“On the other hand, the girls are quite discreet”: Strip-Poker-Reviews in early German Gaming Magazines

by Aurelia Brandenburg

This post (“’On the other hand, the girls are quite discreet’¹: Strip-Poker-Reviews in early German Gaming Magazines”) is an English translation of a paper previously published in German at Spiel|Formen following the conference “Gender & Spielkultur” in Siegen, Germany in July 2023. This is an adapted version with some minor changes for clarity in English while the German original can be found here.

Abstract

Gaming magazines of the 1980s and 1990s are one of the places that laid much of the foundations of modern gaming culture(s). Still, both magazines in German on one hand and erotic games and/or the discourses surrounding them on the other hand have seldomly been researched. Yet, both offer valuable insight in the cultural dynamics of the time, especially from a gender historical perspective. The following paper is an attempt to close some gaps in this field by examining how the rhetoric regarding strip poker games in particular in the German press 1984-1994 developed and what conclusions regarding larger phenomena within (German) gaming magazines at the time might be drawn from that.

Keywords: Strip Poker, Games Journalism, Erotic Games, Gender Studies

“A pure men’s magazine” – Early gaming magazines and sexuality

“So, your magazine is a pure men’s magazine”², Gaby M. Werth from Munich wrote to the editorial department of the TeleMatch, the very first magazine about digital games in German, in 1983. The reason for her harsh judgement was the TeleMate, a category the magazine had started the issue before: The magazine asked readers to send in photos of “the girl, girlfriend or fiancée who has at least as much fun playing electronic games as you and us”³ so that one woman could be invited to a professional photoshoot and become the magazine’s TeleMate of the month. Furthermore, the article was illustrated with Playboy photos which, according to their caption, would not be the style of the planned TeleMate-photographs but “we thought the TeleMatch-readers might like them.”⁴)

The category can serve as an example for a phenomenon which is typical for gaming magazines of the 1980s and 1990s: While women, of course, did find access to digital games, gaming magazines treated them as naturally alien elements within what started to arise as gaming culture during the 1980s. The TeleMate-category that Gaby Werth criticised was even more short-lived than the magazine in which it was published, but the sexualization of women wasn’t. Sexualization actually was a recurring motive on the slowly emerging market of gaming magazines and, thus, also in the culture that began to develop around computer games. Just like the TeleMatch assuming that their readers would be only or mostly men in 1983, others continued such assumptions in the following years.

This phenomenon can be particularly often and clearly observed when it came to sexuality and erotica (games) since this obvious cisheteronormativity and assumption of male dominance can be traced relatively easily with articles and categories such as the TeleMate. At the same time, there has been relatively little research on these games and their press, which leaves a gap I am attempting to begin to close, at least regarding the German press. Although erotic games in particular are often cited as examples for “a sexist strain in early games production”⁵, the discourse surrounding them is often what makes these games an important part of sexism and misogyny in early gaming culture.

In this context, I am examining the press coverage of seven strip poker games that were published between 1982 and 1991 and reviewed between 1984 and 1994 in German in gaming magazines. The selection is mostly tailored in a way to trace technical developments and their press coverage but also cultural changes in the way strip poker games were discussed, especially since the number of commercial strip poker games increased with the late 1980s and early 1990s. This results in the following list of games which were present in the German press with 22 reviews in total: Artworx Strip Poker (Artworx Software Company, Inc. 1982), Poke Stripper (Individual Software 1986), Samantha Fox Strip Poker (Software Communications Ltd. 1986), Hollywood Poker (Golden Games 1987), Teenage Queen (ERE Informatique und Exxos 1988), Hollywood Poker Pro (reLINE Software 1989), and Cover Girl Strip Poker (Emotional Pictures 1991).

These games had genre and basic game design in common, but also serve as examples of different variations of style and production of this kind of game. The developers and studios were from different countries (USA, Western Germany, UK, France, and Denmark), some games were developed professionally, for example by engaging models and/or well-known women for photos displayed in the games (Samantha Fox Strip Poker, Hollywood Poker, Hollywood Poker Pro, Cover Girl Strip Poker), while others (Poke Stripper) were more obscure and probably closer to DIY cultures of other erotic games⁶. Their style varied as well: The French Teenage Queen for example seems to have had a deliberately ironic undertone: While it used relatively elaborate illustrations, the games’ opponent, the name-giving Teenage Queen, would keep playing against the player even once she was entirely naked. After that, in the games’ last picture, she would peel off her own skin and reveal herself as an android. With that, Teenage Queen was an exception, but as such is still important for a somewhat full picture of the genre.

1980s strip poker games and their reception

The origins of the genre began earlier though: One of the first commercial strip poker games for home computers was Strip Poker: A Sizzling Game of Chance by the U.S.-American Studio Artworx, also known als Artworx Strip Poker, which was first published in 1982 on the Apple II. Strip Poker seems to have been a clear success for its studio and was converted and republished multiple times until 1987. The game also used – similar to other titles at the time⁷ – the possibilities the hardware offered to present illustrations to players which later would be hailed as “artistic”⁸ in the press.

Strip Poker’s gameplay was rather simple: Players could choose one of multiple (female) opponents against whom they would poker. Whenever their opponent lost a certain amount of money, the picture shown to players changed into another showing the opponent without one more piece of clothing. The mechanics of later examples of the genre did not change in any meaningful way and any variations mostly depended on technical advancements. While, for example, Strip Poker was bound to digital illustrations, later games often used digitised photos and even offered a zoom feature and animations. What Strip Poker already did offer in the Apple II version of 1982 was an option to hide the current view of the game behind a lock screen at the push of a button. That way, the game was supposed to be hidden quickly and easily if another person was to enter the room unexpectedly. The feature was well received both in the press in German and internationally in 1983/84⁹, but seems to not have been mentioned again later on.

Furthermore, strip poker games nearly always were united by the fact¹⁰ that they were strictly cis- and heteronormative and only offered (normally white) women as opponents, against whom an assumed (heterosexual) male player had to win. This dimension is far from surprising, given how early computer cultures were built on masculinity.¹¹ Yet, this observation is important to note because it lays the groundwork for asking if and how these games and their remarkable presence in gaming magazines contributed to consolidating a male dominated gaming culture.

Gaming Magazines in German 1980-2000

While the first commercial magazines dedicated to computer or video games in anglophone countries were published from 1981 on, the same process only began with a slight delay in the german-speaking countries by comparison. The first magazine of this kind was the forementioned TeleMatch (January 1983 – February 1985) which could not establish itself permanently and was shelved after two years. After that, there only followed another magazine in computer games when the magazine Aktueller Software Markt (ASM) was published for the first time from 1986 on. ASM also reviewed other software than games, but managed to successfully establish itself with this format and quickly gained in popularity until its end in 1995. Gaming magazines which had nothing but computer games and gaming culture as their contents only began appearing with Power Play, a magazine that first appeared from 1987 on as special issues and later gaming insert of the computer magazine Happy Computer. Later, from 1990 until its cancellation in 2000, Power Play was published as a standalone gaming magazine and thus outlived ASM as well. Furthermore, in 1989, the first issue of Amiga Joker was published (November 1989 – November 1996), followed by its sister magazine PC Joker (June 1991 – January 2001). Both deployed a style staged as deliberately youthful in comparison to established magazines such as ASM which sometimes was far more serious in its tone. This relatively provocative style later also was carried on in a similar way by magazines with mid-tier runs such as PC Player (January 1993 – June 2001). Moreover, there also were computer magazines such as 64er Magazin which was published from 1984 and also covered games despite its broader focus, same as short-lived magazines such as Joystick which was only published for a year from September 1988 to September 1989.

Regarding the press coverage of strip poker and erotic games in these magazines, it is particularly interesting that reviews of strip poker games were entirely ordinary in magazines in German of the 1980s already. With that, there seems to be a remarkable difference in comparison to gaming magazines in English which only addressed sexuality in a rather explicit way in the 1990s when especially advertisements started to establish the consensus “that games were no longer ‘kid stuff’“¹². Additionally, this phenomenon is also interesting since the genre never produced any game that would have been hailed as a classic either by journalists or fans in a long-term manner. Still, strip poker games were a constant part within the culture gaming magazines began to establish during these years.

Meanwhile, the features of this culture were not set, at least in the beginning: In the german-speaking countries, there had been computer magazines such as Computer Zeitung since the 1970s, but with the rise of microcomputers, there also emerged a growing target group of readers which were interested in computers for leisure purposes. At the same time, the answer to the question of what it meant to talk about or even judge and review games was not set yet, which meant that early gaming magazines were in a pioneer role to define how gaming culture and the culture of the gaming magazines could or should be like.¹³

In anglophone countries, the U.S.-American magazine Electronic Games and the British Computer and Video Games formed the beginning. Both were first published nearly simultaneously in October/November 1981 and both are good examples to understand the german-speaking market as well: The latter was an example for the beginnings of a computer gaming culture that would be groundbreaking for the European market¹⁴; the former on the hand was more connected to an American Arcade culture in particular, but still served as a blueprint for TeleMatch, the first gaming magazine in German ever.

TeleMatch was licensed as a German version of Electronic Games ((See Kunkel 2005, p. 16.)) that at first only appeared in Western Germany and from July 1983 on in Austria as well, and often published translations of articles from its parent magazine. Despite its successful role model, TeleMatch was not able to establish itself with its approach to gaming culture as an arcade and console culture on the german-speaking market and was cancelled in 1985. As an experiment, it still underlines how it at least seemed in 1983 as if a magazine like this could have been successful. These kinds of experiments are typical for gaming magazine cultures of the 1980s. This way, editors on one hand found out how they could or should talk about digital games as a medium and on the other hand formed what constituted this gaming culture(s) and which kinds of magazine contents were fitting for that¹⁵.

This detail is crucial: Strip poker games were not only part of gaming magazines from the very beginning, but also were part of the experiments in gaming coverage which were apparently considered successful enough to stay.¹⁶ They were no failed experiment such as the TeleMate-category, fanfictions or printed high scores. Instead, they were ordinary, no matter that they had a bad reputation due to their status as erotic games. They were entirely normal.

Corpus and analysis of the examined strip poker reviews

Selection and general context of the reviews

No matter their different focus and style, most magazines reviewed strip poker games in varying frequency or, in some cases, even cooperated with studios and publishers in the form of prize draws. For the games selected here, there were reviews published in TeleMatch, ASM, Happy Computer/Power Play, Joystick, 64er, Amiga Joker, PC Joker, and PC Player between 1984 and 1994. This means the reviews came from eight different magazines, including Power Play which reported on strip poker games both in times when the magazine was still a part of Happy Computer and afterwards. In total, the seven games were reviewed 22 times in gaming magazines in German.

The examined reviews are spread over these magazines as listed here:

Game	Review	Author
Artworx Strip Poker (1982)	TeleMatch 04/84, pp. 54-56.	Karl-Heinz Koch
	ASM 03/87, p. 67.	Michael Suck
Samantha Fox Strip Poker (1986)	Happy Computer SH 11 (1986) [Power Play], p. 118.	Heinrich Lenhardt, Boris Schneider
	ASM 06/86, p. 9.	Dominic Sander
Poke Stripper (1986)	ASM 07/86. p. 33.	Manfred Kleimann
Hollywood Poker (1987)	ASM 01/87, p. 54.	Stefan Swiergel
Teenage Queen (1988)	Power Play 04/89, p. 54.	Michael Hengst
	ASM 04/89, p. 58.	Matthias Siegk
	Joystick 05/89, p. 72.	Markus Matejka
Hollywood Poker Pro (1989)	Power Play 03/89, p. 52.	Michael Hengst
	ASM 03/89, p. 82.	Matthias Siegk
	ASM 04/89, p. 63.	Matthias Siegk
	Joystick 05/89, pp. 80-81.	Markus Matejka
	ASM 11/89, p. 77.	Matthias Siegk
Cover Girl Strip Poker (1991)	Amiga Joker 03/92, p. 56.	Leslie Bunder
	ASM 06/92, p. 110.	Klaus Trafford
	Power Play 07/92, p. 107.	Richard Eisenmenger
	ASM 09/92, p. 99.	Klaus Trafford
	64er 12/92, p. 90.	Jörn-Erik Burkert
	PC Joker 12/93, p. 70.	Michael Schnelle
	PC Player 12/93, p. 98.	Heinrich Lenhardt
	Power Play 01/94, p. 108.	Knut Gollert

The number of reviews per game increased over the course of the 1980s, in part since the number of gaming magazines that were published increased in general, but also since multiple titles could be reviewed in varying length and depth in the same issue. Thus, the number of strip poker reviews per magazine does not tell anything about a higher interest in these games by certain magazines, but rather something about how long they were published and their range of topics. ASM, for example, not only existed relatively long but also covered many different computer systems at once, which made them report relatively often on strip poker games. Meanwhile, 64er Magazin for example did review games but only covered one single system and had a far smaller focus regarding games by comparison. Editorial departments normally were also small and while certain editors specialised in certain systems and genres, it does not seem like there were particular authors specialised in strip poker games, and it also does not seem as if magazines generally liked to outsource reviews of these games to freelancers. With Manfred Kleimann and Heinrich Lenhardt, the editors-in-chief of ASM and Power Play reviewed strip poker games just as other writers did. Furthermore, all reviews were written by men which can be explained with the games themselves and their contents, but the number of women writing for any of the magazines was very low either way. The space individual reviews took up within an issue also did not differ in a meaningful way from reviews of other types of games. Still, it is remarkable how all examined strip poker reviews were illustrated with at least one picture from the game or its advertising material and how strip poker games were promoted more than once on the cover of individual magazine issued (e.g. Joystick 05/89) or within an issue’s table of contents (e.g. PC Joker 12/93).

Poker or erotic game?

One factor regarding most reviews is that the verdict about a game normally was tied directly to the question whether an author treated a strip poker game as an erotic game or as a poker simulation. This also was true for the style of the reviews: If an author focused on the poker aspect, technical or gameplay aspects such as the quality of the graphics or the level of difficulty became central. If an author treated a game as erotic game, then he normally emphasised how attractive the women pictured were or how ‘artistic’ or ‘realistic’ certain aspects of the graphics were. Manfred Kleimann, for example, praised Poke Stripper as a “sophisticated software”¹⁷ in 1986 since he considered it challenging and the playing cards were illustrated in great detail. Michael Suck on the other hand reviewed Strip Poker very negatively in 1987 for similar reasons and criticised, among other things, that the game was not innovative enough both regarding technical questions and gameplay,¹⁸ while Matthias Siegk praised Hollywood Poker Pro in 1989 very much for its digitised photographs. He also then went on and gave the game a fun (“Spielwert”) rating of “Sex”¹⁹ instead of a numeric value. This is also interesting since Karl-Heinz Koch praised the version for Atari and Apple of the same game very highly in 1984 and called it “a computer game how it is supposed to be”²⁰ which presented “a for computer graphics exceptionally hot girl as a playmate”²¹. He also praised the feature for opening the lock screen by pressing a button to “hide the compromising picture”²².

The review also emphasised a sexual dimension in other aspects. It is remarkable, for example, that Koch treated the games’ opponents like real people with agency and at least implied that not only the women on the screen, but also players were supposed to lose pieces of clothing if they lost. Still, it is not clear how seriously he meant the sentence of “until you’ll reach the sweet end, you’ll definitely have lost more than your pants”²³. The idea that playing strip poker at a computer implies some sort of interaction in both directions can also be found in later strip poker reviews, but then rather appears in a flipped manner that a computer would not be able to see it anyway if players lose but still do not undress²⁴.

(Cis-)Heteronormativity, male dominance, and games

Although these later reviews slowly but steadily developed more homogenous standards to judge the quality of games in general and strip poker games in particular, they still always have in common that they, without any exception, assume that potential players were heterosexual men for whom the women depicted in the games were an object of desire. This is also mirrored by the language used in the reviews: The words to describe the women are mainly infantilizing and/or objectifying terms such as “Mädchen” (“girl”), “Gespielin” (“playmate”), “Mäuschen” (“little mouse”), “Mieze” (“kitty”) or even “Göre” (“brat”), although the term “Dame” (“lady”) as a more neutral choice of words was also commonly used. In the case where a game’s opponents had names, the reviews often mentioned these names to emphasise the imagination and personification of the characters as heterosexual women whom a male player would beat for which in turn he then would receive a “reward for his troubles”²⁵. Matthias Siegk, for example, praised in his review of Hollywood Poker Pro for ASM in 1989 that “after wangling one of the cute digitized little mice (Birgit, Ines, Frances and Myriam) out of their few clothes” a player could “not only enjoy their nudity” but also, thanks to the game’s zoom feature, would be able to “examine an interesting body part in more detail”²⁶ which emphasises once again the reward logic already set up by the game itself. Subsequently, losing against the women is always connoted very negatively up to being punished for the embarrassment of losing since, “as a man of honour”²⁷ a player would have lost a piece of clothing as a punishment. This shows an explicitly gendered assumption of dominance according to which men had to be especially good at playing strip poker since they had to play against women in these games. If an opponent was perceived to be too challenging, for example, writers concluded very quickly that said opponent was “peeking like a pro”²⁸, “behaved randomly”²⁹ or just had to play with “marked cards”³⁰. At the same time, easier games were criticised for not being a challenge³¹ and thus not offering any feeling of success.

Group-building, sexuality and masculine hierarchies

Here, it becomes most clear how the magazines connected masculinity and dominance with both prowess as a player and (hetero-)sexual superiority. Long before the late 1990s and their hypersexualized print ads, magazines were exploring in the 1980s already “what it means to be a man, to be masculine, and to be a masculine man who plays video games”³² through strip poker games. Some reviews did praise elements such as an artistic graphic style, but over time, the reviews turned harsher in their tone and cases where editors acted entirely impressed by strip poker games became rarer. In this development, especially Samantha Fox Strip Poker seems to have been a turning point. In 1986, the game was particularly present in the German press through prize draws, posters, and letters to the editor and some reviews even praised it quite enthusiastically. Afterwards, comparable titles normally were inspected far more critically, which could also be due to the genre’s lack of novelty which was still a factor in reviews such as the one of Strip Poker in TeleMatch in 1984 or the one of Poke Stripper in ASM in 1986.³³

Interestingly, this did not end strip poker reviews but rather meant that their style changed, for example by emphasising the genre’s lewd reputation more. Apart from a heterosexual automatism and male dominance, there also was a form of hierarchization that now became more evident: Within this hierarchy, women were objectified by default and treated as alien, but at the same time, this objectification was portrayed as a weakness of other men. While games became more explicit and the numbers of reviews actually increased, the articles repeatedly claimed that interest in these games was next to irrelevant since, for example, only “creeps & sex offenders”³⁴ or “lechers”³⁵ would be seriously interested in them. At the same time, strip poker games were reviewed on a regular basis by the same magazines in sometimes very extensive articles and promoted on covers. PC Joker 12/93 even featured a double-review that compares multiple games to recommend the game with the better cost-benefit-ratio.³⁶ Some magazine issues, such as Joystick 05/89, even contained multiple extensive reviews of different games together with a prize draw in the very same issue which on top even featured Hollywood Poker Pro as cover illustration.

With the early 1990s at latest, strip poker games seem to have been well-suited to discuss gaming-specific, masculine hierarchies within which players who did not play strip poker games as poker simulations or with an ironic twist were to depreciate since they did not demonstrate prowess based either on their ability as players or on their superiority as heterosexual men. The implication which is sometimes more, sometimes less explicitly spelled out is clear: A player who is stable in his own masculinity does not play strip poker games except to prove that he is a demanding player of poker and computer games, meaning that he has no real interest in one of the reviewed games in particular. If players could not match these standards either as gamers or in a sexual way, reviews normally insinuated that as the reason why they played strip poker games – and even then, editors repeatedly advised these readers to simply buy an erotic magazine instead³⁷.

Gaming magazines, strip poker, and masculinity

No matter the different styles of the examined magazines and the reviewed games, it does stand out that the treatment of strip poker games in the german-speaking press normalised itself. Over the course of the 1980s, reviews began to resemble each other more and more in their motives, regardless of which individual game was reviewed. These common features can be sorted in different ways:

Firstly, there are different approaches by the authors regarding the question whether they reviewed a strip poker game as poker or erotic game, i.e. what criteria they were using to judge a game. This question was crucial for the context a game was placed in the same as the review style. This concerned not only a review’s phrasing but also implicitly the same as explicit assumptions regarding the way games would be played such as whether readers would undress if they would try out a game themselves.

Secondly, all articles contain a form of clear cisheteronormativity from an unequivocal male perspective as an entirely unquestioned automatism. In other words: Men were writing reviews for other (heterosexual) men about games for men. This connects directly to how the reviews were clearly discussing masculinity and (hetero-)sexuality in a context explicitly tied to gaming which also always had a misogynistic dimension from the very first review on, for example in the way opponents were described as women.

Thirdly, the reviews offer insight into the development of masculinity in the context of a gaming-specific process of group- and hierarchy-building. The reviews are an example of repeated (self-)affirmation of male dominance and superiority and connect both tightly to digital games and gaming culture. This leads to not only women being systematically infantilized and objectified but also to other men being depreciated if they are sexually or as a gamer inferior to the scale the reviews perpetuate.

With that, strip poker reviews are on one hand an interesting example for the way early gaming magazines treated sexuality and masculinity, but they also mirror larger developments within the emerging magazine market. As reviews slowly became more uniform and gaming magazines in German in general found their rhetoric, they also developed a more standard way to deal with strip poker games in particular. Their presence was entirely ordinary, even normal, but the way they were reviewed still diverted a little from the blueprints of other games and genres. They were normal and yet a special case and as a special case within the normality of gaming magazines, they can serve as a part for a better understanding of the tension of journalism, masculinity, and digital games of the 1980s.

References

Primary Sources

• Anco Software Ltd. (1988): Strip Poker II Plus, Anco Software Ltd., Byte Back.
• Artworx Software Company, Inc. (1982): Strip Poker: A Sizzling Game of Chance, Artworx Software Company, Inc., Advantage Computer Accessories, Inc., U.S. Gold Ltd., Blue Ribbon Software Ltd., Anco Software Ltd., Kingsoft GmbH.
• Bunder, Leslie (1992): Heute schon gestrippt?. In: Amiga Joker 03/92, p. 56.
• Diverse (1983): Post. In: TeleMatch 03/83, p. 6.
• Eisenmenger, Richard (1992): Nackte Tatsachen: Cover Girl Poker. In: Power Play 07/92, p. 107.
• Emotional Pictures (1991): Cover Girl Strip Poker, Emotional Pictures, Sales Curve Ltd., On-Line Entertainment Ltd., Storm.
• ERE Informatique; Exxos (1988): Teenage Queen, Infogrames Europe SA, ERE Informatique.
• Gaksch, Martin (1988): Gleichberechtigung bei Strip Poker. In: Power Play 10/88, p. 8.
• Golden Games (1987): Hollywood Poker, Diamond Software, Golden Games, Players Software.
• Individual Software (1986): Poke Stripper, Individual Software.
• Kleimann, Manfred (1986): Intimste Bereiche. In: ASM 07/86, p. 33.
• Koch, Karl-Heinz (1984): Strip Poker. In: TeleMatch 04/84, pp. 54–56.
• Kunkel, Bill (2005): Confessions of the game doctor, 1st ed. Springfield, NJ: Rolenta Press.
• Lenhardt, Heinrich (1986): Samantha Fox Strip Poker. In: Happy Computer Sonderheft 11, p. 118.
• Matejka, Markus (1989): Hollywood Poker Pro. In: Joystick 05/89, pp. 80–81.
• MobyGames (2023a): Strip Poker Data Disk #1: Female – Candi and Marlena (1982), MobyGames, https://web.archive.org/web/20230816145119/https://www.mobygames.com/game/145221/strip-poker-data-disk-1-female-candi-and-marlena/ [16.08.2023].
• MobyGames (2023b): Strip Poker Data Disk #2: Male – David and Tony (1982), MobyGames, https://web.archive.org/web/20230816144837/https://www.mobygames.com/game/145269/strip-poker-data-disk-2-male-david-and-tony/ [16.08.2023].
• reLINE Software (1989): Hollywood Poker Pro, reLINE Software.
• Schnelle, Michael (1993): Strip Poker & Cover Girl Strip Poker. In: PC Joker 12/93, p. 70.
• Siegk, Matthias (1989a): Pokern mit „gezinkten“ Karten. In: ASM 04/89, p. 58.
• Siegk, Matthias (1989b): Zoomerei für Spanner & Trieblinge. In: ASM 03/89, p. 82.
• Software Communications Ltd. (1986): Samantha Fox Strip Poker, Martech Games Ltd.
• Suck, Michael (1987): Neuer Poker-Aufguß. In: ASM 03/87, p. 67.
• TeleMatch (1983a): Aktion: Schicken Sie uns das nächste TeleMate! In: TeleMatch 01/83, p. 37.
• TeleMatch (1983b): Leserbriefe. In: TeleMatch 03/83, p. 6.

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• Bauer, René; Suter, Beat (2021): Anfänge des Schweizer Game Designs – Teil I, Spiel-Kultur-Wissenschaft, https://spielkult.hypotheses.org/2923 [06.02.2023].
• Bucholtz, Mary (2002): Geek Feminism. In: Sarah Benor, Mary Rose, Sharma Devyani, et al. (eds.), Gendered Practices in Language, Standford, CA, pp. 277–307.
• Condis, Megan; Morrissette, Jess (2023): Dudes, boobs, and GameCubes: video game advertising enters adolescence. In: Media, Culture & Society, pp. 1–18. DOI: 10.1177/01634437231159533.
• Kirkpatrick, Graeme (2015): The Formation of Gaming Culture, London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. DOI: 10.1057/9781137305107.
• Lindsay, Christina (1999): From the basement to the kitchen: constructing the gendered personal computer user. In: ISTAS 1999, pp. 295–298. DOI: 10.1109/ISTAS.1999.787350.
• Nooney, Laine (2013): A Pedestal, A Table, A Love Letter: Archaeologies of Gender in Videogame History. In: Game Studies 13, 2.
• Nooney, Laine (2023): The Apple II age: how the computer became personal, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
• Paasonen, Susanna; Karhulahti, Veli-Matti (2021): Finnish Fuck Games: A Lost Historical Footnote. In: Víctor Navarro-Remesal and Óliver Pérez-Latorre (eds.), Perspectives on the European Videogame, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, pp. 75–90. DOI: 10.1515/9789048550623-005.
• Pfister, Eugen (2023): Die Geschichte Digitaler Spiele in Österreich 2: Austrian Homebrew Coding und Listings in den 1980ern, Spiel-Kultur-Wissenschaft, https://spielkult.hypotheses.org/4388 [15.08.2023].
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1. “Andererseits sind die Mädchen sehr diskret”, Koch 1984, p. 54. [↩]
2. “Es handelt sich also bei Ihrer Zeitschrift um ein reines Männermagazin”, TeleMatch 1983b, p. 6. [↩]
3. “das Mädchen, die Freundin oder die Verlobte, die mindestens ebensoviel Spaß am elektronischen Spiel hat, wie Sie und wir”, TeleMatch 1983a, p. 37. [↩]
4. “Aber wir dachten, zum Start erfreut’s die TeleMatch-Leser.”, TeleMatch 1983a, p. 37. [↩]
5. Kirkpatrick 2015, p. 107. [↩]
6. See Paasonen and Karhulahti 2021. [↩]
7. See Nooney 2023, 111–128. [↩]
8. “künstlerisch”, Koch 1984, p. 56. [↩]
9. See Kirkpatrick 2015, 106; Koch 1984, p. 56. [↩]
10. In fact, I only found two cases of games covered in gaming magazines in German that had an option to play against men. The first of these two cases was one of two additional Data Disks for Strip Poker which added further opponents to the game: One of these extensions added two more women, another two men. The artist behind the illustrations seems to have been a woman and the men were presented in a similar way as the women in terms of poses. (See Mobygames 2023a; Mobygames 2023b) Still, the men were never mentioned in the reviews of the game, and in the TeleMatch’s review, Karl-Heinz Koch even only stated that there were further women which could be added, although two of the four additional opponents were men (see Koch 1984; Suck 1987). The second example is another expansion, but for Strip Poker II Plus (Anco Software Ltd. 1988), a spiritual successor to Strip Poker, which seems to have had an expansion featuring men that was mentioned in the press (Gaksch 1988). [↩]
11. See, for example, Lindsay 1999; Schott and Horrell 2000; Bucholtz 2002; Nooney 2013; Condis und Morrissette 2023. [↩]
12. Condis and Morrissette 2023, p. 8. [↩]
13. See Kirkpatrick 2015, p. 5–26. [↩]
14. See Kirkpatrick 2015, 7–10; Bauer and Suter 2021; Pfister 2023. [↩]
15. See Kirkpatrick 2015, pp. 11–15, 44–48. [↩]
16. With that, strip poker games also were the only kind of erotic games which were present in gaming magazines of the 1980s on a regular basis. Even adventures that were considered to be more lewd only became a notable phenomenon within the press coverage from the late 1980s on. [↩]
17. “[Ein] ausgereift[es] Programm”, Kleimann 1986, p. 33. [↩]
18. See Suck 1987. [↩]
19. Siegk 1989b, p. 82. This is, in part, an obvious pun in German since the word “sex” sounds just as the German word for six (“sechs”), but Siegk also gave the game an operation rating of “hmm”, meaning that he definitely used the individual parts of the rating as an opportunity for jokes, but that does not have to mean that he used the word “sex” as a stand-in for an actual numeric rating of six. [↩]
20. “ein Computerspiel, wie es sein sollte”, Koch 1984, p. 56. [↩]
21. “als Gespielin ein für Computergraphik ungewöhnlich scharfes Mädchen”, Koch 1984, p. 54. [↩]
22. “um das kompromittierende Bild verschwinden zu lassen”, Koch 1984, p. 54. [↩]
23. “bis man einmal zum süßen Ende vorgedrungen ist, hat man selbst sicher auch mehr als die Hose verloren”, Koch 1984, p. 56. [↩]
24. See Lenhardt 1986, p. 118. [↩]
25. “Lohn der Mühe”, Bunder 1992, p. 56. [↩]
26. “Nachdem man […] einem der vier süßen digitalisierten Mäuschen (Birgit, Ines, Frances und Myriam) seine nicht sehr zahlreichen Hüllen abgeluchst hat, [kann ein Spieler] sich nicht nur der bloßen Nacktheit erfreuen[, sondern mit der Zoom-Funktion des Spiels außerdem] eine interessante Körperpartie des Mädels [ansehen]“, Siegk 1989b, p. 82. [↩]
27. Ein Spieler müsste sich “als Ehrenmann natürlich auch von einem Kleidungsstück trennen”, Lenhardt 1986, p. 118. [↩]
28. “linst wie ein Profi”, Siegk 1989a, p. 58. [↩]
29. “geht recht wahllos vor”, Suck 1987, p. 67. [↩]
30. “[mit g]ezinkte[n] Karten”, Matjeka 1989, p. 80. [↩]
31. See, for example, Eisenmenger 1992. [↩]
32. Condis and Morrissette 2023, p. 12. [↩]
33. See Koch 1984; Kleimann 1986. [↩]
34. “Spanner & Trieblinge”, Siegk 1989b, p. 82. [↩]
35. “Lustmolche”, Schnelle 1993, p. 70. [↩]
36. See Schnelle 1993. [↩]
37. See, for example, Siegk 1989b; Lenhardt 1986. [↩]

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