History Commons^™

I Play To Beat The Machine: Masculinity And The Video Game Industry In The United States, Anne Mcdivitt

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the video game industry within the United States from the first game that was created in 1958 until the shift to Japanese dominance of the industry in 1985, and how white, middle class masculinity was reflected through the sphere of video gaming. The first section examines the projections of white, middle class masculinity in U.S. culture and how that affected the types of video games that the developers created. The second section examines reflections of this masculine culture that surrounded video gaming in the 1970s and 1980s in the developers, gamers, and the media, while demonstrating how …