Video games are increasingly becoming an important media today, despite the light connota-tion of its initial categorization. Through an application of sociological theories of taste, I argue that the tension between subcultural “geeky” and mainstream “bro-ish” game preferences is key to understanding the social dynamics at work in the faction of “gamer culture” represented by popular games websites. However, in American journalistic accounts, the former set of preferences is more frequently associated with a middle-class (or upwardly mobile) university “frat boy” identity a possible misassociation which only a few journalistic voices have challenged. This set of tastes contrasts with the games often celebrated within the enthusiast press (and sometimes overrepresented in games studies academia) namely MMOs, single-player RPGs, games from Japan, and narrative-heavy games in sci-fi or fantasy settings. Existing research on gaming and social class in Europe finds that working-class masculinity is often associated with a preference for communal play of predominantly Anglophone sports, racing and military shooting genres. By concentrating on journalistic (and some industrial) representations of a subgroup of male players, the paper hopes to contribute to existing research on player identities by showing how social class affects not only the material dimension of access to technology, but also the values involved in being the “type of gamer” to whom much videogame journalism is addressed. The author analyses a series of discourses surrounding these terms, and their role in the maintenance of a subcultural gamer identity in the face of newly emergent markets of more mainstream players. The paper offers an investigation into terms like “dudebro”, “bro shooter” and “bro gaming”, which entered regular usage on English-language gaming websites in around 2011.
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