Are Video Games Still a Boys’ Club? How German Public Television Covers Video Games

Abstract

Games shape our understanding of culture. As market figures demonstrate, video games as digital successors of traditional games are now the economic drivers of the media and entertainment industry and form a part of our daily media habits. Since the mid-1970s, journalistic coverage has presented video games as a controversial issue, an image that has crucially shaped public opinion to this day. In the case of Germany, the Interstate Broadcasting Treaty (Rundfunkstaatsvertrag) demands that public broadcast services provide balanced reporting. However, to date, there has been no comprehensive investigation into the media’s coverage of video games. With this in mind, the study at hand seeks to conduct the first explorative and quantitative content analysis of how the German public broadcast channels report on video games. The findings of the study support the assumption of generally biased reporting.