Cunningham's background with computer games includes her own and her younger sister's enjoyment of playing them. From this beginning, she shows in her anthropological study that computer games are no longer the sole province of males. She cites the "domestication of computer games," that is to say home-based video game consoles and PCs as opposed to the male-dominated video arcades of the 1980s, as the main reason for this change in consumer demographics (188).
Cunningham cites a new trend in computer games: advertising (190). Realizing that both Domino's Pizza and 7-Up have paid money to have their corporate names and/or products appear in games, one must conclude that advertising executives believe that players pay attention to the visual content of the games. If this is true, then surely the ideological content of the games must also be attended to. And if the content upholds sexism, racism, and other "-isms," how much harder to argue that players do not pick up on these points of view. Cunningham states that games have been "marketed to them [young people] as anarchic, rebellious and anti-establishment," however at least in the case of Civilization, it seems that these young people are actually being fed the party lines of democracy, capitalism, and world domination.
While Cunningham does discuss the issues of addiction to games, and the violence and gender stereotyping in the games, her arguments end in surprisingly moderate stances. She compares the frowned-upon addiction to games to the supported addiction to books, and asks why society should fear the former when it encourages the latter (193). She attributes such concerns to the relative unease and unfamiliarity many adults have concerning the rather new technology of computer games. In terms of violence, Cunningham views the violence generated by the games as cathartic: players can yell at the computer instead of other people (195). And finally, she cites new trends of female characters appearing in once-male-dominant games (such as Mortal Kombat), and offers evidence that girls like playing the violent beat-em-up games as much as boys do (197). Does this just mean equal access to violence, or is it, as she says, a cathartic release? She argues for the latter, maintaining that girls now have an acceptable outlet for their anger (198).
Cunningham's main focus is on street-fighting types of games, where players attempt to beat the computer by knocking the computer's player out cold. Clearly, Civilization is a different type of game. Nevertheless, many of Cunningham's arguments would seem to transfer easily to this strategy game.