A software expert discovers a virus in video game code in The Net
1 2014-08-30T14:23:25-07:00 Steve Anderson 3e015d75989f7e2d586f4e456beb811c3220a805 3025 1 Sandra Bullock plays Wolfenstein 3D in order to look for a dangerous bug plain 2014-08-30T14:23:25-07:00 Critical Commons 1995 Video The Net 2014-08-30T21:07:05Z Steve Anderson 3e015d75989f7e2d586f4e456beb811c3220a805This page has paths:
- 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 2014-09-04T14:48:57-07:00 Banality 25 plain 2014-10-07T09:45:16-07:00 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 via 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 Irwin Winkler's The Net (1995), a computer hacker (Sandra Bullock) displays virtuosic computer skills as a software analyst, moving seamlessly between video game play, system debugging and internet chat rooms as part of her daily, isolated existence. In scenes like this one, where Bullock is debugging the code for Wolfenstein 3D, her interactions with both the game and the computer are presented as a routine part of her job, rather than a spectacle of computational virtuosity. A stark contrast may be made between similar scenes in The Net and Iain Softley's Hackers, which came out just a few months later. Throughout Hackers, scenes of computer programming are dominated by psychedelic computer graphics that take over the screen whenever code is written or data is accessed online. In The Net, the Wolfenstein 3D game play sequence is understated, showing just enough first person shooter violence for Bullock to euphemistically declare the game's hyperviolence to be "very dynamic" before hurrying back to her isolated life of online pizza deliveries and cyberchat rooms. In the end, the film's critique is aimed not at games or gamers but at the internet itself, with a potential for identity theft and criminal abuse that far exceeds the threat of everyday game violence. Kevin Smith's teenage slacker comedy Mallrats (1995) alternately celebrates and condemns the feckless existence of teenagers engaged in a series of inconsequential activities and relationships. In this scene, which is meant to pass for an internal critique of the main character's (Jason Lee) inability to take his life (or relationship with his girlfriend, Shannen Doherty) seriously, video hockey serves as a distraction from their semblance of a love life. At other points in the film avoidance of adult responsibility is achieved through an obsessive and equally trivial relationship to television, comic books and hanging out at the mall. The persistently ironic stance of the film makes it difficult to decode this scene (and numerous others) in terms of its gendered critique of games. For Doherty, videogames represent not only a disruption of her relationship, but the antithesis of the substance and consequentiality she desires from life. At the same time, her romantic idealization of "noble" careers and life goals is ridiculed by both the logic of the film and Lee's character, who is distracted from her breakup speech by his game controller. The following year, Doug Liman's Swingers (1996) highlighted vacuousness, profanity and homophobia as routine parts of videogame culture. This immature, solipsistic behavior is portrayed as symptomatic of - but not causally related to - the banality of existence for three twenty-something dudes (Vince Vaughn, Jon Favreau and Patrick Van Horn). It would be difficult to "blame" video games for the empty narcissism of the Southern California social milieu constructed in Swingers. In fact, in this protracted scene featuring the EA game NHL Hockey 94 Van Horn directly addresses the removal of game-based fighting from the 1994 edition of the game in utterly trivializing terms: "I think kids were hittin' each other or somethin'." Moments later, the discussion of game violence transitions from the screen to the characters in the room after Vince Vaughn cheats to make Wayne Gretzky's head bleed, prompting Van Horn to attack him physically. Not unlike Gretzky's graphically but meaninglessly bleeding head in NHL, the "fight" between Vaughn and Van Horn degenerates into slaps and homophobic insults. In the world created by Swingers, video games are just one more element of an overall landscape of trivial inconsequentiality.
- 1 2014-08-26T10:13:15-07:00 Counter-currents 15 Exceptions and reconfigurations plain 2014-09-08T09:34:20-07:00 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.