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Bad Object 2.0: Games and Gamers

An augmented reality game takes over the crew of the Enterprise

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Games of the 1990s 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.
Addiction With video game consoles fully integrated into the entertainment landscape of American culture, cultural anxieties about potential negative effects emerged predictably from the same pool of topics once dominated by television.

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 clichés 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.

The 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 "primal mind" and causing the game to spin out of control into a metaphor for sexual assault. Although the film was released a year before Julian Dibbell's cautionary tale of early internet culture, "A Rape in Cyberspace," the scene bears an uncomfortable resemblance to a virtual rape when Jobe (Jeff Fahey) loses control of his avatar and morphs into a large pink orifice that lunges repeatedly at his female companion. This scene also marks a turning point for Fahey's character, who has been undergoing experimental VR treatments in the hands of an obsessed scientist (Peirce Brosnan). At the beginning of the movie, Fahey is a simpleton who is unable to perform the simplest game-based cognitive test, but thanks to a combination of neuroactive drugs and regular sessions in a virtual reality simulator, he becomes hyper-intelligent and, in the end, uncontrollably aggressive. Jobe is unable to stop the development of his intelligence, which is ultimately uncontained by his body and must be uploaded into the computer systems of the VR lab, leading to his death and destruction of the lab.

David Cronenberg's eXistenZ (1999) displays numerous continuities within the director's body of work concerning cultural anxieties about loss of touch with reality and the potentially addictive character of screen media. Many of these themes were specifically prefigured in Cronenberg's earlier film Videodrome (1983), in which television watching is constructed as simultaneously necessary for full citizenship in a mediated society and a life-threatening, hallucination-inducing plague. In the course of updating Videodrome for the video game age, Cronenberg's eXistenZ constructs a multi-layered reality within which players of a virtual reality game begin to feel slippage between the "real" and "virtual" worlds. In this scene, two game players - one a world-renown game designer; the other a first-time gamer - move back and forth between layers of reality in the course of examining the game for defects.
Generational conflict 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. 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." 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 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.