"Why Is It Like That?" – Dr. Carly Kocurek on Games Research and Gaming's Techno Masculinity

This interview came from researching author David L. Craddock's Long Live Mortal Kombat, the definitive account of the MK franchise's creation and its global impact on popular culture, funding now on Kickstarter.

I spend a good deal of time thinking about how to write about games. More time than I spend actually writing about games, in fact, because even when I'm writing, I'm thinking about what I'm writing and how I'm writing what I'm writing. It's all very interlocked and confusing, and the opportunity to talk to someone like Dr. Carly Kocurek, someone who knows and shares that effort that is both a thrill and a mental burden, is a rare treat.

My interview with Kocurek came about by happenstance. One of Long Live Mortal Kombat's early readers wondered about the types of people most likely to frequent arcades in the heyday of Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter II in the 1990s. I was one of those people, but I was a kid, and at the mercy of the pocket change my mom or dad would give me to play while they ran errands. I wanted to know about the older patrons, the teens and 20- and 30-somethings who made trips to the arcade almost as frequently as they went to school or their jobs. More frequently, in some cases. That led me to Google, which led me to Coin-Operated Americans: Rebooting Boyhood at the Video Game Arcade written by Kocurek.

In Coin-Operated Americans, Kocurek examines the "golden age" of arcades through the late '70s to the North American industry's crash in '83, to the resurgence of coin-op gaming in the '90s. More specifically, she looks at the types of players who made these supposed dens of iniquity their second home, and how video games at large became known as a boys' club. She was more than up to that challenge. A full-time professor at Illinois Institute of Technology, Kocurek has a background in academic research with a concentration on the history of video games both as a business and a cultural movement. We talked about the pervasive view of games as being made by and for men, the practices of chronicling video game history, the supposed connection between violent games and real-life behavior, how her interest in research brought her to video games, and much more in this wide-ranging interview.

David L. Craddock: Before we talk about your interest in game design and gaming history, what led to your interest in academic research?

Carly Kocurek: I was always excited about writing, and I love history. I grew up in a family that spent a lot of time going to museums and stopping at historical landmarks and national parks and things like that. I was obsessed with American Girl dolls when I was a kid, and I've been able to write about them as an adult, which was fun. I've just always been interested in the past, and specifically, the way we live daily life, not necessarily political history or military history. Those are really important, and there are people doing great work in those areas, but I was fascinated by day-to-day things: What were sewing machines like in the 1920s? What did it mean for someone to get one? How did that change your life? It was probably huge.

I completed my undergraduate degree, and I majored in English and history. I worked a lot with a professor, Krista Comer, who wrote a book about surfing. She was mentoring me and kind of coaching me through grad applications as I was applying to programs. I was going to apply to English Literature programs, and she said, "You don't want to get a PhD in English. The stuff you're doing is not actually what Lit PhDs do. You're actually doing American Studies." I said, "Oh, okay," so I applied to 10 American Studies programs, and got into exactly one, and it was my least favorite choice.

But that was lucky because in a way, it was what I needed. I went to the University of Texas at Austin, and I'm from Texas. I'd always lived in Texas. I think part of why I wanted to go to out-of-state universities was because I wanted to see a different part of the country. But that didn't happen, so I went to school in Texas.

The American Studies program at the University of Texas has a really strong focus on cultural history. The program has faculty who have studied areas such as the history of photography, the history of plastics, which is such an interesting thing, and the history of the circus. That was studied by Janet Davis, who I worked with, and who ended up being my chair [the head of a university department]. I also worked with Elizabeth Engelhardt, who's now at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and who's a really big deal in food history.

I like to joke that coming out of American Studies is like being raised by wolves. I didn't work with games history people; I worked with other history people, and with almost no overlap in the decades we were all studying. But there was a lot of overlap in thematic and theoretical concerns, particularly research methods and things like that. I worked a lot with people in the anthropology department as well. They have a cultural studies certificate I completed. I also worked with folks in what was at the time the Radio, Television, and Film program; they've reorganized, and I don't know what the department is called anymore.

So, I have this kind of interdisciplinary background. That was a carryover from how I approached my undergraduate degree.

Craddock: How did that lead to you sharpening your focus to the video game industry?

Kocurek: I worked on a project about barbecue under Elizabeth Engelhardt, and that led to a book called Republic of Barbecue, and I realized I loved doing oral histories. I loved interviewing people. I'd been a student journalist, and I still interview people occasionally, like when I'm writing pieces for different magazines. I think people are so interesting and so weird. There's a great oral history book called Amoskeag that's about the Amoskeag textile mill, and the stories are fascinating, but it has this section at the beginning that I love and think about all the time, and it's about accuracy. People say things in interviews that aren't accurate, but they're also not wrong. They're inaccurate, but they hit on something.

The example they have is that the Amoskeag mill catches on fire. It probably caught fire several times; mills catch on fire all the time because there's always fiber in the air and machines and things. But at one point there was a big fire, and it was really disruptive. In at least one interview—I think actually in several interviews—people claim the mill closed shortly after this fire, within a year or something. That's not accurate; it was five, seven, maybe 10 years later, but it points to something, which is that the mill felt really different after the fire. It felt like it was in decline. That's why I love interviewing: You get that kind of emotional and impressionistic part of history that you will not get from solid facts like dates found in the mill's records. I might speculate, but I wouldn't know.

I mentioned to some of the faculty I was working with that I loved interviewing people, and they said, "You should interview people about video games. There's not a lot of oral history happening in that area, and there's definitely some interesting stuff to find." I've always been interested in gender and technology because I've always loved the internet. When I was young, the Internet was like a miracle. I grew up in the middle of nowhere, so it was extremely exciting to read things and talk to people in New York. It was just cool, and I loved it. I spent all my time online. I was so interested in the gender divide in technology. I was like, why doesn't everyone get to enjoy technology the way I do? I was interested in that, and in gaming.

This was the mid-'90s, and I'm working on a project about that time period right now. It's the height of the "games for girls" movement, this moment where you see games developed specifically for girls. There was a lot of conversation about that, and a lot of research about it. I t bumps up against the extreme masculinization of games, which you can see really palpably in advertisements from that period. That was when I was a teenager. I was very aware of it in some ways, so I started looking at the research that existed.

There's a book called From Barbie to Mortal Kombat, which is this landmark piece of research by Henry Jenkins and Justine Cassell. It has interviews with a bunch of developers from the time, and it was super-interesting to me, this exclusion of girls. I asked, why was it like that? That's always the history question: "Wait, wait, wait—why is it like that?" We had all this research about how women get excluded, and it's a problem, but how do they then get included? And why do we still think of games as for men and boys? That's a really interesting and thorny question.

That became my dissertation, "Coin-Operated Americans," which is about video game arcades, the rise of competitive gaming, and how Cold War priorities got mapped onto video games early in the cultural imagination, and in the political imagination as well. That's where I started. I got interested in asking, "But wait, why is it like that?" It was a fun and exciting project. I interviewed people, I spent a lot of time in archives, I spent time in arcades. That was my starting point as a researcher in a really serious way, which is, I guess, the point of a dissertation: To get you started.

I do a lot of normal historical research activities like spend a lot of time in archives, and of course, interviewing people, but I also do things that fall more in the vein of American studies, cultural studies, and media studies. Things like look at films from the period and talk ideologically about, what is this doing? Why is this resonating? What are these stories that we're telling over and over again?

I'm fascinated by how much we talk about people that do tech things as if they're really young, and we'll keep doing this. Steve Jobs is dead, but we're still talking about him as this youthful figure in some ways, which is super-fascinating. These are not kids; they're captains of industry. We don't hold them to standards of accountability that maybe we should. It's so interesting and so problematic. I love technology enough to be like, "Oh god, oh god, oh god," all the time.

I always hope for the best but expect the worst. I've been looking at all this Metaverse stuff and I'm like, "Guys, we figured out this was bad in, like, 1994. You're not gonna invest in enough moderation, and it's gonna be bad." And of course, we get reports of sexual assault almost immediately, and it's like, "Oh, god, we knew this would happen. You didn't stop and ask anyone, and now it's happening."

Centipede creator Dona Bailey was the first woman to program a coin-op game at Atari, but her impact on the industry is often overlooked in favor of (typically redundant) reporting on her male peers and superiors. (Image courtesy of Vice.)

Craddock: One term that's a through line in your research is "techno masculinity." Could you define that term and explain how those words came together to form it?

Kocurek: That came out of a chapter I wrote that was primarily about Tron and WarGames. Those were two of the first blockbuster movies—and we can argue about how successful or not successful they were financially—but they're both really interesting in terms of the history of the film industry and the kinds of stories we tell in games. They both have male protagonists, and [those characters] are shown as very similar even though, ostensibly, one [Tron's Kevin Flynn] is a grown-up, but the movie lingers on his adolescence. They're shown as very middle class, youthful, always wearing jeans and bomber jackets, not suits. They are divorced from trappings of adulthood even when they are adults. Flynn owns an arcade, of course, and is the best programmer ever, but he left or was fired from his job. Tron is very confusing. I love reading reviews from the time because they conflict on what the plot was. I've watched it probably 50 times because that's what happens when you write about these things, and I'm still like, "This is bizarre."

I think my favorite detail in Tron is that the other heroes are Flynn's ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend. Those are the three heroes. There's no romantic resolution. I genuinely really like that, but it's also something that keeps him out of adulthood. His trajectory is not going to be stability or order in a way we expect. He gets his job back with the company; we see him arriving in a helicopter, where he's greeted by his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend, which I love. I'm happy for them. I hope they're all friends. But it's narratively strange. It's pretty distinct to that realm. There's a high level of interest in youth in these movies, and an extreme focus on technical proficiency. It's often self-taught or inherent technical proficiency. No one is like, "This kid went to MIT, and he's a genius." No, he's just a genius. Maybe he'll get to go to MIT now because he's a genius.