in gaming as a cultural field in which they may excel and secure recognition from their peers.

Keywords: cultural studies; gaming culture; gaming identity; history of gaming; sociology of gaming

Kirkpatrick, Graeme. The Formation of Gaming Culture: UK Gaming Magazines, 1981–1995. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137305107.0005.

This book is a work of cultural sociology. Its primary concern is with the meaning(s) that people attached to their own activity in connection with computers and specifically games on computers in the 1980s. Reading computer gaming magazines of the 1980s enables us to address questions like how games were first interpreted, what kinds of significance people found in them and how they were compared with other cultural practices.

This chapter describes the theoretical ideas that have been used to construct the study and which have guided my interpretation of the results. In any study of this kind there is a question about its value. What questions will an investigation of 1980s computing and gaming magazines pose and why will the answers matter? This question must be addressed if we are to be assured that the work has any value but also to place it in the relevant conversations.

Games have been brought to us by the historical past and their aesthetic and technical properties exist in the form that we encounter today because they have been shaped by that past. It follows that adequate understanding of computer games cannot stop at an analysis of their aesthetic or technical aspects without attention to the matter of cultural and social mediation. As Adrienne Shaw has pointed out, we must understand games and gaming as culturally constituted, that is, through a problematic derived from cultural studies (Shaw 2010: 404).¹

This chapter begins with an account of the 1980s context in which the magazines were published, including an account of the home computers that were central to their concerns. It positions the study in the context of established historical narratives and highlights the importance of the UK and the magazines themselves to the history of gaming culture.

The next section introduces the idea of indeterminacy and highlights the importance of social and cultural factors in producing a clear sense of what computer games are, what they are for and why they are interesting. The first achievement of gaming culture lies in identifying computer games as a special class of software object among the myriad of products that swirled around home computers in the 1980s and in singling them out in a way that turned out to be determinate.

The first two sections highlight important principles that apply to the historical study of all technical phenomena, including entertainment technologies. In section three, I develop a specific analogy with cinema, drawing particularly on the work of André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion (2006) to suggest that, like movies, games were ‘born twice’: first as relatively indeterminate technology then as the focus of a specific milieu which elevated them to a kind of prominence. Just as with cinema, the second stage, which involves the formation of this milieu and the resulting change in perceptions, is key to the ‘heroic phase’ in the development of the new medium, when it moves towards becoming a cultural practice in its own right.

The fourth section develops the notion of a new prism through which games are viewed and understood by drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s (1993; 2005) notions of habitus and field. The new perception is located in a set of embodied dispositions that people learn and on which basis they are able to come to grips (literally) with gaming practices. This, the formation of gamer habitus, is rendered intelligible through the development of ways of talking that are specific to gaming and come to be associated with the identity, ‘gamer’. Tracing the development of this milieu through the magazines enables us to see that a new language, new ways of interpreting and understanding the world are made possible through it. This is the formation of gaming’s field: the social and cultural prism that makes gaming possible.

In conclusion, I suggest that this account of gaming and how it came to be an activity that people could invest themselves in and in which they could find meaning, has reflexive implications for those of us who study games in the present. Gaming’s illusio – the belief that it is a valuable practice worth arguing over and ‘getting right’ – is itself a social product: in feeling this way and making these arguments we contribute to the production of the very field that accommodates our activity. This insight carries implications for contemporary scholarship, to which I return in the conclusion of the book.

1.1 Context: UK computers in the 1980s

The first computer games for public consumption were arcade games manufactured in the US in the early 1970s.² Arcade gaming machines spread rapidly from the US to Japan, Europe and Australasia where they entered different pre-existing arcade cultures. In the US gaming was quickly transformed into a domestic entertainment medium by the first generation of home gaming consoles, the most famous of which were Atari machines, which sold well there in the second half of the 1970s.³ Initially these machines were like mini-arcade machines with games ‘wired in’ at the hardware level. Later they had slots for cartridges so consumers could adopt the ‘razor and blades’ model familiar to contemporary console gamers.

These consoles were much less important outside the US, where gaming mainly entered domestic space a couple of years later with home computers. These were marketed initially as business and study devices but in Britain and elsewhere they were used mainly to play and also to create games. The proliferation of these small computers and the associated hobbyist culture predates similar developments in the US in the 1990s (described in Cassidy 2002), even though the biggest selling machine of the era, the Commodore 64, was manufactured there. The computer revolution and gaming culture have American seeds⁴ but they took hold and flourished elsewhere before personal computing became ubiquitous in the US (and everywhere else) after 1989 (see Haddon 1995; Švelch 2013; Gazzard 2014; Swalwell 2011; Kirkpatrick 2007, 2012).⁵

The period covered in this study is roughly that between the launch of computers in the UK for home use (the first British-manufactured device of this kind was the BBC microcomputer made by Acorn Computers in late 1981) and the arrival of the World Wide Web (which became widely available and accessible in 1994). Because the focus is on the formation of gaming culture, there is rather more emphasis on the 1980s and my account of the early 1990s is more tentative. During the 1980s computer ownership was a minority activity in the UK. Ownership of a computer only reached one million between 1987–9, out of a population then estimated to be around 56 million.

For much of the 1980s computer use was limited to tens, then hundreds of thousands of households in which there was often an established enthusiasm for technology. Notwithstanding its minority appeal, the UK seems to have occupied a unique place in the burgeoning computer culture when viewed in international perspective. The magazines, Computer and Video Games (launched in November 1981) and Commodore User (which replaced Vic User in September 1983) seem to have been the first publications of their kind, that is, computer magazines with a specific focus on games, anywhere in the world. They grew rapidly in circulation in the very years that are often associated with a ‘crash’ in the games industry, 1982–5.

This probably reflects the fact that, as I have argued elsewhere (Kirkpatrick 2013), home computers were bought and used in the UK, while in the US, where many of them were made, they were bought but stashed away in cupboards.⁶ In 1982, Commodore sold more computers in the UK than in the whole of the US (Bagnall 2010: 464).

Although they were not popular, Atari systems were available in the UK in the first half of the 1980s, as were the rival Intellivision, Colecovision and Vectrex home gaming systems and they were discussed in the magazines. They compared acceptably well on price with the most popular small computers. The Atari 600XL, for example, retailed in late 1983 at £159.00 and was advertised as a gaming machine with 16k of RAM and ‘excellent graphics’. The Coleco system of the same period offered 32K of RAM, so that its advertising proclaimed ‘faster speed of play’, and dedicated ‘video memory’, which meant that its graphics would be more defined and better for playing games.⁷

Home computers varied greatly in price and in their usefulness to what were then referred to as ‘games players’ (and only very rarely as ‘gamers’). The biggest selling machines were Commodores, starting with the PET and, from August 1981, the VIC-20⁸ which had 3.5K of RAM (which could be expanded using peripherals) and sold for just under £200. Also popular for playing games were the Sinclair computers, which were inferior in terms of their graphics, processing power and feel (they came with cheap, rubbery keyboards) but significantly cheaper at around £129.

These machines appeared in the marketplace alongside computers that were avowedly educational devices. Particularly important in this context was the BBC microcomputer system, which had a large 32K of RAM and sold for between £335–£399. According to a 1983 review in Computer and Video Games magazine, the BBC computer had ‘graphical capabilities far superior to any machine in its price range’ (CVG 28, September 1983, p. 52). It offered eight colours and 255 pitch variations of sound. The BBC was part of a campaign on the part of the British government to get computers into schools. A concerted effort was made to introduce young people to computing and the devices were often presented as an important part of ‘the future’. Mastering computer skills was something that would give children an advantage.

This context framed small computers in a way that made them more appealing to parents than dedicated consoles for ‘TV gaming’. However, the price of the BBC made it prohibitive for many families. The wide range of computers⁹ sold in the first half of the 1980s, priced at under or around £200 reflects the fact that manufacturers knew they had to undercut the BBC to appeal to parents while maintaining the functions essential to playing games: graphics capabilities and speed of visual action. These parameters defined the market in home computers at the time when, as Les Haddon (1995) points out, they were inherently ambiguous between their educational and entertainment functions, and this ambiguity was often key to their appeal.¹⁰

For most people in Britain in the late 1970s the only places to play digital games were arcades, pubs and nightclubs. Home computers, when they arrived, were purchased in the ambiguous context just described and not straightforwardly as games machines. Britain quickly developed a software industry producing programs for people keen to see what their computers could do. CVG reported in June 1982 that there were ‘a dozen’ firms producing software for the VIC alone (CVG 80, June 1982, p. 80). Soon there were hundreds of bedroom and garage-based operations making software for all the available machines. Games programs became salient in this context.

As this happened so commenced an important phase in the history of video games and home entertainment. ‘Bedroom coding’ was the locus of a cultural transformation that turned out to be constitutive for computer gaming. It is worth pointing out that there was a definite, positive US influence at work here: the dedicated TV gaming machines popular in America had superior graphics capabilities to home computers and the US industry and its products were often referred to as ‘more professional’ than homebrew software (e.g. CVG 81, 1981, p. 91).¹¹

Between 1982–6, however, the UK was the powerhouse of computer gaming yet most histories of gaming overlook this important phase (e.g. Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter 2009). The reasons for this seem to trace to a US-centrism concerning the origins of computer games and to a kind of technical determinism which leads people to assume that important developments in gaming must be attendant upon technical and design innovations. Consequently we are led to believe that the 1982–3 crash in US sales led to a hiatus in the development of gaming as a craft, medium or art form, but nothing could be further from the truth.

The UK magazines analysed here reflect the fact that while the US industry was largely dormant)¹² and before the arrival of the Japanese consoles that transformed the technical basis of games playing in Autumn 1987, gaming culture was in a crucial period of formation – a period that merits the title ‘heroic’.

1.2 Indeterminacy and the magazines

The small computers of the 1980s came loaded with diffuse symbolic significance. They were the technology that would realize the popular vision of a workless, post-industrial future.¹³ However, they did not come with instructions¹⁴ on how to fulfil these rather vague expectations. As many have pointed out, computers were at this time ‘underdetermined’: it was not clear what they were for. As constructionist scholars have shown (Bijker et al. 1989) this is the normal situation with new technology. Initially there is a period of indeterminacy during which rival social constituencies find what is of use to them in the new artefacts. There follows a period of contested definition during which they compete for symbolic ownership; to have their preferred use accepted as definitive. Once this struggle has been concluded some designations appear natural and obvious while others, gradually forgotten, appear odd and to lack common sense.

During the phase of indeterminacy the possibilities that inhere in an artifact are probed and tested by different social groups, each seeking to identify and establish uses for it that comport with their own interests. Hence, youn...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Approaching Video Game History
• 2  Studying the Magazines
• 3  Getting a Feel for the Games
• 4  Game Addicted Freaks
• 5  Wimps, YOBs and Game Busters
• Conclusion: Gaming Culture and Game Studies
• References
• Name Index