by Hiloko Kato [updated draft, January 7 2025]
This blog entry refers to a subchapter of an article co-written by Eugen Pfister, Pierre-Yves Hurel, Sophie Bemelmans and Hiloko Kato. The article will appear in the book „Fragments and Microhistories of the European Videogame“, edited by Víctor Navarro-Remesal, Clara Fernández-Vara and Óliver Pérez Latorre
This blog entry first provides background information regarding the initial approach to media coverage of games. The second part focuses on the insights from a keyword search conducted using the media archive FARO, provided by the Swiss broadcasting company SRF. Despite its simplicity and limitations, this quantitative approach provides a first impression of how digital games are and were depicted in (Swiss) media. One specific television show excels in thematising digital games, the innovative early evening television show “Karussell”. Starting in 1977, “Karussell” even started featuring its own computer game approximately in 1981 (unfortunately, not all shows were recorded at that time). Interesting footage was identified and examined in detail in a qualitative analysis to uncover how digital games were featured. This analysis was mainly conducted using a qualitative approach inspired by the fine-grained analysis methods of Conversation Analysis (CA) and Multimodal Interaction Analysis. The results showcase the intertwined powerplay between the media and the audience (Hall 1983, Fiske 1987, Sefton-Green/Buckingham 2004). A short version of this analysis was published in the article mentioned above. A more detailed blog entry on this topic will follow in 2025.
1. Initial approach to media coverage of digital games
“Digital Immigrants” is a short documentary film by Denis Stauffer and Norbert Kottmann (2016) about the generations that did not grow up in the digital age. The film shows how senior citizens support each other using smartphones and computers. The footage interchanges with supplemented material from the Swiss media archive FARO. They show, for example, vendors selling computer systems in a department store as Christmas gifts, youngsters who are already fluent in using computers, experts talking about health problems caused by using computers and moderators showcasing computer systems in the early evening show “Karussell”.
[https://www.srf.ch/sendungen/school/medien-und-informatik/digital-immigrants]
This documentary film sparked the idea of using the media archive FARO to find footage of digital game depictions in Swiss media. FARO (accessible via login, https://medienarchiv.srf.ch/) enables research and consultation of SRF’s extensive television and radio holdings, with over two million hours of radio and television programmes dating back to the early 1930s.
2. Quantitative overview of archived material on digital games on FARO
For gaining an overview regarding the TV shows, a keyword search with Computerspiel(e), Game(s), Videospiel(e), Spielautomat(en) and Schweizer Game(s), was conducted in November 2023, resulting in 3374 matches in total (including misleading entries like for “Olympic games”) spanning from 1941 until 2023:
Computerspiel(e): 920 matches [in January 10 more matches were found]
Game(s): 1929 matches
Videospiel(e): 398 matches
Spielautomat(en): 97 matches
Schweizer Game(s)/Videospiel(e)/Computerspiel(e): 14/5/1 matches
For the years until 1989, a qualitative review of the material was conducted, resulting in a final version of 445 relevant matches. Unfortunately, not all of these matches are accessible as they contain third-party productions or, for example, sensitive contributions in terms of personal rights, probably excluding fitting matches.
In a next step, the data was quantitatively analysed by sorting it by a) show title, b) topic and c) runtime.
Show Titles
Topics
Runtime (will follow)