Blue Sky

Get On the Party Line: Parties, Games, and Work at Mattel Electronics in the Early 1980s

In the early 1980s, parties shaped both the work and the design culture of Mattel Electronics' Applications Software group, and this study uses the origin of the "Party Line" videogame concept, pitched at a February 1983 party-style meeting, as its central case.

• The study draws on more than 150 interviews and roughly 20,000 archival pages to examine Mattel Electronics' Applications Software group in the early 1980s, using the February 1983 origin of the "Party Line" videogame concept as its central case.
• The authors argue that party practices both nurtured creativity and structured labor, producing "playbor" in which work and leisure blended and bridged divisions between marketing and programming, and they contrast this gender-balanced culture with the frat-like atmosphere they attribute to Atari.
• The Party Line concept was motivated by perceptions of videogames as antisocial and by Intellivision's shrinking market share, proposing party games to broaden the audience through shared, simplified play.