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Hardware Culture. Tech Demo Modalities in PC Gaming Social Media Channels
Gowanlock, Jordan (2023) , S. 32-45
This article concerns the particular forms of tech demos at work in PC hardware culture, a video game subculture where people review and debate the consumer products needed to run video games. As an intensely social online space where emerging forms of hardware are represented, negotiated, and debated, this subculture and its unique forms of media are a contact zone between the hardware underpinnings of video games discussed in video game “platform studies” and the social construction of video games. This article takes a wholistic approach to this culture, noting its persistent gender bias and embeddedness in consumer culture, while also noting points of resistance that bring a media archaeology skepticism to discourses of technological advance and obsolescence.