Inventing Gamers: German Gaming Magazines and the Emergence of Gamer Culture 1980–2000

How ‘Gamer Culture’ emerged as a male-coded, patriarchal culture through West German gaming magazines of the 1980s and 1990s. PhD dissertation, University of Bern, 2026.

PhD dissertation · University of Bern · 2026

Inventing Gamers traces how “Gamer Culture” — a mainstream, male-coded and patriarchal gaming culture — emerged in the German-speaking sphere through West German gaming magazines of the 1980s and 1990s. Situated at the intersection of gender history, media history, the history of terms and ideas, and game studies, the dissertation treats German gaming magazines both as an industry that took shape up to 2000 and as historical sources that constructed and naturalized the figure of the “Gamer” as an identity distinct from the mere “player.”

After establishing its theoretical and methodological framework and reconstructing the largely unwritten history of the German gaming-magazine market, its editors and publishers, the study examines three formative discourses: debates over violence, war and youth protection that drew a boundary between Gamer Culture and its outside; myths of sexism and misogyny that cast women and girls as disruptors of a supposed men’s domain; and the magazines’ cultivation of their own fandoms through devices such as editor personas. In doing so, it shows how these magazines became facilitators of a culture that would later underpin reactionary backlashes such as GamerGate, and asks how far insights from research on anglophone audiences transfer to a non-English-speaking market before the rise of the internet.

The dissertation was supervised by Prof. Dr. Tobias Hodel (Digital Humanities, University of Bern) and Dr. Eugen Pfister (Institute of Design Research, Bern Academy of the Arts, HKB).

Links: Personal website