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.