Game reviews as tools in the construction of game historical awareness in Finland, 1984-2010: Case MikroBitti Magazine

Abstract

The paper introduces a case study on game journalistic practices and on the construction of historical self-understanding of game cultures. It presents results of the study of Finnish digital game reviews, retrieved from a major computer hobbyist magazine, MikroBitti. The results are based on a qualitative content analysis of 640 reviews from two magazine issues per year (1984–2010). The aim is to examine changes in the production of game reviews, in the work of individual reviewers, and then to focus on particular stylistic characteristics: to study how game journalists refer, on the one hand to other popular media cultural forms and products such as television series, cinema, comics, literature, sports, news, board games, and on the other hand, to other digital games, game genres, genre-hybrids, game producers, national game product styles as well as game designer auteurs. The paper argues that by using these references and allusions game journalists construct historical understanding of digital gaming as a particular popular media cultural form. The preliminary research hypothesis was that digital game cultural references increase and other media cultural references decline in reviews. This has proven to be partially incorrect. The content analysis of reviews hints that historical self-understanding of game cultural actors as well as the press and gaming industry has grown and been enriched since the 1980s.