Representation of the video game industry in Spanish online press and its news frames

Spain is one of the European countries in which the video game industry has one of the highest sales rates and where much of the population spends its daily leisure and entertainment time playing video games. The social, cultural and economic relevance of this phenomenon pose the challenge to the Spanish press of covering the various aspects of the video game industry. Through qualitative content analysis of a sample of articles published in the online editions of the newspapers El Pais, El Mundo and ABC between 2008 and 2012, this paper examines the news coverage of video games in order to define the news frames used in the information about this industry. The results indicate that the three newspapers provide a biased view of this phenomenon, in fact they reproduce the one-sided view of the producing agents of the industry and represent an oversimplified image by contrast of negative versus positive aspects without providing reading keys of the facts. The news frames used in the coverage of video games are defined thus: a) Legitimation of the video game industry as a profitable business, b) Legitimation of video games as cultural products, c) Legitimation of the economic and intellectual potential of the Spanish video game industry, d) Consensus, e) Conflict.