Adolescent Masculinity and the Geek Aesthetic: A Study of Gaming Magazine Imagery 1982 to 1993

This paper presents a study of the early UK specialist gaming press and charts how these vanguard texts helped initiate, and articulate, an emergent gamer culture, specifically in terms of producing a distinctly adolescent gaming aesthetic from pre-existing Fantasy and Sci-Fi tropes. Textually orientated discourse analysis is combined with content analysis to examine the illustrations used in over 100 magazines, both in terms of their cover pages and advertising content, in order to establish and examine their dominant tropes. Findings show the imagery used on the magazines prioritised certain themes and identities whilst excluding others. As such these texts acted as sites of masculine role-play, with idealised bodies and minds set within a network of fetishistic Fantasy and hi-tech environs. Crucially, these images would provide gamers with a diegetic bridge into the new game worlds they represented.