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1. 1 2014-09-05T14:17:07-07:00 Steve Anderson 3e015d75989f7e2d586f4e456beb811c3220a805 Media Chronology Steve Anderson 23 A chronological gallery of all media included in this project structured_gallery 2014-09-09T07:35:30-07:00 Steve Anderson 3e015d75989f7e2d586f4e456beb811c3220a805

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• 1 2014-08-26T10:49:03-07:00 Games of the 1990s 36 plain 2014-09-04T14:45:55-07:00 During the 1990s, cinematic and televisual depictions shifted to present a more consistently troubling vision of games and gamers, often focusing on three general areas of antisocial behavior: addiction, violence and sexual repression. The terminal points of this discussion include two critical vectors in which I find grounds for hope. First is the legacy of games as potential catalysts for adolescent freedom and competence, which, although less common in the decades after the 1980s, is not entirely eradicated. Second is the appearance in the 2010s of a narrative counter-current in which video games play a productive role in the reconstitution of families and the domestic sphere, the very cultural formations that much of the moral panic surrounding video games supposes to be at risk. Cultural associations between gaming and antisocial behavior have been supported by social scientific research, much of which presumes that games manifest causal "effects" on their players, which may be observed in the real world. It is beyond the scope of this project to recapitulate the body of theoretical writing that seeks to decenter the importance of "effects" research, but I would emphasize that I hope to actively distance this project from effects-based models whenever possible. Emergent tropes: generational conflict; reality and its other Generational roles are reversed in the 1991 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG), titled "The Game," in which an alien video game technology causes the entire Enterprise crew to become addicted to the game, making them vulnerable to mind control. The addictive qualities of the game are linked to sexual pleasure, which is ironically resisted by two teenagers, while the adults in the episode cheerfully embrace their addiction and ultimately physically force all crew members to submit. In it's continuing mission to deal with pressing social issues, TNG here resorts to multiple cliche's of the moral panic surrounding videogames. In addition to sexual pleasure and addiction, the games become vehicles for mind control and alien invasion. TNG also explored the issue of video game addiction in the season 3 episode "Hollow Pursuits" (1990), in which it is revealed that Lt. Barclay is using the Holodeck to escape from reality. The spinoff series Deep Space 9 would return to the themes of adolescent addiction and games as therapy with the episode "It's Only a Paper Moon" in 1998. In this episode, an adolescent boy has taken refuge in the space station's "holo-suite," which is generally used for recreation and alternative narrative scenarios. A meeting of station officers and concerned parties including a therapist and physician is convened to discuss the situation. The suggestion that spending time in a virtual world may serve a therapeutic function is initially ridiculed, but is ultimately accepted as a course of action by which it is hoped the boy may return to normal functioning. This virtual reality-based gaming sequence in Brett Leonard's The Lawnmower Man (1992) opens with the promise that, "in here, we can be anything we want to be." In this fantasy of the cinematic imaginary, bodies become liquid and unconstrained by laws of physics and biology as they play out the ultimate in VR fantasy narratives, tapping into the character's "primal mind" until it becomes a literalization of Julian Dibbell's cautionary tale of early internet culture, "A Rape in Cyberspace" published in The Village Voice in 1993. In Toys (1992), Robin Williams discovers that his family's toy company is developing war games for children to play that are being used in real world military missions. The children in this scene, who believe themselves to be innocently playing videogames are in fact blowing up real people and military targets. This is typical of the Hollywood critique of games, in which players are consistently victimized, hyperviolent and stripped of any real world agency by game manufacturers. The "Virtual Reality" episode from NBC's prime time television comedy Mad About You (1994) crystallizes numerous stereotypes of the cultural imaginary surrounding virtual reality in the 1990s. Series protagonist Paul Buckman (Paul Reiser) has decided to invest in a virtual reality system developed by a preteen computer genius, which allows for an impossible array of VR experiences spanning the usual range of erotic, exotic or adventurous experience. Narrative tensions emerge over whether the system should be regarded as a "video game," a trivializing designation in the mid 90s, which would mark it as an illegitimate investment. After Paul tests the system with a virtual encounter with supermodel Christie Brinkley, he later attempts to assuage the resulting domestic turmoil with his wife (Helen Hunt), by dismissing the experience as being simply "a video game." In spite of the film's focus on emerging technologies of the 1990s, videogames play a relatively minor role in Iain Softley's Hackers (1995). However, games play a key role in an initial gender-based competition cum romance between teenage hackers Angelina Jolie and Johnny Lee Miller. When Miller defeats Jolie at a public arcade version of Wipeout (Psygnosis 1995), it sparks a rivalry that can only be resolved through a competition in computer hacking and ultimately by the two teaming up to defeat a cynical black hat hacker and systems administrator (Fisher Stevens). As is often the case with videogame narratives on film, on-screen gameplay is used as a surrogate for the relatively non-visual activities of computer programming. Unlike video games, which had fully entered the visual vocabulary of Hollywood by mid-decade, depictions of computer programming still ranged from real-time keyboard typing of The Net (1995) to extremes of psychedelic, 3D motion graphics that appear in several different scenes of Hackers, drawing overt parallels between the fluidity with which the film's teenage cast is able to traverse urban spaces and digital environments, as compared with the constipated physical and technological blockages of older generations. Swingers (1996) eXistenZ (1999) Two episodes of long-running Fox paranormal detective series The X-files (1993-2002) were written by cyberpunk icon William Gibson and co-writer Tom Maddox at the height of the show's popularity, "Kill Switch" (1998) and "First Person Shooter" (2000). Both episodes explore familiar Gibson topics of relevance to 1990s cyberculture: artificial intelligence, video games, the line between virtual and real, and the possibility of transferring consciousness into a computer network. It is possible to analyze these episodes along multiple vectors including gender politics, paranoid culture, anxieties about technology and stereotypes related to video games, cyberculture and computer hacking. The schizophrenia of these episodes may also be understood in terms of the basic incompatibility of cyberpunk anarchism and the middle brow constraints of prime time network television. The "First Person Shooter"episode indulges in snide televisual critiques of the extreme violence and sexism of video game culture, but these ring hollow when the same elements are used to spice up network programming with lurid camera angles on scantily clad cybervixens. Agent Mulder's last diegetic line of dialogue, "That's entertainment!" is uttered with painful irony as he and Agent Scully finally escape from a virtual environment where digital bullets can kill. But the ironic, self-satisfied giddiness of this proclamation is quickly reversed with a dark rumination on man's fundamental relationto technology that is pure Gibson: "Maybe past where the imagination ends, our true natures lie, waiting to be confronted on their own terms. Out where the intellect is at war with the primitive brain in the hostile territory of the digital world, where laws are silent and rules disappear in the midst of arms. Born in anarchy with an unquenchable bloodthirst, we shudder to think what might rise up from the darkness." The sentiment is played straight as part of Mulder's weekly voice journal, but this too is undercut when, on screen, what "rises up" from the darkness of a resurrected computer system is an adolescent male fantasy video game character rendered as a 3D wireframe model.
• 1 2014-09-04T14:49:28-07:00 Generational conflict 10 plain 2014-10-07T09:34:08-07:00 Instances of generational conflict that emerged in the depiction of video games on film and television during the 1990s took multiple forms, including cultural anxieties about the emergence of new social behaviors and associations among game players. These fears, which resonate with previous generation's concerns over previous "new" technologies such as television and comic books, resulted in both industry policies to regulate exposure and a variety of contested responses in the cultural sphere. In Toys (1992), Robin Williams discovers that his family's toy company is developing war games for children to play that are being used in real world military missions. The children in this scene, who believe themselves to be innocently playing videogames are in fact blowing up real people and military targets. This is typical of the Hollywood critique of games, in which players are consistently victimized, hyperviolent and stripped of any real world agency by game manufacturers. Toys reinforced a vision of game and toy manufacturers as a paternalistic industry "entrusted" with creating products that would not harm children. In spite of the film's focus on emerging technologies of the 1990s, videogames play a relatively minor role in Iain Softley's Hackers (1995). However, games play a key role in an initial gender-based competition cum romance between teenage hackers played by Angelina Jolie and Johnny Lee Miller. When Miller defeats Jolie at a public arcade version of Wipeout (Psygnosis 1995), it sparks a rivalry that can only be resolved through a competition in computer hacking and ultimately by the two teaming up to defeat a cynical black hat hacker and systems administrator (Fisher Stevens). As is often the case with videogame narratives on film, on-screen gameplay is used as a surrogate for the relatively non-visual activities of computer programming. Unlike video games, which had fully entered the visual vocabulary of Hollywood by mid-decade, depictions of computer programming still ranged from real-time keyboard typing of The Net (1995) to extremes of psychedelic, 3D motion graphics that appear in several different scenes of Hackers, drawing overt parallels between the fluidity with which the film's teenage cast is able to traverse urban spaces and digital environments, as compared with the constipated physical and technological blockages of older generations.
• 1 2014-09-04T15:03:16-07:00 Independence 9 plain 2014-10-06T13:40:39-07:00 The moral panic that characterizes much of the contemporary cultural discourse surrounding videogames condemned the notion of teenagers using games to assert or develop their independence. However, a subset of films from the 1980s resisted the blanket condemnation of games and their emancipatory potential for young people. In the low-budget, youth-oriented feature film Night of the Comet (1984), Regina, a teenage girl played by Catherine Mary Stewart, uses her work time in a movie theater to play video games, provoking the ire of her boss during unnecessarily protracted game play sequences of the Atari game Tempest (1981). In addition to using her video game prowess to resist doing menial chores in the theater, Regina is saved from destruction when a comet strikes the earth because she is having sex with her boyfriend in the theater's projection booth. Contrary to the narrative conventions of mainstream teen movies of this era, both video game skills and teenage sex are rewarded rather than punished. The film also does not hesitate to position Stewart as the undisputed champion of the Tempest game, causing her to be upset when a male challenger's initials appear among the top ten scores of the game. A similar scene recurs a decade later in the movie Hackers (1995), when Angelina Jolie's top score is beaten by her future love interest Johnny Lee Miller. However, the character of the sexually liberated girl gamer played by Stewart in Night of the Comet reverts to more traditional gender roles the very next year, when Stewart is relegated to the role of the neglected girlfriend in The Last Starfighter (1984). Decades later, when Hollywood returns to the narrative conceit of video games superceding romantic relationships in films such as The Breakup (2006) and Couples Retreat (2009), home consoles may be seen to play a very different role than the exo-domestic arcade consoles of The Last Starfighter. In The Last Starfighter, a teenage video game prodigy (Lance Guest) earns the adulation of his intergenerational trailer park community by breaking the high score record on the Last Starfighter arcade game, not realizing that the game was being used by an alien civilization to recruit expert players to assist them in an intergalactic war in the real world. The sequences of simulated game play were produced by Atari in anticipation of a Last Starfighter video game release that fell victim to the game industry crash of 1983. Although they are being used to cultivate teenage military competence -- a problematic conceit that returns in Toys (1992) and Ender's Game (2013) -- the general framing of videogames as catalysts for teenage competence and independence from parental or societal control is uniquely characteristic of the decade's dispensation toward games and their potential for positive impact on real world social behavior. Released the same year as the McIntosh computer (which was memorably marketed as a device capable of delivering the masses from totalitarian bondage), The Last Starfighter tapped into nascent PC-era cultural fantasies of technology as a means of improving one's social status. In D.A.R.Y.L. (1985), an android boy who has lost his memory begins to suspect he is not an ordinary human when he turns out to be an expert player of the racing game Pole Position on an Atari home computer system. In this protracted sequence of game play,  D.A.R.Y.L. reveals the film industry's fascination with the emerging genre of computer-generated imagery and its willingness to profit from association with video games in popular culture. Narratively, D.A.R.Y.L.'s video game playing skills demonstrate their value when he turns out to be an expert car driver in the real world, allowing him to escape from his military creators. As D.A.R.Y.L.'s social skills and self-knowledge improves -- essentially reforming his autistic-like social tendencies to more socially acceptable behavior -- he is ultimately integrated into his adopted family as if he were an ordinary child. Even during the games-positive decade of the 1980s, few films achieved the level of synergy seen in Todd Holland's The Wizard (1989). Created through a close collaboration between Universal Pictures and game manufacturer Nintendo, the film presented audiences with their first glimpse of  both Nintendo's newest version of the popular Super Mario Bros. franchise and its now infamous Power Glove controller. Although it comes close to decade's end, The Wizard offers perhaps the most unwaveringly boosterish vision of games culture, featuring multiple, protracted sequences of on-screen game play featuring Nintendo titles, leading up to a climactic showdown in which contestants play Super Mario 3 as a spectator sport at Universal Studios in Los Angeles. Audience reactions to the final competition offer a final moment of redemption and familial bonding toward the withdrawn videogame prodigy who turns out to be using games as a way of working through a trauma related to his sister's death. In Cloak and Dagger (1984), a boy whose PC game play is not valued at home resorts to a fantasy world that extends a game narrative into the real world. This scene is typical of the generational conflict surrounding games as they are often depicted in Hollywood. Although the fantasy narrative of the boy's online game persona initially creates conflict with his uptight military father (Dabney Coleman), a parallel narrative with Coleman's alter ego, the adventurous spy Jack Flack softens the underlying critique of PC games as a destructive presence in the domestic sphere. In Cloak and Dagger, games serve as a form of domestic therapy that supports intergenerational play, a theme that would be explored further in The Wizard (1989) and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1992-99).