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Part of a page from Power Play 03/90, p. 6 showing the faces of the editors as part of their explanation of their rating and review practices.

Dataset: German Games Journalists 1980-2000

by Aurelia Brandenburg

Working with early gaming magazines as a source often poses a variety of problems. One can be the accessibility both of magazine issues as objects as well as PDFs, another how to deal with nostalgic biases, and last, but not least, it can also be difficult to grasp who the people making these magazines and pioneering games journalism as a field actually were. Both in German games journalism and elsewhere, there often are a couple of names which always make it into any list of examples, but these names actually represent a small sample of all people involved. People like Heinrich Lenhardt, Manfred Kleimann, Michael Labiner, and more were influential in the way German games journalism in the 1980s and 1990s began and evolved over time. What has been missing for me, ever since I started researching these magazines, was a list that recorded any editor/writer or even the whole staff involved and that would allow analysing dynamics within the field as a whole between 1980 and 2000. Who were the people writing for these magazines? How long did they work there? And the maybe most obvious question from a Gender Studies perspective: How high – or rather: how low – was the quota of women involved, and how did it evolve in the case of which magazine?

Right now, I am in the process of working on a paper on the networks of commercial gaming magazines in German of the 1980s and 1990s together with Christian Günther (University of Wuppertal) and for that, having an overview like that in a machine-readable form became imperative. Such a dataset did not exist, which, in turn, led me to creating one. Therefore, I collected the names and gender of all editors/writers mentioned in the imprints of 15 magazines and created it myself to have a basis to build upon for the work on said paper. I did something similar last year by collecting and publishing the sales data of 19 magazines in the same timeframe1 and just like with that dataset, the blogpost here serves as a documentation and explanation regarding the data structure and collection and also gathers some first findings in relation to the questions above. The final dataset can be found on Zenodo (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.12705696) and as a Google Sheet online for an easier overview.

Table of Contents

    1. Magazine Sample and Selection
      1. Objectives and Sampling
      2. List of Recorded Magazines
    2. Problems with the Sources and Special Cases
    3. Data Structure
    4. Current Findings
    5. German Games Journalism as a Homogenous Field

Magazine Sample and Selection

Objectives and Sampling

At its core, the dataset provided here is a list that collects all names of writers/editors mentioned in the imprints of all individual magazine issues within a sample of overall fifteen different gaming magazines published between 1980 and 2000. This means that the main aim of this list was to make these names easier accessible for research by making them machine-searchable and putting them together into one list across different magazines in a systematic manner. The latter is important, since there actually exists a list of early German games journalists which is maintained by the German retro fan website kultboy.com,2 but unfortunately for research, lists like this one are normally incomplete and rather focus on popularity than completeness within a certain sample.

This leads to another objective I had with this dataset: Creating a somewhat representative overview over the structure of games journalism as an emerging field during the 1980s and 1990s. I did this in part for the aforementioned paper with Christian Günther since we will be building upon the dataset published here, but also to get a sound overview over the field beyond a couple of famous names3 in general. I deliberately focused on writers/editors in particular instead of staff doing layout or administrative work for this since with my research, I am mostly interested in the editorial contents of gaming magazines and this made it easier to manage my own scope during the data collection process. Still, it would be interesting to revisit the sources and the dataset in the future and add more groups like admin staff, especially since there are some overlaps and forms of movement between different groups of staff at many magazines. Furthermore, the dataset is built upon a list of fifteen magazines with a main focus on digital games and the individual magazines are selected by different criteria, in part depending on their time of publishing, to create a balanced selection that can be taken as representative for the industry at the time.

From left to right: Covers of <em>TeleMatch 01/84</em>, <em>ASM 03/87</em>, <em>Power Play 05/88</em>, and <em>Joystick 01/89</em>.
From left to right: Covers of TeleMatch 01/84, ASM 03/87, Power Play 05/88, and Joystick 01/89.

This is easier to achieve for the 1980s: During that time, there were few commercial magazines covering games in German altogether and even fewer with games as a main focus, so it is relatively easy to determine the most relevant ones. The ones with the largest reach in terms of sold copies were ASM and Power Play, which both later became very influential for German games journalism in general. Additionally, I also recorded all names mentioned in the imprint of TeleMatch, which was very short-lived but the first gaming magazine in German ever, and, lastly, I also added Joystick as an example for a magazine which supposedly was more of an experiment of its publisher 1988-19894 and can serve as a nice example both for a magazine published by DMV Verlag and a short-lived magazine published at a time when other gaming magazines managed to become a financial success already. With the 1990s, the magazine market exploded and differentiated in many ways. Magazines focusing not only solely on games but also on games only on a particular platform/system became more common, and they often had a remarkable reach.5 Furthermore, new magazines and new publishers managed to establish themselves and started to publish new types of magazines, which again changed the market, and sometimes even forced old publishers like Tronic Verlag out of business. Therefore, I again focused mainly on magazines with high sales for the period of time, but also made sure to create a balanced selection published by different publishers and with a focus on different topics. This includes video game magazines (Man!ac, Video Games) same as influential PC gaming magazines (PC Action, PC Games, PC Joker, PC Player, GameStar) and magazines by influential publishers (Amiga Joker, PC Joker, PC Spiel, PC Xtreme). There also are many overlaps between these criteria depending on the magazines and some are also relevant for particular cultural reason. For example, Amiga Joker was influential as an Amiga magazine and Video Games was not only relevant as an early video game magazine, but also as Power Play’s sister magazine which often shared large portions of their staff.

List of Recorded Magazines

These thoughts result in the following list:

  • Amiga Joker (11/1989 – 11/1996): Gaming magazine about Amiga games published by Joker Verlag which further popularized a more provocative style as it became more common within gaming magazines of the 1990s. – Imprint of issue 01/95 missing.
  • ASM (Aktueller Software Markt, 03/1986 – 02/1995): First financially successful gaming magazine in German and published by Tronic Verlag. The magazine became popular for its reporting on games, but always also featured a large section on software in general. After its end in 1995, the publisher launched PC Spiel as ASM’s direct successor. – All imprints available and recorded.
  • GameStar (10/1997 – today): Gaming magazine published by IDG Deutschland and one of the best-selling gaming magazines of the late 1990s. – Imprint of issue 04/99 missing.
  • Joystick (09/1988 – 09/1989): Gaming magazine allegedly designed to reach a younger audience by its publisher DMV Verlag, but never took off as planned and was shelved after eleven issues. – All imprints available and recorded.
  • Man!ac (11/1993 – today): Video gaming magazine published by Cybermedia Verlag with former editors of Video Games and Power Play as staff. – All imprints available and recorded.
  • PC Action (02/1996 – 01/2013): PC gaming magazine with a more yellow-press-reputation in comparison to other magazines, published by Computec Verlag. – Imprint of issues 02/98-03/98 and 02/99-11/99 missing.
  • PC Games (10/1992 – today): PC gaming magazine by Computec Verlag and one of the best-selling gaming magazines at the time. In 1996, the magazine even claimed to be Europe’s number one best-selling magazine at the time. – Imprint of issue 04/98 missing.
  • PC Joker (06/1991 – 01/2001): Sister magazine to Amiga Joker focused on PC Gaming and published by Joker Verlag. – All imprints available and recorded.
  • PC Player (01/1993 – 06/2001): PC gaming magazine published by Future Verlag and deliberately founded by and advertised as the new project of well-known editors of Power Play. – Imprint of issue 08/99 missing.
  • PC Spiel (03/1995 – 12/1996): Short-lived successor to ASM which focused on computer games, published by Tronic Verlag. – All imprints available and recorded.
  • PC Xtreme (11/1996 – 04/1997): Short-lived PC gaming magazine, published by Cybermedia Verlag with at the time well-known gaming journalists as staff. – All imprints available and recorded.
  • Play Time (01/1991 – 09/1995): First gaming magazine by Computec Verlag with a focus on computer and console games. Like all Computec magazines, the imprints are sometimes inconsequential in their structure during the first few issues and often list an additional, separate editorial team in the United Kingdom as “Redaktion (UK)”. – All imprints available and recorded.
  • Power Play (11/1987 – 04/2000): One of the first financially successful gaming magazines in German and one of the most influential in its style. First published as part of the computer magazine Happy Computer by Markt+Technik and later as a standalone magazine with different publishers over the years. Most important competitor to ASM and sister magazine to Video Games. – Imprint of issue 11/91 missing.
  • TeleMatch (12/1982 – 02/1985): First known commercial magazine about games in German, published by TeleMatch Verlag / Marshall Cavendish Verlag as a licensed German version of the American Electronic Games. Regularly published German translations of English articles and therefore often listed American authors in their imprints. – All imprints available and recorded.
  • Video Games (01/1991 – 03/2001): One of the first successful gaming magazines focusing on video games in particular, and sister magazine to Power Play. Both magazines shared not only publishers, but normally also staff and the editors-in-chief were often the same as well. – All imprints available and recorded.

Problems with the Sources and Special Cases

The data recorded in the dataset stems from the imprints of magazine issues, and the individual issues mostly have been accessed as publicly available PDFs. In some cases, though, these PDFs cannot be found in a complete state but only with the pages containing the imprint of an issue missing, which resulted in some gaps as listed above. If the issues as physical objects were available in our own collection, I closed these gaps with our own copies as far as I could. If we did not have an issue with the missing imprint available, I also used other parts of an issue, such as editorials announcing the arrival or departure of an editor, as a substitution, and compared the data provided in the bordering issues with the imprint available. Thus, in most cases, there should not be any significant gaps due to this or if there are some, they should only concern freelancers who only wrote for a very short period of time.

Generally speaking, each imprint lists editor(s)-in-chief, editors, freelancers, publishing house and any other relevant staff such as layouters same as contact options such as a postal address to reach out to the magazine either as readers or advertisers. In theory, this makes them a really nice source to adapt into a table or a whole database, since the categorization of certain roles is something that is provided within the data source already. In reality, the categorization between different magazines and/or publishing houses can vary, depending on the internal structures behind a magazine.

For example, early magazines by Computec generally had a large section of “editorial staff” (“Redaktion”), but later listed the same names (or part of it) as “freelancers” once they began maintaining this category in the imprint. It is safe to assume that a large portion of what is listed as editors in the beginning actually worked more as freelancers than permanent editors, but since they are listed as editors in the original source, the dataset lists them as editors as well.

Example of an Imprint from <em>Play Time</em> from 1991 differentiating between editorial staff in Germany (“Redaktion Deutschland”) and the UK (“Redaktion U.K.”). (<em>Play Time 07/91</em>, p. 129)
Example of an Imprint from Play Time from 1991 differentiating between editorial staff in Germany (“Redaktion Deutschland”) and the UK (“Redaktion U.K.”). (Play Time 07/91, p. 129)

Similarly, TeleMatch did not differentiate in their imprints between local editors/freelancers and American authors whose articles were translated from Electronic Games as the magazine’s parent magazine. As a result, the dataset also contains records for people like Bill Kunkel or Joyce Worley who, of course, are by no means German gaming journalists, but, at best, international journalists with a connection to the German market through Electronic Games and then TeleMatch.

Meanwhile, Computec magazines on the other hand did make this distinction in the 1990s and often listed a separate editorial team in the United Kingdom as “Redaktion U.K.” and sometimes even an editor-in-chief for this team. This structure is special to this particular publisher, but still, since it is a recurring problem with the sources, I decided to record the names listed there the same, for example as “Editor (UK)” in their role. This makes dealing with the roles recorded a little bit more difficult, but reduces the risk of wrong assumptions and interpretations regarding the structures at Computec in the 1990s by me. For the same reason, people like Kunkel and Worley are listed in the final dataset as well. Furthermore, it is also safe to assume that in some cases, there are errors in the original imprints which are not edited as well since it would require a lot of speculation to find and correct such mistakes and probably cause even more errors.

Data Structure

The Dataset consists of two tables: “Journalists by Role(s)” and “Individual Journalists Overview” with the latter being a summary of the former. The table containing journalists by role is the core of the dataset and lists everyone mentioned in the imprints by magazine, role and the issues in which they appeared first and last in that role. The other table containing individual journalists in general is focused on the people and simply merges all records of the role-table to make it easier to look up how long someone was active over multiple magazines in different roles. For example, Manfred Kleimann is best known for being editor-in-chief of ASM, but he also worked as an editor and freelancer for PC Spiel, Amiga Joker, PC Joker and Play Time, often without much sensation. What are five records, since they concern five different roles he worked in between 1986 and 1996, in the roles table is then merged into one in the overview table for an easier overview of individual people vs. the roles they appeared in the imprints.

Still, the structure of both tables is similar and uses the following columns and values:

  • Name: The name recorded in the imprint. If it is a name that consists of a first and last name, the last name is written first to make the table easier sortable. (e.g. “Kleimann, Manfred” instead of “Manfred Kleimann”) If there are changes in the names during the timeframe, all variations of the name are listed. This concerns both changes of a legal name, for example through marriage, same as typos or wrong spellings that were later corrected by the magazine as long as these changes are traceable within the imprints.6
  • Gender: The gender of the recorded person, usually first identified by looking at the first name and later, if possible, verified. (For that, see column “Gender Verified” and the explanation listed there.) The field “Gender”, however, is standardized and allows five different values out of which four are actually used: male, female, diverse, N/A, and none. “N/A” is used for entries where the gender simply cannot be identified, normally because the person cannot be identified, for example because their first name is shortened to one single letter. “none” is used for companies which in some rare cases can appear as authors in imprints.
  • Magazine: The name of the magazine, standardized to prevent errors. (For example, ASM is always recorded as “ASM” instead of its full title “Aktueller Software Markt” and TeleMatch is always recorded as “TeleMatch” although the magazine’s full title changed slightly during its runtime.)
  • Role: The role someone appears in. This column is standardized as well and allows mainly the following values: Editor-in-Chief (Chefredaktion), Deputy Editor-in-Chief (Stellv. Chefredaktion), Editor (Redaktion), Freelancer (Freie Mitarbeit). To capture some special cases where these categories cannot apply directly, the sheet also allows the following values: Picture Editor-in-Chief (Chefredaktion (Bildredaktion)), Publishing Editor (Herausgeber), Project Lead (Projektleitung), Editorial Director (Redaktionsleitung), Copy Chief (Textchef), Editor-in-Chief (UK) (Chefredaktion (UK)) and Editor (UK) (Redaktion (UK)). The latter list of values generally only appears in a limited number of special cases and normally point at particular circumstances at individual magazines or publishing houses, often also only at a particular point in time.
  • From Issue / From Year / To Issue / To Year: First and last appearance of a person within that role by issue(s) and according to the imprint of the issue(s) in question. For every role except freelancers, a name has to appear without interruption between the first and last issue where it appears in per record. Freelancers are the only exception, since freelance work by definition is more irregular in nature. Therefore, every freelancer is always listed with their first and last appearance even if there might be gaps in their involvement between individual issues until their very last appearance in an issue by a certain magazine or until they are listed as a permanent editor at the same magazine.
  • Sources: References to the magazine issues and pages where the first and last appearance of a person in a certain role can be found.
  • Gender Verified: Within the dataset, I normally first identified a person’s gender by first name and, if possible, confirmed through pronouns or self-identifying terms used in the magazines or through later sources such as personal websites, social media profiles or interviews. If a person can be identified and their gender entry can be confirmed beyond the more speculative criterion of first names, the value in the column “Gender Verified” is set to true.

Within the overview table of individual journalists, there also exists an additional column “Verified as a Pen Name” which is set to true if a name has been confirmed as a pen name. This is only true in three cases though, no matter that there are more cases where it can be assumed that a name was a pen name (e.g. “Michael Jordan”) with no somewhat official confirmation, for example by people involved7 in the production of a certain magazine issue.

Current Findings

Generally speaking, the findings that can be drawn from this dataset mostly confirm on a more quantitative level what can also be found out or maybe even just assumed through qualitative analysis. Still, with fifteen, often very influential magazines, the final collection consists of 559 recorded names spread over 955 records for individual roles. With that, the dataset allows a simple overview over the emerging field of German games journalism of the 1980s and 1990s, how departments were structured, and who was working there when. For example, the list also contains a variety of names of people who were active only briefly in games journalism but then went on and either became successful either in other areas of gaming and the games industry or in bordering industries such as other journalistic fields.

Still, as a first step, the most obvious angle for analysis is gender and the gender (im-)balance of games journalism as a field from the 1980s on. This starts already with the problem of what values do or do not appear when recording gender. While my model was designed to allow four values for gender in the beginning (male, female, diverse, and N/A), I was never able to actually assign the value “diverse” for, for example, non-binary people or others outside the gender binary. This comes to no real surprise since I also was not able to find any person who is not cisgender (even within binary categories) while trying to identify the recorded people and their genders, but it is worth noting since this absence also underlines a general invisibility of queerness which was simply normal in this field during that time. Ironically, in the final dataset, there are still four different values that actually appear in the column “Gender” since I had to add the option “none” to record companies which are listed as freelancers along with the name of individual people.

The homogeneity of the field also extended far beyond questions of a mere absence queerness: From 559 records, about 493 entries belong to men, 39 belong to women and 27 are lacking either information or belong to companies, meaning that about 88% of all entries belong to men. Furthermore, the percentages only change slightly if the records are limited to people whose gender can be verified. In that case, there are 267 entries for men in relation to 20 entries for women and 21 for unclear entries and companies, resulting in a quota of nearly 87% men. Either way, women were only making up about 6-7% of all journalists in the entire sample.

Only records of people with verified gender entries All records
Gender Value Number Percentage Number Percentage
male 267 86,69% 493 88,19%
female 20 6,49% 39 6,98%
diverse 0 0,00% 0 0,00%
none 2 0,65% 2 0,36%
N/A 19 6,17% 25 4,47%
Total 308 100,00% 559 100,00%

Table 1: Gender balance among all recorded (individual) journalists

Looking at the same data, but splitting the records up into people active during the 1980s (i.e. active starting from the year 1989 or earlier) vs. the 1990s (i.e. active at least until the year 1991 or later) reveals that this imbalance became more clear over the years. For the 1980s, there are 55 (verified) records for men, 8 for women and 12 which cannot be identified.8 For the 1990s, there are 237 records for men, 15 for women, 2 for companies and 9 with unidentifiable gender, meaning that the percentage of female writers actually decreased from about 11% to 6%.9 In other words: As gaming in general and magazines in particular famously became more provocative (and often more openly sexist) in their style, the quota of women writing for them seems to have dropped as well.

People active during the 1980s (i.e. Recorded from Year <= 1989) People active during the 1990s (i.e. Recorded to Year >= 1991)
Gender Value Number Percentage Number Percentage
male 55 73,33% 237 90,11%
female 8 10,67% 15 5,70%
diverse 0 0,00% 0 0,00%
none 0 0,00% 2 0,76%
N/A 12 16,00% 9 3,42%
Total 75 100,00% 263 100,00%

Table 2: Gender balance among recorded (individual) journalists split up into the 1980s and 1990s and limited to records with a verified gender entry

Another interesting detail is that the percentage of women writing for a magazine could also vary a lot. Counting only records with a verified gender entry per magazine and role,10 results for example in a percentage of 0-16% women depending on the magazine. Of 955 records, only two belong to female editors-in-chief:11 Petra Maueröder/Fröhlich, who became editor-in-chief at PC Games in 2000, and Ingrid Spröte who is listed as editor-in-chief exactly once in the very last issue of TeleMatch. Some more (Vera Brinkmann, Patricia Beischl, and Petra Maueröder/Fröhlich again) can be found as deputy editors-in-chief or as picture editor-in-chief (Monika Stoschek/Lechel), but the number of women in leadership positions was very low. Multiple magazines employed only men (MAN!AC, PC Xtreme) in general or as permanent editors (Play Time, Power Play, Video Games) during the whole recorded timeframe. While the absolute numbers can vary and some magazines had such high quotas of men in part since they were published for a very short time,12 it is interesting that in all cases, the number of women was remarkably low and the majority of all magazines in the dataset had a percentage of men above 80% in all positions, or even higher if freelancers are omitted from the calculation. Women were there, but in many cases, they were the only woman at a time at a magazine,13 and they rarely managed to climb the ranks above regular editors, a path that was more common for men14. In fact, there are 19 people in the dataset who were active for 10 years or longer and in most cases either started in leadership positions during that time or already started on one. Of this group, only one is not a man, but a woman15.

Cover of the first issue of <em>PC Xtreme</em> which was advertised as “The definitive game magazine by [Heinrich] Lenhardt, [Martin] Gaksch & [Winfried] Forster” on the upper left of the cover just below the magazine title (<em>PC Xtreme 11/96</em>)
Cover of the first issue of PC Xtreme which was advertised as “The definitive game magazine by [Heinrich] Lenhardt, [Martin] Gaksch & [Winfried] Forster” on the upper left of the cover just below the magazine title (PC Xtreme 11/96)

German Games Journalism as a Homogenous Field

As mentioned before, most of these rough findings come to no true surprise. Games journalism not only but also in German has long been a field dominated mostly by white (often young) men, and it is a relatively recent development that this started to change. Nothing about this statement is new or controversial, but rather common knowledge by now, and some male games journalists even have publicly reflected about the resulting dynamics16 already.

The dataset in the version I am publishing now first and foremost confirms on a more quantitative level than qualitative observation how games journalism as a field always was and long remained very homogenous. Women were rare and almost never got into leadership positions, and men not only dominated the field but also were more often able to launch long-standing careers. Instead, there were whole magazines which either temporarily or permanently did not employ any women at all, and the first names that appear more frequently among the recorded people correspond with the most common names for men in the German-speaking countries at the time.

Apart from that, the more interesting use cases for the dataset begin with everything that can be done through it beyond these first findings and by building upon the current data as a base. A first step will be the aforementioned network analysis Christian Günther and I are working on, but this is only one example. More magazines could be added, more people (reliably) identified, and other angles could be added such as where identifiable people came from, who remained working in games even after leaving journalism and/or who left games, but not journalism etc. In other words, the dataset is supposed to further open up the field to new questions by providing the data needed for them in an accessible way, not only for my own research, but also beyond.


Header image: Power Play 03/90, p. 6.


  1. In fact, there are large overlaps between both datasets in terms of the magazines examined. Brandenburg, Aurelia.“Print runs of German Gaming Magazines 1980-2000”. Confoederatio Ludens, 23.10.2023. https://doi.org/10.58079/mr91. []
  2. Kultboy. “Übersicht der ehemaligen (Spiele)-Redakteure aus den früheren Zeitschriften. Wie zb. Amiga Joker, PC Joker, ASM, Power Play”. kultboy.com, since 2004. https://www.kultboy.com/index.php?site=red. []
  3. Or rather, a couple of famous names from games journalism. There are still some names of people in the dataset who never made a name for themselves in journalism but proceeded to work, for example, in games marketing and/or development and became successful there. []
  4. Eymann, André. “‘Joystick’ – Portrait einer Spielezeitschrift”. Videospielgeschichten, 22.02.2014. https://www.videospielgeschichten.de/joystick-portrait-einer-spielezeitschrift/. Apart from the article itself, its comments are also very interesting since multiple editors, including the magazine’s editor-in-chief, commented and offered further insight into Joystick’s background. []
  5. Brandenburg, Aurelia.“Print runs of German Gaming Magazines 1980-2000”. Confoederatio Ludens, 23.10.2023. https://doi.org/10.58079/mr91. []
  6. For the same reason, Petra Maueröder/Fröhlich is only listed as Petra Maueröder. While she is today better known as Petra Fröhlich, she only changed her name after 2000 when she got married in 2003, meaning that her married name cannot be traced in my source corpus. []
  7. This is the case, for example, regarding the pen name “Max Magenauer” which is the probably best-documented example and has been confirmed multiple times, for example by former Amiga Joker editor Richard Löwenstein. See: Löwenstein, Richard. “Amiga Joker. 30 ganz persönliche Jahre”. spieleschreiber.de. 2017. https://www.spieleschreiber.de/amiga-joker-30-jahre-kein-bisschen-weise/. []
  8. Entries with gender “N/A” can still be counted as verified if it is safe to say that the gender of the writer cannot be identified, for example if the name is known to be used as a pen name by multiple writers or if a magazine did not provide a full name in their imprint which makes it impossible to identify the person in general. []
  9. The results are similar when counting all records and not just the ones where the recorded gender can be verified by other means than the first name, although the difference is smaller with 8% (1980s) and 7% (1990s). []
  10. The numbers here are based on the table of the dataset that records all writers and roles individually, meaning that within the table, some people can appear multiple times in the list, even for the same magazine, if they worked in multiple roles for one or more magazines. The calculation regarding the gender (im-)balances within the editorial departments of different magazines are already adjusted to this problem and only count unique entries per magazine. []
  11. Meanwhile, there are 51 entries connected to male editors-in-chief, some of which even filled that role at multiple magazines. []
  12. For example, PC Xtreme was only published from 1996 to 1997 and seems to have been more of an experiment by the publisher. Still, other short-lived magazines such as Joystick (1988-1989) did not necessarily have the same extreme percentage of men among their staff. []
  13. his also would remain true if people in non-editorial positions such as layouters and/or secretaries would have been counted. Women were more common in these positions and some magazines also presented them as part of the team, but normally, these women would only make up a minority. []
  14. For example, Martin Gaksch first worked as an editor at Power Play in 1990 and later became Deputy Editor-in-Chief and then Editor-in-Chief at Power Play and Video Games and examples like this one are easy to find. []
  15. Furthermore, this woman in question is Brigitta Labiner, the (now former) wife of Michael Labiner who founded Joker Verlag as his own publishing house for gaming magazines. There are a few more women with long-standing careers who appear in the dataset (for example, Petra Maueröder/Fröhlich who first appears in the dataset in 1992, but works as a journalist in games until today), but they are few and the imbalance of senior female journalists vs. senior male journalists only increases by comparison. []
  16.  Klinge, Heiko. “Sexismus-Skandal bei Blizzard: Warum Entschuldigungen wichtig sind, aber längst nicht mehr reichen”. GameStar, 26.07.2021. https://www.gamestar.de/artikel/sexismus-skandal-blizzard-meinung,3372008.html. []

OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Aurelia Brandenburg (July 12, 2024). Dataset: German Games Journalists 1980-2000. Confoederatio Ludens. Retrieved December 11, 2024 from https://doi.org/10.58079/120br


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