Antisocial stereotypes
I am also wary of the danger of analyzing tropes as having the result of reifying the very categories this project aims to critique. My hope is to move this discussion through a trajectory that acknowledges the damaging stereotypes represented by this work, while simultaneously including examples that are exceptional or indigestible to representational reading. The terminal points of this discussion include two critical vectors in which I find grounds for hope. First is an excavation of examples drawn from the 1980s, when many of these tropes had not yet been fully formed. This decade, which corresponded with the faltering emergence of the video game industry as an economic force, offers multiple examples of games and gamers that defy or resist the association with antisocial behavior. 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.
Beginning in the 1990s, Hollywood's depiction of games and gamers grows increasingly critical.
Generational roles are reversed in this 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 by an alien race. The addictive qualities of the game are linked to sexual pleasure, which is ironically resisted by two teenagers, who are ultimately forced 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 addiction and therapy with the episode "It's Only a Paper Moon" in 1998.
Toys (1992)
Knight Rider (1983)
An automotive version of Pac Man is compared unfavorably to computers by the artificial intellgence agent KITT on Knight Rider: "Playing a video game where circles eat blobs is hardly 'getting into computers.' A computer is a sophisticated, very complicated piece of equipment." Although this car-based version of Pac Man is not a typical "home console," its intrusion on the domestic relationship between Michael Knight and his talking car makes it eligible for Hollywood's characteristic antipathy toward console games.
Elephant (2003)
The Wire "Soft Eyes" (2006)
The Dictator (2012)
Breaking Bad, "Problem Dog" (2011)
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (2010)
The X-Files, "First Person Shooter" (2000)
The Dictator
Breaking Bad
The Wire
Big Bang Theory
Gamer
Lawnmower Man
eXistenZ
X-Files
Elephant
Conspicuously missing from this survey is the cinematic genre of "VR films," which enjoyed a brief but highly visible period of proliferation in the early-mid 1990s. Although many of these films involve or are in dialogue with the narrative conventions of "game films," the social anxieties they most commonly evince are more clearly related to cultural anxieties surrounding computers and artificial intelligence (e.g., replacement of human with machine intelligence; loss of touch with reality) than games, as such.