Framing the Gamer: A Study of Invented Marginality

This study examines how gamer identity was constructed in the Dutch- and Flemish-speaking games market during the 1990s, arguing that the figure of the male, white, heterosexual gamer was not merely reflected in advertising but actively formed through it. Positioning its work within game studies debates about the gap between the narrow representation of players in games and the diverse actual player base, the authors contend that the construction of this gamer identity occurred before widespread internet access and largely at a local, meso-level of industry practice rather than through a purely global or national process. Their central claim is that advertising functions as a discursive system that brings an audience into being, sorting people into "gamers" and externalizing others.

The empirical basis is the first five years (1993–1998) of Power Unlimited, a long-running Dutch game magazine. The analysis draws on all advertisements in the magazine, not only game advertisements, and proceeds in three phases: a quantitative overview of how identification figures, antagonists, and "other" figures such as damsels or sidekicks are depicted; qualitative readings of representative advertisements; and comparison with a global corpus assembled within the broader HACS project. Visual and textual examples, including a 1993 advertisement addressing an assumed male, English-literate reader and a 1994 advertisement for a related magazine, are used to illustrate these patterns.

The findings are summarized through three verbs: advertising identified hegemony, antagonized non-white figures as dangerous or immoral, and objectified non-male figures as helpless or subservient. The authors conclude that Dutch and Belgian gamer culture, despite the politically progressive reputation of these countries at the time, reproduced globally occurring biases toward white and male identities while marginalizing others. Methodologically, the study argues that localized, linguistically bounded magazine archives are a productive means of tracing how hegemonic gamer identities were framed and branded outside the anglophone context.