Hot Tubs and Pac-Man : Gender and the Early Video Game Industry in the United States (1950s–1980s)

This work looks at the gendered nature of the US video gaming industry. Although there were attempts to incorporate women into development roles and market towards them as players, the creation of video games and the industry began in a world strongly gendered male. The early 1980s saw a blip of hope that the counter-cultural industry focused on fun would begin to include women, but after the video game industry crash, this free-wheeling freedom of the industry ended along with the beginnings of the inclusion of women. Many of the threads that began in the early years continued or have parallels with the modern video game industry. The industry continues to struggle with gender relations in the workplace and with the strongly gendered male demographic that the industry perceives as its main market.

Anne Ladyem McDivitt has succeeded in writing an exceptionally thoroughly researched and extremely readable book that will be an important foundation for the field of the history of digital games, for it deconstructs the founding myths of the US games industry around Nolan Bushnell and Atari. McDivitt has found and thoroughly prepared exciting new sources for her readers. It can be assumed that many subsequent researchers will gratefully draw on these research results. (translated from German)

Eugen Pfister: Rezension zu: McDivitt, Anne Ladyem: Hot Tubs and Pac-Man. Gender and the Early Video Game Industry in the United States (1950s–1980s). Berlin 2021. ISBN 978-3-11-066446-1, In: H-Soz-Kult, 26.04.2021, <www.hsozkult.de/publicationreview/id/reb-95835>.