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Bad Object 2.0: Games and Gamers

A software analyst connects with a virtual community of geeks via instant messaging in The Net

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Counter-currents Although games have continued to play the role of Hollywood's bad object well into the 21st century, rays of hope within this otherwise bleak landscape have also appeared. In addition to gradually coming to represent a range of games that is not strictly limited to hyperviolent and sexualized first person shooters, on screen video games have evolved to suggest a productive role in the reconstitution of alternative modes of family life and domesticity. Except for a cinematic concession to voice synthesis, this scene from The Net (1995) is relatively content to portray the minutiae of keyboard based communication among software geeks. Throughout The Net, a female hacker played by Sandra Bullock fends off crude advances via phone and computer. Apart from anxieties about stolen identity and electronic surveillance, the narrative taps into threats posed to women online and in physical space. Although somewhat accelerated, this scene of code debugging refrains from resorting to 3D graphics to represent the internal functioning of a computer processor or the code that runs it. Like some early supercomputer films of the mainframe era, the specifics of interfacing with the computer via keystrokes and code are given significant screen time, although it is less visually stimulating than computer generated flythroughs and colorful abstract imagery. In The Sopranos, "Meadowlands" (1999), a session playing Mario Kart helps Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) unwind and reconnect with his son (Robert Iler) after a day of gangster violence, psychological torment and marital infidelity. In a deliberate inversion of Hollywood's usual depiction of console games as damaging family tranquility, this isolated sequence of lighthearted game play, allows Tony to playfully interact with his son via the Nintendo 64 controller (which he implausibly operates with one hand). For a moment during their gameplay, the father/son roles are reversed, when Anthony Jr. admonishes his father to "concentrate" before starting a new game. Having failed to initiate a meaningful conversation by asking about school, Tony resorts to playful physical interactions, covering his son's eyes and jostling him until he wins the race. Before going to bed, Tony and his son exchange affectionate glances, a gesture that will recur later in the episode at the funeral of a mafia boss. The tension between Tony as father and a gangster continues throughout The Sopranos. Although video games enable a brief connection between father and son, additional plot lines in the Meadowlands episode find Anthony Jr. getting in two fights at school and discovering for the first time that his father is involved in organized crime. In John Murlowski's low-budget cyberthriller Terminal Error (2002), a computer programmer and self-described "cyber-ethicist" played by Marina Sirtis writes a "counter-virus" on a Nintendo Game Boy Color handheld gaming system that is used to defeat a homicidal AI supercomputer before it has a chance to cause a nuclear meltdown. In this climactic scene, Sirtis works with her son and estranged husband to defeat the computer, which in turn leads to the reconstitution of her own nuclear family. If one can look past the absurd premise of using a Game Boy to write and upload a virus to the supercomputer that controls a nuclear reactor, we see in Terminal Error a rare inversion of the role of games in Hollywood narratives, with the game console functioning more like a handheld computer than a gaming console. In fact, a unique feature of Nintendo's Game Boy Color was the use of a translucent purple housing through which one could see some of the electronics driving the game, including a printed circuit board just beneath the primary game controls. Unlike the Game Boy and Game Boy Advance units that preceded and followed it, the exposed electronics of the Game Boy Color suggested a more technically sophisticated range of possible uses than the average game system. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (2010) In Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, a dizzying array of cinematic and transmedial styles converge into an audio-visual cacophony inspired by comic books, video games, DIY 'zines, Hong Kong action films and Bollywood musicals. Each member of the new family formed in Real Steel has emerged from adverse circumstances. Technology, which is often figured as the destroyer of domestic harmony is here positioned in an entirely positive role. In this scene, the ability to play video games is taken for granted, as is the related ability to control a giant metal robot.
Banality By the mid-1990s, the technology of video games and virtual reality had fully penetrated popular culture, making non-disruptive appearances on prime time network television and non-technology oriented genre films alike. No longer a novelty, in these examples, games are woven into the everyday fabric of cinematic and televisual narratives. 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." Except for a cinematic concession to voice synthesis, this scene from The Net (1995) is relatively content to portray the minutiae of keyboard based communication among software geeks. Throughout The Net, a female hacker played by Sandra Bullock fends off crude advances via phone and computer. Apart from anxieties about stolen identity and electronic surveillance, the narrative taps into threats posed to women online and in physical space. Although somewhat accelerated, this scene of code debugging refrains from resorting to 3D graphics to represent the internal functioning of a computer processor or the code that runs it. Like some early supercomputer films of the mainframe era, the specifics of interfacing with the computer via keystrokes and code are given significant screen time, although it is less visually stimulating than computer generated flythroughs and colorful abstract imagery. Swingers (1996) Vacuousness, profanity and homophobia are characteristic of these twenty-something gamer dudes, for whom the trivial banality of game worlds is coextensive with the real world.