A Brief Social History of Game Play - Dmitri Williams.doc

A Brief Social History of Game Play Dmitri Williams, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Who has played video games? Where have they played them? And how have games helped or hindered social networks and communities? This chapter answers these historical questions for the birthplace of video games—the United States—although many other industrialized countries have had similar patterns. In the U.S., our collective stereotype conjures up an immediate image: Isolated, pale-skinned teenage boys sit hunched forward on a sofa in some dark basement space, obsessively mashing buttons. In contrast, the statistics and accounts tell a very different story—one of often vibrant social settings and diverse playing communities. Why do American conceptions of gamers diverge from reality? The explanation is that for video game media, the sociopolitical has been inseparable from the practical. Social constructions, buttressed by the news media over the past 30 years, have created stereotypes of game play that persist within generations. This chapter will explain both the imagery and the reality. Moving from the descriptive to the analytical, it begins with the basic trends and figures: who played, when, where and why, and how changes in technology have impacted the social side of gaming. An immediate pattern appears—for both industrial and political reasons, the early 1980s were a crucial turning point in the social history of video game play. What began as an open and free space for cultural and social mixing was quickly transformed through social constructions that had little to do with content, the goals of the producers, or even demand. The legacy of that era persists today, influencing who plays, how we view games, and even how we investigate their uses and effects. Setting the Stage Figure A gives industry revenues for home and arcade play, standardized to 1983 dollars. The data show what game historians have already presented through narratives (Herman, 1997; Herz, 1997