Addiction
Among the most explicit of these was 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.
eXistenZ (1999)
Continuing the anxieties about loss of touch with reality seen in Cronenberg's earlier film Videodrome, players of the virtual reality game eXistenZ began to feel slippage between the "real" and "virtual" worlds.