Grannies against Militarized Masculinity. Inspecting Target Audiences in Video Game History through Large-scale Marketing Analysis

This article centers printed adverts as a privileged corpus of documents in the inspection of video game history. In the context of a research project examining the cultural history of video games, our team coded thousands of adverts published over 34 years in Computer and Video Games (6216 adverts) and Level (1424 adverts) in order to document the evolution of marketing discourse and target audiences. The article provides some answers to the following research questions: who are the privileged audiences of mainstream video games? What can be said of the other visible audiences left at the margin? How do these marketed audiences evolve in time? And with what messages are they addressed? The article also provides an overview of the intricate coding methods developed by the research team to provide reliable statistical results and highlight the use of dedicated visualization tools guiding our inspection of the data and historical observations. The data emerging from this process allowed us to revisit the dominant cultural paradigm of “militarized masculinity” (Kline et al., 2003), providing more specific information about target audiences and recurring messages. This large-scale analysis also provides the necessary context to present close readings of adverts featuring one of the least prevalent target audiences in magazines: elderly women.