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“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

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

  1. “Andererseits sind die Mädchen sehr diskret”, Koch 1984, p. 54. []

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?

Continue reading Dataset: German Games Journalists 1980-2000

CH Ludens Starts Collecting Historical Gaming Magazines

by Aurelia Brandenburg

Researching the history of digital games means, among other things, researching the discourses about games in gaming magazines. For that, the Bern Team of CH Ludens is starting a collection of physical copies of gaming magazines in German (primarily) published in the 1980s and 1990s. This post serves as a living document for this collection, and we will update the list below as we start acquiring individual magazine issues.

There also is a German version of this post which can be found here. Continue reading CH Ludens Starts Collecting Historical Gaming Magazines

CH Ludens beginnt mit der Sammlung von historischen Spielemagazinen

von Aurelia Brandenburg

Die Geschichte digitaler Spiele zu erforschen bedeutet, neben anderen Dingen, auch, die Diskurse über Spiele in Gaming Magazinen zu erforschen. Um diese Forschung zu intensivieren, will das Berner Team von CH Ludens eine (physische) Sammlung von Ausgaben von deutschsprachigen Gaming Magazinen anlegen, die (primär) in den 1980ern und 1990ern veröffentlicht wurden. Dieser Blogpost dient dabei als eine Art Living Document, das wir regelmässig entsprechend unserer aktuellen Anschaffungen aktualisieren werden.

Es gibt ausserdem auch eine englische Version dieses Posts, die hier gefunden werden kann. Continue reading CH Ludens beginnt mit der Sammlung von historischen Spielemagazinen

Print runs of German Gaming Magazines 1980-2000

by Aurelia Brandenburg

Gaming magazines are certainly an important part of the emergence of gaming culture(s) since the 1980s. There is, however, a difference between the importance ascribed by expert or fan circles and the actual distribution and, thus, the potential impact of a magazine. “Retro culture” tends to have a nostalgic bias. This means that it is useful to re-examine the basis on which significance is attributed to certain magazines. For this, I created a dataset consisting of sales and distribution data of nearly twenty German gaming magazines between 1980 and 2000. The dataset in full is available online through Zenodo (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.10009428) and a Google Sheet, and this blog post serves as an accompanying documentation of its sources and my own reasoning behind the magazines included and the table structure, same as some rough findings and visualizations based on the data collected.

Continue reading Print runs of German Gaming Magazines 1980-2000