It's no accident that the United States government is co-opting Halo and Pokémon imagery to promote U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The industry has been building to this moment for decades, as companies built an aesthetic of "gamer" told through advertisements designed to sell games to kids. Decades ago, magazines were a stand-in for today's online internet communities, says Jess Morrissette, a professor of political science and Director of International Affairs at Marshall University.
Morrissette and Megan Condis, associate professor at Texas Tech University's Department of Journalism and Creative Media Industries and author of Storytelling for Video Games Using Bitsy and Gaming Masculinity, published a review in January of nearly 3,000 advertisements published between 1989 to 1995 in Electronic Gaming Monthly—"Rad Dudes, Rude ‘Tude, and the Family, Too: How Nintendo and Sega Advertisements Shaped the Image of Gaming in the 1990s." The review is a look back at how Nintendo and Sega advertisements were deployed during the '90s, but also a way to reflect on how these advertisements shaped "gamer" as an identity.
"[The Department of Homeland Security] is pulling on this idea of the gamer aesthetic as being playful outsiders with a masculine machismo, who are rejecting whatever they think of as mainstream," Condis told Aftermath. "To use the terminology we use, they're being rude. They're being mean. They're being 'cool,' in a cruel, playful way. That's the imagine they're hoping to project—pwning their opponents as opposed to doing serious politics. That's only possible because of this very specific position that video games crafted for themselves as objects of pop culture."
Their paper is an extension of a previous publication that analyzed gender in game advertisements, "Dudes, boobs, and GameCubes: Video game advertising enters adolescence," which was published in 2023. The new paper specifically looks at Nintendo and Sega advertisements during a period that many call the console wars, in which Nintendo consoles, positioned as family-friendly, were pitted against the cool, edgy Sega consoles. The story of the console wars has been well-trod, but often told through oral histories or interview-based retrospectives.
"Popular history has almost been mythologized," Morrissette told Aftermath. Magazines provide a tangible way to analyze whether reality lines up with the way we think about the console wars. "Advertisements give us that little bit of extra sense of how we're supposed to understand these products, how they expect us as an industry to relate to these products, which ones we're meant to identify with, and maybe even in some cases, what audiences they're subtly signaling you aren't who we're targeting with this product," he says.
Condis described the research process: First, the researchers had to decide what sorts of advertisements to include. They landed on first-party hardware and software, so games and hardware published directly by Nintendo and Sega. But they also included third-party software—games that were published by outside studios for either Nintendo or Sega. They left out ads for other systems, like the NeoGeo, and excluded third-party peripheral companies, too. The idea behind including third-party software was that a person deciding whether to buy a Nintendo or Sega console isn't just looking at first-party stuff; they're looking at a wider catalogue of games that they can buy.
Then, they and an undergraduate research assistant, Theresa Brown, went through nearly 3,000 advertisements using a complex coding system to mark the attributes of an ad. If an ad met the criteria for sexualizing women, that got a tick. If it had what the researchers described as a "rude attitude," like using or implying swear words, that got a mark. The process applied lots of different labels for analysis.
Neither Nintendo nor Sega were particularly interested in selling consoles or software to girls, Condis and Morrisette found; they were clearly selling to boys and men. Nintendo's advertisements spanned age ranges—kids, teens, and adults. But Sega's were aligned more closely with ads for teens and adults, and less toward kids. "That supported the story that the oral histories are telling," Condis says. "Sega was the thing that was going to swoop in and say, 'Nintendo games are for babies! You're a cool high school kid. Your little brother plays Nintendo, but you play these sick games with an attitude.'"
Nintendo wasn't squeaky clean, though, Morrisette adds. Nintendo actually had more images of what the researchers defined as sexualized images of women, though that number may be skewed a little because Nintendo had more ads in Electronic Games Monthly during the set time period. But Morrissette said that adjusted as a percentage, Nintendo and Sega were "roughly neck and neck on sexualized images of women, which, again in thatthat sort of world of, 'Sega does what Nintendon't,' is a little bit of a surprise," he said. "That's certainly not my image of how I remember Nintendo at the time."
The researchers also looked at imagery depicting families—was either console maker marketing their consoles and games to the whole family? Family play appeared in 37 Nintendo ads, but just one Sega ad, they said. It's something that they expected, in some ways, because Sega did have that appeal as the edgy, teenage boy console. But it was surprising to see just how disinterested, in this set of ads, Sega appeared to be, Morrissette says. The earlier era of video game ads, prior to the 1970s and Atari, Condis adds, were marketed as family experiences for the living room. Into the '90s, consoles overall became more known as kid friendly over family friendly, something that a kid has in their room instead of, say, a family space. Sega's appeal to teenage boys was also on display in '90s advertisements as something the researchers defined as "rude 'tude."
"One of my favorite examples was an ad for a soccer game on the Sega Genesis that said, 'You're going to kick some balls,'" Condis says. "And we were like, 'Ooooh, yeah.' My grandma clutched her peals. So edgy. Flirting with cuss words being rebellious. It's ads that talked about, like, 'This game is going to make your teacher's eyes pop out of her head,' or gross out ads like burps, farts, and 'This is going to make you throw up!'"
Nintendo, of course, didn't refrain from this sort of advertising, but it was in smaller doses. "One of the ads we found of Kirby, the cute little pink guy, was Kirby getting his mug shot taken," Morrissette says. "He's tough, too! He's cool—he hasn't shaved in a couple days."
The full paper is available to read free online through ACM Games: Research and Practice. Both Condis and Morrisette say there's so much more research to be done on video game advertisements. And it's research that both scholars and enthusiasts can do: Just look for magazine archives and start going through them. "What if you went and looked at all the letters to the editor?" Condis asks. "What letters are they choosing to publish to represent the voice of the reader? What if you went and looked through all the reviews?"
All you need is a spreadsheet and an online archive of these magazines, of which there are many that are free, she says.
"The way you come to understand [anything] inside and out is by seeing how it evolved over time," Condis says. "And seeing how the messages played off each other and snowballed to create this tapestry."
Morrissette adds: "And realizing that these identities and these values didn't come from nowhere. A big part of what this project is all about is that these values didn't just spring up out of thin air. These ads are both shaping identities and values while at the same time being reflexively shaped themselves by the growth of gaming from a very nice hobby to a massive part of the entertainment industry. It becomes a back and forth as they negotiate this idea of what a gamer is and what a gamer does, and what a gamer believes, what energy drink they drink, and everything eventually starts to spin out from there."
