Telling Tall Tails: Rumour in 1990s Video Game Culture

"I heard it from my uncle who works at Nintendo"; so goes the famous line mocking the purported source of many a school-yard video game rumor. But if the claims could be so ridiculous, why did certain rumors stick? And what made them more likely to spread?

This work builds on ongoing research (EMIF, 2024) into the ability of video games to address disinformation in modern contexts by taking the affective methods that this work has recognised as one of the vectors of how disinformation spreads, and considering various video game rumors of the 1990s through them. This work has so far focused on the following three aspects. The subjectivity present in assessing the credibility of sources, (Traberg et al., 2024), personal biases towards individuals or groups (Galesic et al., 2021), and the heightened susceptibility that occurs when in a highly aroused emotional state (Martel, Pennycook and Rand, 2020). These three aspects can make all of us more likely to believe something that is not true. I argue that these same processes are in part responsible for the spread of rumors about video games in the highly charged social spheres of gaming cultures, with many agents all competing for gaming capital (Consalvo, 2009).

I will give a definition of a video game rumor and ask whether they fit DiFonzo and Bordia's (2007) definition as "unverified and instrumentally relevant information statements in circulation that arise in contexts of ambiguity, danger or potential threat, and that function to help people make sense and manage risk". Then, taking Pokemon (Game Freak, 1996) and The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time (Nintendo, 1998) as case studies, I will lay out the similarity in appearance between various video game rumors, and how their construction or form triggers a certain kind of affective response. I will also consider the environments that these rumors were spread within, whether they were primarily spread face to face or whether central sources of authority such as magazines or developer/publisher communications were a primary source of them.

This work helps us understand the spread of gaming culture in a world before, alongside, or that did not rely on the internet. The apotheosis of a particular era in games culture, where journalists were at the peak of their power to shape the narratives about games and the people who played them (Kirkpatrick, 2012), and with an aggressively formalised industry exerting strict control over what is a legitimate game, and expecting some secrecy surrounding the conditions of their production (Keogh, 2019). And finally, how rumor and disinformation are important aspects of the playful world of discussions about games.