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Masculinity turned to toxic masculinity quick, and by the 90s all the game systems were flooded with ads that played up stereotypes and lurid pandering to the hilt.
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Myst computer game free#
Marketing to boys became marketing to pubescent boys became marketing to stereotypes of pubescent boys, to make things fast and loud and free of thoughtfulness. Their mascot, Sonic the Hedgehog, perhaps tried a bit too hard to seem cool while embodying the fast action ethos of the company, but all the ads and marketing would prime the pump for what was to come. The Genesis wasn’t just for boys, it was for the kind of boys who didn’t like icky girl things or little kids things or boring things. Sega marketed their product as the cool game system, not like that childish Super Nintendo. It wasn’t that girls couldn’t enjoy these games, it was that the company told both kids and their parents that this was a boys toy for boys.īy 1989, when the Sega Genesis launched in North America, boys who had grown up on the Nintendo were now hitting puberty. Nintendo’s research said that boys played more games than girls, and so (as had happened with personal computers) they marketed their products exclusively to boys, creating a feedback loop attracted more boys while excluding girls. The console migrated out of the electronics shops and into toy stores.Īs anyone who’s entered a toy store knows, the toy market is starkly gendered, with girl products in their rows of bright pink cordoned off from that of boys. And so it was when, in 1985, the Japanese company Nintendo decided to bring their new Entertainment System to the North American market, they packaged it with a little toy robot that would follow the player character around on the screen, so that it could be marketed not as a game console at all but as a toy. Then-dominant Atari had flooded the market with cheap and poorly produced games and the result was a loss in consumer confidence paired with the idea that the new multi-purpose personal computers had made dedicated consoles obsolete. Marketing towards boys accelerated following the video game console crash of 1983. These personal computers were marketed primarily towards boys, parents bought them for boys, and as a result computer science classes began to fill with those same boys who had grown up with the machines. The seeds of the war had been sewn at the dawn of personal computing. As has been widely reported, computer programming was once the domain of women, positions descended from their earlier roles as human “computers”, solving mathematical problems for corporate and governmental work, labor considered rote and therefore “women’s work”.Īs computer programming became more complicated, it gradually shifted to men, aided by personality tests used by employers that prioritized “stereotypically masculine traits and, increasingly, antisocialness”. Still, women in computing were common until the late 1970s when personal computers began to appear. Within ten years, the entire industry had remodeled itself around Doom. In the 1990s, Doom and Myst fought a war for the soul of video games.