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
