I'm in my late thirties. Played a lot of video games when I was a kid through college and a little after. But this whole idea of there being a "gaming culture" or how being a "gamer" is a major part of peoples' personalities just seems weird to me. Not even a complaint, just an observation.

:grillman:

  • TheLepidopterists [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Go back far enough and there were MORE women than men in arcades, back before marketing ghouls determined that male arcade visitors were more likely to spend lots of money if feeeemales weren’t around socializing and otherwise distracting them. It was a decision made, an artificial one, to use advertising and social engineering tricks to gradually evict women from early video game fandom. E T H I C A L.

    This is, aside from being very fucked up, pretty interesting. Do you have an article about it?

    • UlyssesT [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      These are not the article I originally found. They're not nearly as good. If I can find the original article that gave the specific details and even showed examples of pre-and-post dudebro marketing focusing in the 80s, I will link that later.

      https://uwm.edu/news/book-excerpt-pac-man-lured-women-video-game-arcades/

      https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/12/female-gamers-and-masculine-marketers-polygon-s-history-of-the-sexist-selling-of-video-games.html