- Coin-Operated Americans: Rebooting Boyhood at the Video Game Arcade by Carly A. Kocurek
By Carly A. Kocurek.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. xxvii + 244 pp. Paper $22.95.
When asked to picture the “typical” video gamer, an image of a white, middle-class youth absorbed in play can be difficult to dislodge. This stereotypical gamer is almost invariably male, despite current research that suggests that women and girls constitute approximately half of gamers. This persistent conception of video gaming as a male-dominated arena creates a cycle in which the overwhelmingly male industry envisions a male audience, perpetuating the gender disparity.
Kocurek’s Coin-Operated Americans examines how video games came to be popularly understood as a young man’s realm, focusing on the burgeoning [End Page 145] popular, consumer, and trade cultures that developed around the arcade before the industry crash in 1983. Situating video games within the broader historical context of coin-operated amusements, from mutoscopes to pinball machines, Coin-Operated Americans charts the development of the gamer as a cultural figure within the space of the early arcade, demonstrating how the association of video games with masculinity fueled both sides of a polarized debate about games’ roles as violent influences or as providers of technological skills for the future.
The book’s first two chapters detail the early commercialization of games, including the arcade itself as the space of play, as well as the emerging trade press and the role of specialists such as route operators who licensed, sold, and serviced arcade machines. The second chapter focuses on Life magazine’s 1982 “Year in Pictures” story, which featured an image of several record-holding players in an increasingly standardized culture of scorekeeping. Borrowing the terms and iconography of competitive sports helped fashion the perception of gamers as skilled, trained, and legitimate. In contrast, chapters 3 and 4 deal with the emergence of an association among video games, violence, and fears about juvenile delinquency. Chapter 3 discusses the moral panic associated with the 1976 release of Death Race, which, critics argued, encouraged vehicular violence, while chapter 4 provides an account of how various reform efforts sought to challenge and curtail arcade culture through means such as zoning ordinances. Kocurek’s original research here demonstrates how early legislation protected video games in terms of free speech, fruitfully arguing that young people’s access to games was framed as both a civil and a consumer right.
Chapter 5 concentrates on representations of gamers (commonly conflated with hackers) in fiction films such as Tron and War Games. Here Kocurek more fully develops the notion of the technomasculine, a distinct valence of masculinity that gamers embody, energized by a combination of youth, technological ingenuity, the discipline of athleticism, and a kind of militaristic engagement. Technomasculinity, as portrayed by the young protagonists of these films, both allayed broader cultural anxieties about American technological inferiority from the Cold War and helped imagine new professional possibilities in the tech sector within the context of an uncertain economy. Chapter 6 shifts more broadly to a consideration of nostalgia for the arcade, detailing archival and preservation efforts of both hardware and software and linking nostalgia for the arcade to a longing for childhood itself. Chapter 7 returns to a discussion of gender disparity in contemporary game culture, reiterating the importance of the early arcade as a site of study in tracing the genesis of these disparities.
At times, readers may wish for closer and more sustained engagement with scholarship rooted in issues related to children and youth. For example, Neil [End Page 146] Narine and Sara M. Grimes’s piece “The Turbulent Rise of the ‘Child Gamer’: Public Fears and Corporate Promises in Cinematic and Promotional Depictions of Children’s Digital Play” in Communication, Culture & Critique would help further contextualize the fifth chapter, while in chapters 3 and 4, the specific discourse of boyhood gives way to a more general discussion of youth and delinquency. This is not so much a critique, but rather, an indication of the overlapping critical concerns shared by researchers in both media history and histories...