HARDWARE CULTURE. Tech Demo Modalities in PC Gaming Social Media Channels J O R D A N G O W A N L O C K Subcultures and social spaces relating to video games have been proliferating on online media platforms over the past decade. They see people playing games to- gether, discussing games, making games, spectating e-sports, and simply watching each other play. One significant subculture focuses on the technology used to play PC (personal computer) games. Here, users and professional content creator “in- fluencers” discuss the merits of different pieces of hardware and configurations, showing off their latest “builds” as others vicariously ogle their top-of-the-line kit. It is a world of metrics, benchmarks, technical details, marketing buzzwords, and endless debates, and it shows us how, for many people, playing games is as much about engaging with technical hardware underpinnings as with story, gameplay, or rules. PC hardware culture has thrived online in part because it is about consump- tion. On a platform like YouTube, channels on certain topics yield more sponsor- ship income than others (Google YouTube Help 2022). A channel on philosophy, for example, has a smaller pool of potential advertisers than one on cosmetics or sneakers, and the viewers of certain topics have higher value to advertisers than others because they tend to spend more money. Thus, there is a wealth of PC hardware content on the internet, especially on platforms like YouTube. Media that cater to consumer cultures are nothing new, of course. Print magazines like High Fidelity and Modern Photography flourished between the 1950s and 80s when home stereos and photography were popular hobbyist pursuits. One might say PC hardware culture is therefore merely the most recent iteration of a long tradition, but we should not minimize what is unique about this culture and par- ticularly about its forms of media. Like hi-fi or photography magazines, PC hardware culture is about the tech- nology of media, the stuff we use to create and consume media. It is also often about emerging trends at the “cutting edge” and projections of the future. While one might assume that the enthusiasts who consume these types of media merely sit on the sidelines dutifully consuming products, this article will explain how PC hardware culture plays a vital role in shaping emerging media technologies, help- ing to determine what new features and technologies get adopted and molding the technological imaginary. These findings are the result of a detailed study of how these PC hardware enthusiasts demonstrate, measure, and promote PC hardware on platforms like YouTube, forums, and specialized websites. NAVIGATIONEN T E C H | D E M O JORDAN GOWANLOCK Studying PC hardware culture offers an opportunity to reconcile two influen- tial schools of thought in contemporary game studies that focus on social ele- ments and hardware respectively. Researchers like Mia Consalvo and Christopher A. Paul view the social aspects of games as fundamentally constitutive, contending with earlier views that saw games as a special space separate from society (a dis- position unfairly attributed to Johan Huizinga) (Consalvo and Paul 2019). In sharp contrast, Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort propose with their “platform studies” a methodology where scholars go beneath games’ rules, structures, and even be- neath the code itself to study the hardware substrates for which they were pro- grammed. They argue that we need to understand the affordances and limitations of platforms like the Atari 2600, with its miniscule amount of RAM and particular user interface, in order to understand the games that were made for it (Montfort and Bogost 2009). None of these scholars would be so strident as to argue their respective methods are the only way to understand games, but there is still much left for us to understand about the way social aspects overlap and interact with hardware. While the hardware underpinnings and the social construction of games may seem like they are opposite poles, in fact they have significant overlap. Building PC hardware can be an extremely social practice, and for many the prac- tice of playing PC games is inseparable from hardware tinkering. Studying PC hardware culture offers an excellent opportunity to examine this overlap because it consists of social spaces and media where hardware configurations take shape. These social hardware spaces further pose an opportunity to foreground and ne- gotiate the ecological stakes of media and their hardware. PC HARDWARE IDOLS OF PROMOTION While PC hardware culture is full of forums and Web 2.0 platforms where ama- teur users make media and exchange ideas, there are a handful of professionals we might call influencers or social media personalities who garner the most views. Generally, these personalities are backed by numerous behind-the-scenes work- ers and work within multiple media modes. Most have their own websites, some with their own forums and even their own subscription-based video platforms, but most see the greatest amount of traffic through their YouTube channels.1 Be- cause they tend to focus on YouTube, I will refer to these media groups as “chan- nels.” Videos featured on these channels cover consumer advice, reviews, and DIY tinkering guides. Prime amongst these is the Linus Media Group (Canada), with a combined number of approximately 25 million subscribers and over 5 bil- lion views on YouTube. Other notables include Hardware Canucks (Canada), Paul's Hardware (U.S.), Gamer's Nexus (U.S.), and Hardware Unboxed (Austral- ia). English language channels attract the most traffic on YouTube, but there is 1 Linus Media Group has its own video platform called Floatplane that it uses in parallel with YouTube where users get access to additional content for a subscription fee. Several other tech YouTubers also use it as a revenue stream. NAVIGATIONEN 32 T E C H | D E M O HARDWARE CULTURE also a great diversity of regional channels that can address local issues like tariffs, taxes, and the availability of certain parts in their market. Local channels also re- flect the socioeconomic status of their region, with channels based in the global south often reviewing more modest hardware. Videos featuring top-of-the-line “halo” products reliably draw the most viewers, though. A notable German lan- guage channel Der8auer (2006–), run by Roman “der8auer” Hartung, gained no- toriety by setting performance records “overclocking” the highest-end PC hard- ware products to squeeze maximal performance from them. At times these channels function as little more than trade show tech demos; they repeat the claims given to them in their press packet, they demonstrate the function of new features, and they try to cultivate enthusiasm for a new product. But they also play the role of gatekeepers and tastemakers, judging products and sometimes withholding recommendations, like any reviewer or critic. The influencer hosts at the center of these channels conform to what Brooke Erin Duffy and Jefferson Pooley term “idols of promotion.” Duffy and Pooley ob- serve a progression over the course of the 20th century from “idols of produc- tion” (captains of industry and the like) to “idols of consumption” (celebrities and the idle wealthy), to idols of promotion. Each belies a shift in capitalist modernity, with the most recent representing a post-Fordist age of “a flattened celebrity cul- ture, a precarious labour market, and the heightened injunction to brand oneself online” (Duffy and Pooley 2019, 28). Through their self-promotional acumen and platform manipulation, these channels occupy a different role than a reviewer or consumer advice columnist in a newspaper or magazine, at once more promo- tional yet also more given to sarcasm and snark, and they seem to have a much greater degree of popularity and influence as well. Several figures in PC hardware culture have moved back-and-forth into “product” roles in retail and manufacturing companies. Linus Sebastian, of the Li- nus Media Group, started as a buyer at a PC hardware retailer called NCIX, mak- ing decisions about what products to stock in their stores. JonnyGuru, the most well-respected reviewer of PC power supplies, quit writing reviews and moved into a product development and engineering role at manufacture Corsair. Der8auer has taken on several projects helping to develop products for manufac- turers as a sort of endorsement deal where he lends his brand to a product. Linus Tech Tips has had similar endorsement deals as well. While these branded prod- ucts might be testing the ethics of consumer advice and review, this permeability between the roles of product developer and YouTuber points to the part these figures play in shaping the hardware that will be running the games and software of the future. NAVIGATIONEN T E C H | D E M O 33 JORDAN GOWANLOCK MEDIA FOR TESTING, MEASURING, AND DEMONSTRATING At the heart of PC hardware channels is the principle of demonstration. These are spaces to negotiate emerging technical forms and their uses. In his critique of technological determinism, Raymond Williams argues that while the technical form of media like television does have effects on society, the forms of those technologies themselves result from social factors (Williams 2010, 14). In other words, we did not just discover television fully formed in a research lab one day, but instead its form was “looked for” by society long in advance of its invention. Once established as a concept, research and development resources were allo- cated toward making that media form a reality. But the question remains, where do visions of media technologies like television come from? Demos are a prime place to look for clues. Although demos are rarely impartial when they envision technologies, as they typically serve marketing and strategic ends for manufactur- ers or institutions, they are also dense texts that, as Christoph Ernst and Jens Schröter put it, bridge the “epistemic gap” between the present and future with an “amalgamation of hopes, fears, visions, and fantasies” (Ernst and Schröter 2021, 3). Demoing has a long history in gaming culture. Between the early 1990s and early 2000s a large proportion (perhaps the majority) of distributed media in the video game industry consisted of “demos”: smaller, usually interactive versions of games used as promotional samples. These became so ubiquitous they were commonly packaged with magazines and even in breakfast cereal. PC demos had a particular function with relation to hardware, as they offered the opportunity to test if a game would work on a given configuration without buying the game. In the 1990s the gaming industry developed its own events that were part tradeshow and part fan convention such as Supergames in France (now defunct), E3 in California, and the Tokyo Game Show. In these spaces game and hardware companies demonstrate products in a more traditional fashion, conforming to Wally Smith’s description of the term, where the use of a technology is modeled within a fictional “frame” of demonstration (Smith 2009). For example, when Nin- tendo released its Wii console with its novel motion control configuration at the 2005 Tokyo Game Show, it showed people in a living room using its unconven- tional controllers to play games. While Nintendo’s 2005 demo of the Wii was an unmitigated success, dem- oing the inner workings of PC hardware can present some particular challenges for which the traditional trade-show demonstration is ill equipped. These chal- lenges have brought about unique forms of media. If you were to demo a piece of PC hardware like a graphics card or processor using Smith’s definition, the fic- tionalized scenario of use would merely consist of a person sitting in front of a computer. You could show the hardware running a game, but this does not offer much information either. The difference between the way two processors run a game can be a matter of a few frames per second, imperceptible to the human eye. These differences are even harder to see on YouTube, with its video com- NAVIGATIONEN 34 T E C H | D E M O HARDWARE CULTURE pression and limited frame-rates. Thus, new forms of demo media have emerged to make the inner workings of hardware more perceptible. A popular example of this is the software benchmark. Benchmarks give a computer (PC, Linux, or Mac) a difficult computing task and record the time it takes to complete, allowing the user to measure and visualize the differences between different configurations. These tasks vary depending on the application, such as CAD work, editing, gam- ing, or scientific computing. For example, 3DMark uses purpose-built 3D animat- ed sequences that the computer renders in real time, as it would a video game. Thus, the visual output is very game-like, but the program also outputs abstracted data that PC hardware channels can process into charts and tables. Many con- temporary games also have built-in benchmarking tools where they run through a specific sequence to test different computing challenges. PC hardware YouTube channels use these types of software to measure and make visible the often im- perceptible workings of parts like processors, graphics cards, and storage. Certain games have become institutions within PC hardware culture specifi- cally because they are good for testing hardware. For example, Shadow of the Tomb Raider is a popular game because of its ability to tax both graphics cards and processors and because it can utilize different application programming inter- faces (APIs). Some games are even more popular as benchmarks than they are as games. This is the case with Ashes of the Singularity by Stardock Games, because it is particularly good at utilizing multi-threaded workloads. Thus, it can test pro- cessors with increasingly large numbers of parallel processing threads. Ashes was designed to be a good demo because it was the first game to use Stardock’s new game engine Nitrous, which they hoped to license to other game studios. This meant it functioned both as a game and as a tech demo for what their game en- gine could do. Ashes therefore has the strange distinction of being a game few people still play, while at the same time still being frequently shown and refer- enced on YouTube. The game Crysis is the most classic example of this merger of demo and game. Like Ashes, the series was developed by the studio Crytek to utilize their new game engine, called Cryengine in this case. The game was so tax- ing even on the most expensive of hardware it became a shorthand for a graph- ically demanding game. When a new demanding PC game is released now, nu- merous articles will appear online asking if it is “the new Crysis.” There is also a popular meme called “can it play Crysis?” Examples like Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Ashes, and Crysis demonstrate how inseparable hardware consumption and gameplay are. Crysis had appeal be- cause of its gameplay mechanics and rules, its narrative, and its sci-fi world build- ing, but more than anything it was consumed because it had cutting-edge spectac- ular visuals, and users needed the latest hardware to enjoy those visuals. This consumer logic recalls a similar phenomenon in home theaters, where the most spectacular films drive the desire for the most expensive consumer electronics (Pierson 2002, 1-11; Acland 2010). Yet this logic goes even further. Some games are visually spectacular without being particularly demanding of PC hardware be- NAVIGATIONEN T E C H | D E M O 35 JORDAN GOWANLOCK cause they are well engineered, or their appeal lies more in artistic invention. Yet these games do not have the same appeal as Crysis. Crysis and games like it are appealing because they are difficult to run. The fact that games and tech demos can be almost indistinguishable demonstrates that playing a game and assembling a computer can be deeply integrated, almost indistinguishable activities. Playing a game can entail a great deal of engagement with its underlying hardware, and the pleasure may not be so much in the playing as in choosing the right components, monitoring them, and tweaking them. The YouTube genre of game “performance reviews” offers further evidence of this overlap between gameplay and hardware consumption. These videos as- sess a game purely based on how it performs, completely ignoring story and gameplay. There are generally two types of videos that fall into this category. The first measures how a game performs on a variety of hardware configurations. So, for example, playing Red Dead Redemption II on “High” settings with an AMD Vega 56 graphics card will yield an average 71 frames per second. The other type of performance review measures the resource burden of different settings in the game. For example, turning on multisample anti-aliasing will cause a 50% reduc- tion in performance, but through side-by-side comparison it offers a clear im- provement in image quality. Again, these reviews make use of a mixture of visual display and metrics. But they also support this modality of playing games that Crysis suggests: In PC hardware culture, playing games is always to some extent about the hardware. As I have observed in other work, early computer graphics tech demos ex- hibited at conferences like ACM SIGGRAPH gradually began to feature more the- atrical and non-demonstrational elements over time. At the same time, cinematic visual effects and animation began to exhibit the reflexive technical display of tech demos in movie theaters. The line between the theatrical and the demonstrative became blurred (Gowanlock 2019). This is a phenomenon that has repeated itself over and over through media history. Michael Allen describes how films that in- troduced new technologies like sync sound or Cinemascope had aspects of me- dia-reflexive demonstration (Allen 2003, 101–12). As Acland and Pierson observe, these spectacles of new movie technology often dovetailed with consumer elec- tronics, where spectacular visual and audio content drive demand for the newest home theater technology (Acland 2010; Pierson 2002, 1-11). This is the product of industrial strategy and consumer culture to be sure, but it is also vital for un- derstanding spectatorship and technological change. These forms of media ad- dress the audience in a certain way that is media-reflexive in nature. As Crysis demonstrates, this is true of games as well. Indeed, some games push reflexivity almost to the point of absurdity. In PC Building Simulator players choose from lists of hardware and build their own PCs in a virtual environment using 3D mod- els of actual licensed PC hardware. To date, the game has sold over 4 million cop- ies. NAVIGATIONEN 36 T E C H | D E M O HARDWARE CULTURE SHAPING MEDIA TECHNOLOGY One of the aspects of PC hardware culture that differentiates it from its anteced- ents in spectacular feature films, home theaters, or hi-fi enthusiast magazines is its sociality. Most benchmarking software has the option to upload results to online databases, allowing fans to compare their own results to those of personalities on YouTube. There are also websites like PC Part Picker that allow users to share their own system configurations, listing hardware specs and uploading images of the finished product. This very technical activity of assembling the hardware sub- strate for running games is a fundamentally social activity, and these social interac- tions are key sites where users and consumers influence the shape of new media technologies. Of particular note is the way YouTube channels now leverage social interaction as a source of market research. PC hardware YouTube channels often discuss hardware that is in a pre- preproduction or prototype stage. This is a chance for manufacturers to build promotional anticipation for the product, but it is also an opportunity to gather feedback. Indeed, there are examples of particular videos influencing new prod- ucts. A Linus Tech Tips video titled “I Inspired This Product” (2022) discusses a new laptop with a screen resolution-setting feature the channel had called for in a past video. In addition to giving their own notes, the hosts of these channels also often ask their viewers for input. Steve Burke at Gamers Nexus (2009–) often concludes his coverage of consumer electronics trades shows saying, “let us know what you think in the comments.” Hosts also talk about the feedback that they get in their own website’s forums. These channels are not just spaces for promo- tion and consumer advice, they do market research via the social spaces in and amongst their various forms of media. Some of these channels also use statistical sources of data for market re- search using affiliate links. Affiliate links are a common source of revenue for so- cial media and websites. For example, if a YouTube video is talking about a cer- tain type of processor, they will provide a link below the video where viewers can buy that product on Amazon, and the channel will get a small percentage of any sales Amazon gets from the link. An interesting by-product of this is that the YouTube channel then gets the information about how many customers they re- ferred. Linus Tech Tips has been very transparent about this process. In fact, they have videos where they share their data, discussing why their viewers are buying specific products (Linus Tech Tips 2018). While they seem keen to share this in- formation, it also has valuable market information for both the channel and their advertisers. Through mechanisms such as elicited feedback in YouTube comments sec- tions and Amazon affiliate links, these channels are able to use the social spaces they have created as a source of market information for manufacturers. Say, for example, a channel profiles a new computer case and through these feedback sources the channel hosts learn a certain feature is very popular. They can then in turn relay that valuable information to their advertisers who may make design de- NAVIGATIONEN T E C H | D E M O 37 JORDAN GOWANLOCK cisions based on it. Thus, this is not a case of computer hardware manufacturers simply telling people what they want and creating hype with their advertising dol- lars in a top-down, strategic fashion. Instead, it is a more transactional process. This look into PC hardware culture gives us some insight into how changes in media technologies happen over time. And this phenomenon is hardly limited to PC hardware culture. Consumer technology channels that review everything from smartphones to cars like Marques Brownlee and Unbox Therapy fulfill a similar role. Several PC hardware technologies have taken shape in this context. High- frame-rate displays have been one of the largest changes to PC hardware in the past decade, and feedback from these enthusiast cultures has influenced the tech- nology. Traditionally, computer displays have run at 60hz, while video games and movies tend to run at 30hz. In the 2010s PC monitors started to appear that ran at even higher numbers, like 120 or 144hz. This became a coup for the PC hard- ware industry because rendering all these extra frames in a video game requires more robust and therefore expensive hardware. The “top of the line” became twice as high, in other words. Gradually this technology has found its way into laptops, tablets, and even smartphones, because it offers slightly smoother motion and a higher number to advertise in marketing material. While this was certainly a success for the product developers and marketers, this was also a social process. Message boards full of debates have proliferated, discussing the merits for com- petitive online video games and whether, in fact, a human can even perceive the difference between different refresh rates. A variety of YouTube videos and arti- cles from PC hardware channels discuss these debates and conduct tests, acting as arbiters between the consumers and manufacturers. It is worth noting that the influence these channels and their viewers are hav- ing on new media technologies is a far cry from the “tactical” fan agency theo- rized by Henry Jenkins (Jenkins 2013, 9–49). These processes are more about market research and product development than social change. This culture does have a significant industrial influence, though. As financial markets soared to un- told heights in 2021 amid a surge in “consumer investors,” Nvidia, a company whose main revenue source is high-end PC hardware, became the eighth largest company in the world by market capitalization, surpassing companies with ten times their revenues (Bary 2022). MEDIA ARCHAEOLOGY AND HIGH-TECH TRASH The influencers and YouTube channels of PC hardware culture generally collude with the industry at large in terms of the way they promote enthusiasm for the hobby and benefit from consumer sales through sponsorship and affiliate links. They also rely on hardware companies for advertising revenue. One channel gets 41 percent of its revenue from these companies, and others likely rely on them even more (Linus Tech Tips 2020). Yet there are some notable points where the NAVIGATIONEN 38 T E C H | D E M O HARDWARE CULTURE channels push back against the logic of consumption, notably on the subject of ob- solescence and repair. Laptop builders, Apple in particular, have favored con- struction methods that make opening and repairing their products difficult, and they restrict the availability of replacement parts. Channels will often attempt to take apart hardware to see what is inside and criticize manufacturers for being unfriendly to repair. A very common complaint is that laptops sometimes have normally-replaceable and upgradable parts like RAM soldered in place, forcing the consumer to pay for inflated upgrade costs at the initial point of purchase. Gener- ally, these points of friction amount to minor complaints in an otherwise positive review of a product, but occasionally a YouTuber will bring the very concept of buying new products into question. Steve Burke at Gamers Nexus has on several occasions recommended against buying the newest products simply for the sake of having the most up-to-date hardware, saying “if you don’t need it, don’t buy,” citing the role consumption plays in generating e-waste. Although Burke’s statement is the most explicit rejection of a system of con- stant consumption (and the e-waste that goes along with it), there are other more subtle cases where channels question the idea of newness through an encounter with old defunct media. In a Linus Tech Tips video titled “NVIDIA Thinks These GPUs Are Worthless,” the host takes graphics cards that were top-of-the-line a few years ago and compares them to contemporary performance standards (Li- nus Tech Tips 2021). This encounter with old media hardware momentarily dis- rupts the enthusiasm for novelty that usually motivates these channels, instead confronting the viewer with how rapidly the new becomes obsolete. The host remarks in the video, “This was once a 700-dollar GPU but now Nvidia says, ‘you know what? It’s worthless. It’s garbage’…” These videos that revisit old media hardware are in effect a kind of media ar- chaeological exercise. While they may not be uncovering the conditions of knowledge from a given period in history the way a Kittler or Foucault-inspired media archaeology would, especially given that some of the hardware is only a few years old, they do demystify some aspects of media technological change over time. Jussi Parikka and Siegfried Zielinski both describe media archaeology as way of questioning narratives of media technology advances. Zielinski (2006, 7) writes that media archaeology counters the assumption of “predictable and nec- essary advance from the primitive to the complex apparatus,” and Parrika (2018, 13) describes how it can overcome the “strategic amnesia” of digital culture. Vid- eos with old hardware like these remind viewers of all the over-hyped features that have been abandoned and of how quickly their new purchases will age. Encounters with these artificially obsolete pieces of hardware are a demon- stration of what Charles Acland (2007, xiii–xxvii) terms “residual media.” Acland’s term extends from his interest in the social processes that produce emergent, dominant, and residual media forms. An encounter with leftover, disused, aban- doned, or junked media offers an opportunity to reveal the social processes that manufacture the new. Acland writes, “if there is a reigning myth of media, it is NAVIGATIONEN T E C H | D E M O 39 JORDAN GOWANLOCK that technological change necessarily involves the “new” and consists solely of rupture from the past. This preoccupation neglects the crucial role of continuity in historical process… it ignores the way the dynamics of culture bump along un- evenly, dragging the familiar into novel contexts” (Acland 2007, XIX). Thus, while PC hardware culture relies on the logic of constant novelty, there are some lim- ited examples where channels can disrupt or reveal this logic. GENDER AND THE “PCMR” While the social spaces created by PC hardware channels create opportunities for the public to influence the development of new media hardware, competing in some small way with the strategies of manufacturers, it is worth noting that not all users have an equal say, and that these spaces can be extremely exclusionary. The most salient aspect of these spaces is their extreme gender bias. The maleness of this culture is evident both in the content of the channels themselves and in the constitution of the greater culture. Although the culture does not have the open acrimony of the “gamergate” movement, there is still an abundance of off-hand sexism in PC hardware forums, and the perception of PC hardware as a male space goes largely unquestioned. While users are having an influence on the hardware that, in turn, will be shaping the games of the future, only certain users are really having a say. As game culture in general makes gestures toward greater inclusivity,2 PC gaming and PC hardware have become the last bastions of exclusionary game cul- ture. Mia Consalvo and Christopher A. Paul observe in their ethnographic work that PC gaming is constructed by players as a purer, more accurate, and more re- al gaming experience by its advocates (Consalvo and Paul 2019, 71). The hard- ware aspects of PC gaming are vital to this discourse of exclusivity because this faster, higher-definition experience requires specialized hardware. This creates a hierarchy that privileges PC gaming as opposed to “casual” platforms like mobile gaming. Added to this is the elitism of technical know-how required to assemble and configure a PC. This discourse creates a category of “true” gaming that be- longs to people with the material means to buy hardware and the opportunity to acquire technical knowledge, keeping it in the domain of relatively affluent males 2 In 2018 Xbox head Phil Spencer devoted his entire Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences D.I.C.E. Summit keynote to the lack of gender equity in the industry and called for change (Spencer 2018). The organization Women in Games (founded in 2009) holds an- nual conferences and advocates for women in the industry. The industry’s most high profile “Me Too” moment came in 2021 when Activision Blizzard head J. Allen Brack re- signed amidst a high-profile lawsuit, worker walkouts, and regulatory scrutiny over “a pervasive frat boy culture” and widespread sexual harassment at the studio (Whipper 2021). NAVIGATIONEN 40 T E C H | D E M O HARDWARE CULTURE in the most affluent countries.3 Indeed, PC hardware forum users tend to look down on those PC gamers who buy pre-built systems instead of building their own. Game reviewer Benjamin Richard "Yahtzee" Croshaw mocked this culture of exclusivity, purity, and hierarchy by coining the satirical terms “dirty console play- ing peasants” and “glorious PC gaming master race” (The Escapist 2011). Howev- er, this satire has transformed into a popular way for PC hardware culture to la- bel itself, often abbreviated to “PCMR.” The most popular subreddit on PC hardware bears this name, and so does a popular brand of input devices for PC. On social media when someone builds their own system, they will sometimes jokingly say they have “ascended,” meaning they have risen to the highest tier of gaming, the glorious PC master race. Uses of these terms are tongue-in-cheek, but they still belie an enduring elitism and an exclusionary sense of humor de- signed to provoke. While there is an increasing number of gender-diverse people streaming games and making YouTube videos about gaming, there are only a handful of mi- nor exceptions to PC hardware’s maleness. TastyPC, one of the most prominent women PC hardware YouTubers, has about 100,000 subscribers, a comparatively modest number. Even more striking is how gender is represented on the most popular channels. Within the hundreds of videos I watched, amongst the channels I studied, only two feature women on screen and do so only occasionally. One host includes his wife on occasion, who knows little about the hobby, and the other periodically features women production crewmembers (one of whom is the host’s wife), again, none of whom have knowledge about PC hardware. In- deed, a popular trope on these channels has women ineptly trying to build a computer using their limited knowledge. Four of the five women who have ap- peared on these channels have been in such a video. This gendering is indicative of a bias that has been at work in computer hob- byist pursuits since the 1980s. Before 1985 it was common for women to pursue the discipline of computer science, but during this decade their enrollment began to drop, and the field gradually became one of the most male-dominated. In her study of the subject, Jane Margolis theorizes that this was in part due to the rise of computer hobbyist pursuits (Margolis and Fisher 2001, 1–5). It was becoming common for computer science students to tinker in their spare time, and boys were vastly more likely to be introduced to computers as a hobby. In this case and in PC hardware culture, people are excluded from the design of the hard- ware that runs our media. Indeed, we might ask ourselves how gaming hardware 3 Racialization can of course significantly overlap with wealth and educational opportunities needed to participate or work in PC gaming. In the United States, black workers in par- ticular are underrepresented in the game industry (Toulon, 2021). At the same time, PC hardware culture has some prominent representatives from racialized groups, and in the UK BAME (Black, Asian, and minority ethnic) workers are statistically overrepresented in the game industry while women are underrepresented (Taylor 2020). NAVIGATIONEN T E C H | D E M O 41 JORDAN GOWANLOCK would have been different if the hobby had been coded as a girl’s hobby. What different affordances and conditions might it have produced? What different types of games would be made for these platforms? How might the interfaces or the standards of progress be different in the industry? While this might seem like im- posing gender upon a neutral subject – how is a processor affected by gender? – it opposes the assumption that hardware is self-evident and immune from social fac- tors. CONCLUSION PC hardware culture has produced unique forms of “demo” media that allow ac- cess to the inner workings of the hardware that run PC video games. These forms of media show us the extensive overlap between the hardware underpin- nings of games and the social construction of games. Indeed, for many in this cul- ture playing games is primarily about configuring, tweaking, and testing hardware. The social spaces that have formed around these media have had a marked effect on the shape of emerging media technologies. The mechanisms these channels have developed for turning user participation and social activity into market re- search for hardware companies made this possible. 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