Approaching Video Game History

Abstract

This chapter describes the theoretical ideas that inform the work. The approach taken emphasizes the social and cultural mediation of computer games. We have the games we have because people have understood games played on computers in culturally specific ways. The formation of gaming culture in the 1980s was a process through which a discrete class of objects were singled out and made into the locus of a new cultural practice with its own meanings. This in turn opened a range of possible identity positions, including that of the ‘computer gamer’; one who is invested in gaming as a cultural field in which they may excel and secure recognition from their peers.