Vintage advertising image for Atari’s 2600 game console.

Post by Anthony Smith, University of Salford

This post continues the ongoing “From Nottingham and Beyond” series, with contributions from faculty and alumni of the University of Nottingham’s Department of Culture, Film and Media. This week’s contributor is Anthony Smith, who completed his PhD in the department in 2013.

Advertisers’ use of family life as a means to market video games and hardware is by no means a new phenomenon. Hugely successful home consoles such as the Atari 2600 (launched in 1977) and the Nintendo Wii (launched in 2006), for example, were each promoted in part on the basis of the familial unity each system encourages. Television commercial spots for these platforms promised fun gaming experiences that children, their parents and their grandparents could enjoy together in living rooms (see videos below).

With this post, however, I identify how advertisers have begun to construct via their campaigns an alternate, more ambiguous relationship between video gaming and family life. Whereas advertisers have previously depicted gaming as a unifying force for the family (or, as I detail below, an activity entirely unrelated to family), recent UK ad campaigns for the Sony PS4 video game console and for Virgin Media’s broadband service suggest that video gaming might in fact be an imperfect fit for the family. In particular, each campaign establishes the father figure who is required to balance familial responsibilities with a video-gaming pastime that excludes other family members.

“This is for the Players”—2013 ad for Sony’s PS4 console.

In the case of the PS4’s marketing, the discursive construction of this figure–who we might term “gamer dad”–emerged as part of Sony PlayStation Europe’s promotional campaign for the device’s launch in 2013, central to which was the assurance that this system “is for the players.” This marketing tactic helped Sony appeal to dedicated video-game players–a group that largely comprises the “early-adopter” market for home consoles, simultaneously positioning the PS4 against the rival Microsoft console (Xbox One, also launched 2013), which in contrast was initially promoted on the basis of its Skype and voice-activated TV-viewing capabilities. Sony’s poster and TV ad campaign further articulated who it envisaged these “players” to be: the PS4 serves, among others, the “rookies and the veterans. The soldiers. The survivors. The 3 am fathers and the multiplayer motor mouths. The trophy collectors. […] The once-in-a-while assassins” and “Fans of jaw-dropping graphics.”

“The players” that Sony’s marketing discursively constructs via these labels largely conform to an enduring stereotype of the “hardcore” gamer; that is, a player who is abrasively competitive (trophy-collecting, motormouth, multiplaying), prioritizes hardware that delivers strong technical performances (“jaw-dropping graphics”), and who favors games that feature fictional killing as a game-world objective (“once-in-a-while assassins”) and–more specifically–games concerning military warfare fictions (“The rookies and the veterans. The soldiers”), such as those of the Call of Duty and Battlefield first-person-shooter (FPS) series.

The marketing of console hardware more generally typically presents this “hardcore” gamer type as an adult male who, apparently without family, has free reign of the living room television (as is the case with the Aaron Paul-starring Xbox One commercial below).

Sony’s “3 am fathers” label, however, presents an unusual version of this type. The “3 am father,” the label implies, is required to pursue his gaming hobby in the morning’s early hours due to the prioritization within the day and evening of his familial and parental role, outside of which his hobby must exist. The label’s further implication is that the “3 am father” plays games that are incompatible with family life, such as violence-depicting FPS games, hence the need for their confinement to the twilight hours.

A Virgin Media commercial spot designed to promote its broadband service similarly constructs the image of a father figure who imperfectly incorporates the playing of “hardcore” video games into a familial context. The ad depicts “Nick,” an anthropomorphized seal on a living room couch, playing a militaristic FPS (Nick is a Navy Seal, apparently). The ad’s voiceover claims Virgin Media’s “superfast fiber broadband […] lets [Nick] download new games quicker,” which is, the voice-over informs, an essential feature for Nick “because every second counts when you’re not being a dad.” The ad subsequently reinforces this point, as the return of Nick’s wife and daughter to the home results in the interruption of his gaming session (see video below).

In line with the “3 am fathers” label, the Virgin Media ad suggests that a chief characteristic of “gamer dad” is the manner in which he must awkwardly situate his “hardcore” gaming hobby around his family’s requirements.

The advertising construct of “gamer dad” has the potential to be considered in relation to wider debates regarding media representations of video-game players, and more specifically players of “hardcore” games. In particular, “gamer dad” can be connected to the more general process within media culture of gendering “hardcore” gaming as a primarily male pursuit. A further component of Sony’s “This is for the players” promotional campaign, a video in which various men and women self-identify the types of players they are (see below), emphasizes this point.

The video at least to some extent avoids gendering tendencies, as it features, for example, a young woman self-identifying as an enthusiast of the FPS series Killzone. However, the apparent characteristics of the video’s one self-identifying mother are largely in opposition to those of the “3 am father,” suggesting that, for parents at least, conventional gender stereotyping continues with regard to representations of “hardcore” video-game players. “I’m a mum who plays with her son,” the woman says to the camera while holding up a placard stating her preference for Skylanders, a child-targeted game series. By suggesting that carrying out parental activities (such as playing Skylanders alongside a son) is the primary and legitimate means by which mothers achieve pleasure, Sony’s promotional campaign aligns mums with the “good mother” stereotype, of which feminists have been highly critical. Thus, while, advertisers make clear that the likes of Nick the Navy Seal and “the 3 am fathers” enjoy and are suited to game-world soldiering and assassinating (as long as such escapades are appropriately cordoned off from family life), they neglect to suggest also that mothers might desire–or can legitimately undertake–such recreational activities.

In brief: #Gamergate started in late August when an ex-boyfriend of independent game designer Zoe Quinn posted an intimate account of their failed relationship, including accusations that Quinn had several affairs with men who write for videogame news and review sites. This, he implied, explained why her interactive fiction game Depression Quest had become an award-winning success. The ex-boyfriend also explicitly stated that his purpose in posting his interpretation of their relationship was to ruin her career.

#Gamergate should have ended there. Exploiting the personal life of a woman to call into question her professional success is an all-too familiar tactic to delegitimize women’s work and status. In 2007, Ubisoft producer Jade Raymond endured similar public humiliation when popular gaming blogs accused her of using sex appeal to promote Assassin’s Creed, suggesting as well that she reached her position at Ubisoft only because she is an attractive woman. For Quinn, the accusation that her success is a result of sleeping her way to fame followed months of harassment and negative comments about her game from users on Steam Greenlight, many of whom claimed Depression Question was not a ‘real game’ worthy of development support from Valve.

Unfortunately Kotaku, one of the news outlets named by the jilted ex, responded to accusations that one of their writers had acted unethically. After a brief investigation, Kotaku determined no ethical breach had occurred, but the editor’s statement only brought further attention to the smear campaign. Video “evidence” was produced in the form of rambling monologues, and graphics tracing Quinn’s supposed relationships within the industry were created and shared widely on 4chan, Reddit and Twitter. Shortly after the initial ex-boyfriend post, B-list actor Adam Baldwin (best known for playing Jayne Cobb on Firefly) linked to a “Quinnspiracy” video and tagged the Twitter post #gamergate; Baldwin has remained active in the #gamergate tag.

An insular, cozy relationship between publishers, developers and game journalists has characterized the industry for decades, though complaints from readers have rarely affected any policy changes. Like other sectors of the entertainment press, industry-sponsored media junkets and gadget-leaden swag bags continue to woo journalists and reviewers despite calls for more objective news coverage and more meaningful game criticism. The back pages of Game Informer, Computer Gaming World (before it folded in 2006) and dozens of gaming magazines over the years are filled with photos of journalists and editors hanging out with celebrity game designers and triple-A publishers at industry parties.

While the outrage about Quinn’s connections in the industry seems to raise fair concerns about journalism ethics, the focus of #gamergate has largely not been on journalists or on the well-funded publishers and developers who have courted the press with exclusive access and freebies for years. Instead, Quinn and other independent game developers with far fewer resources were targeted for fostering relationships and building professional networks – an absolute requirement for success in any creative industry.

The #gamergate controversy frothed when a few game journalists and editors were linked to indie developers through the crowdfunding sites Kickstarter and Patreon, and at least one site adopted a policy of “disclosure” for such funding by writers. This sounds fine on the surface, but is a little more insidious when we consider who is usually supported through crowdfunding (i.e. indie developers, often with projects that fall well outside the triple-A mainstream); after all, nobody is asking the same writers to maintain a public list of major releases they’ve paid cash dollars for, even though by the same logic “supporting” development with money in any way should be suspect.

#Gamergate is not about ethics, or about making the industry more transparent. The rhetoric of #gamergate is a co-option of the concerns that women and minorities in the industry have raised for years. The reason #gamergate has struck such a chord now is because, indeed, the industry is changing. Diverse characters in games are more common and more women and minorities are making games. As others have commented, #gamergate signals a culture war within gaming that has been slowly building for decades and, following years on the margins, has finally broken through to the mainstream.

However, the conversation that should occur about inclusivity in games has been hijacked by an extremely conservative discourse that co-opts the language of exclusion in order to argue that the cultural shift occurring is meant to deny gamers their preferred experiences. Transcripts of 4chan conversations and Reddit threads where instigators of #gamergate strategize the online abuse of women and their allies who dare to challenge the status quo read like talking points crafted by conservative political consultant Frank Luntz and right-wing commentator Glenn Beck. It is a world turned upside down, and it would be funnier if it were not alternately scary and tiresome. Even as #gamergate has simultaneously reached mainstream attention and hysterical levels of conspiracy theory paranoia, it remains at heart an object lesson in the harassment that women in and around the game industry are subjected to.

If #gamergate has uncovered anything, it has revealed that some people with shared professional interests know each other, that some people with shared professional interests attend the same professional events, and that some people with shared professional interests are reminded, daily, that those very interests put them at risk. But, hey, we knew that already.