"Parents Should Read the Box," Sega and the Advent of the Entertainment Software Ratings Board

"Parents Should Read the Box," Sega and the Advent of the Entertainment Software Ratings Board

This blog post is a very small part of a much larger project that attempts to historicize and contextualize the origins of violent misogyny and toxic masculinity in video games culture. If video gaming’s masculinity was born in the arcades of the late 1970s and early 1980s, as others Like Carly Kocurek [1] and Shira Chess [2] have suggested, this project argues that it was honed and hardened by the home console market, especially by Sega of America in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, when the home video console shifted from the living room into private domestic spaces and as game companies began aggressive marketing campaigns that ultimately helped to define an ideal masculinity and a path to rebellion that was attractive to both young white men and suburban teenage boys. An identity which has had a lasting legacy and becomes uniquely tied to the contemporary identity of many white male “gamers.”

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