The Disappearance and Reappearance and Disappearance of the Player in Videogame Advertising

This paper examines how videogame advertising has shaped consumer understanding of both the devices and the people who use them, arguing that ads have repeatedly alternated between showing players and showing games. The author contends that early advertisements for home videogames, from Atari's Pong in 1976 onward, frequently featured players to teach consumers how to operate new hardware, while later ads dropped the players as the medium became familiar. The central thesis is that videogame ads have served as tools for both education and audience construction, and that their repeated disappearance and return of the player reflects the medium's shifting place in American domestic life.

The analysis draws on print ads, television commercials, and theatre promotions from roughly the mid-1970s through the 2007 launch of Nintendo's Wii, with particular attention to the Atari 2600, the Super Nintendo, the Game Boy, and the Wii. The study is grounded in media history and cultural theory, drawing on Lynn Spigel's account of television's entry into the postwar home and on Louis Althusser's concept of interpellation to explain how ads "hail" particular consumers as players. Rather than relying on a large quantitative sample, the paper works through a set of representative advertisements and their accompanying copy, supplemented by contemporary press coverage and historical sources.

Among its key observations, the paper notes that early ads paired videogames with unrelated household goods such as sweaters, clocks, and garden products, reflecting uncertainty about how the new category fit into consumers' lives. It also argues that Atari's advertising targeted a broad audience of families, including grandparents and babysitters, while later campaigns narrowed toward teenage boys and young men. The Wii campaign is presented as a deliberate reversal, using players of varied ages, genders, and ethnicities to broaden the perceived market. The author concludes that the player is likely to reappear whenever a new device or genre demands explanation, making videogame advertising a useful lens for understanding the medium's cultural integration.