Game Theory

In his book Rules of the Game: Quiz Shows and American Culture, the communications professor Olaf Hoerschelmann suggests how neatly American game shows have reflected the times that produced them. The radio quiz shows popular in the 1930s and 1940s used “man on the street”-framed trivia questions to bring a sense of democratization and intimacy to the country’s new mass medium. The TV shows of the ’50s tapped into the geopolitical anxieties of their age to emphasize, as Hoerschelmann puts it, “the hegemonic project of cold war education policy” and its “focus on Anglo-American elite culture.” The sober sets of series like The $64,000 Question and Twenty-One—and, in general, the well-spoken, well-educated contestants the shows’ producers selected to participate in them—effected an air of patriotic sobriety. In their soft celebrations of enlightenment, the game shows suggested all that was at stake in the fight for “the free world.”

Today, we tend to associate with “game shows” the form they took after the quiz show scandals of the later ’50s eroded Americans’ trust not just in the shows themselves, but in television as amedium—the form they took after they were reinvented as, a show that cheekily glorified the soft skills of shopping, first aired in the U.S., , in 1972.