ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the entwinement of technical and economic changes to the production of computer games in the mid-1980s with the transformation of amateur programmers into gamers. It expresses that, notwithstanding the rhetorics of 'pro-sumption' that have been associated with the way that contemporary consumption shades into digital 'creativity', the transition corresponds to the superimposition, mediated through technology, of a fairly clear-cut distinction between production and consumption, labour, and leisure. The chapter also explores the new identity as one effect of a strategy of containment aimed at limiting the range of permitted activities in connection with game software. Gamer subjectivation was the basis upon which new truths were produced, recognised, understood, and articulated, and, in this case, these were the truths pertinent to games. Computer gaming was brought into being through a social process in which it was recognised that playing games on computers was a practice with its own, more or less autonomous values.
