Coin-Operated Americans: Rebooting Boyhood at the Video Game Arcade

Abstract

Carly A. Kocurek demonstrates how arcades and video games affected the trajectory of contemporary digital culture. She illustrates many “critical moments in early gaming culture” and the moral objections that ensued, and she contributes to the history of American boyhood and manhood and the history of youth consumerism (p. xviii). She shows that to understand the contemporary gender divide in the video game industry and among video game players, one must look at the rise and fall of the video game arcade in the 1970s and 1980s. Unfortunately, she misses key evidence and marginalizes the role of women. Conspicuously absent are the girls and women who did participate, the girls who spent their youth alongside boys in the arcades, and the female video game competitors. Also missing are the female developers—Atari's Carol Shaw, often credited as the first woman game designer, and Dona Bailey, the co-creator of the popular early 1980s arcade game Centipede. Kocurek could have defended her thesis without writing these women out of history and ignoring relevant evidence.