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Bad Object 2.0: Games and Gamers

Arcade game record breaking brings intergenerational harmony in The Last Starfighter

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Independence The moral panic that characterizes much of the contemporary cultural discourse surrounding videogames condemned the notion of teenagers using games to assert or develop their independence. However, a subset of films from the 1980s resisted the blanket condemnation of games and embraced their emancipatory potential for young people. In the low-budget, youth-oriented feature film Night of the Comet (1984), Regina, a teenage girl played by Catherine Mary Stewart, uses her work time in a movie theater to play video games, provoking the ire of her boss during unnecessarily protracted game play sequences of the Atari game Tempest (1981). In addition to using her video game prowess to resist doing menial chores in the theater, Regina is saved from destruction when a comet strikes the earth because she is having sex with her boyfriend in the theater's projection booth. Contrary to the narrative conventions of mainstream teen movies of this era, both video game skills and teenage sex are rewarded rather than punished. The film also does not hesitate to position Stewart as the undisputed champion of the Tempest game, causing her to be upset when a male challenger's initials appear among the top ten scores of the game. A similar scene recurs a decade later in the movie Hackers (1995), when Angelina Jolie's top score is beaten by her future love interest Johnny Lee Miller. However, the character of the sexually liberated girl gamer played by Stewart in Night of the Comet reverts to more traditional gender roles the very next year, when Stewart is relegated to the role of the neglected girlfriend in The Last Starfighter (1984). Decades later, when Hollywood returns to the narrative conceit of video games superceding romantic relationships in films such as The Breakup (2006) and Couples Retreat (2009), home consoles may be seen to play a very different role than the exo-domestic arcade consoles of The Last Starfighter. In The Last Starfighter, a teenage video game prodigy (Lance Guest) earns the adulation of his intergenerational trailer park community by breaking the high score record on the Last Starfighter arcade game, not realizing that the game was being used by an alien civilization to recruit expert players to assist them in an intergalactic war in the real world. The sequences of simulated game play were produced by Atari in anticipation of a Last Starfighter video game release that fell victim to the game industry crash of 1983. Although they are being used to cultivate teenage military competence -- a problematic conceit that returns in Toys (1992) and Ender's Game (2013) -- the general framing of videogames as catalysts for teenage competence and independence from parental or societal control is uniquely characteristic of the decade's dispensation toward games and their potential for positive impact on real world social behavior. Released the same year as the McIntosh computer (which was memorably marketed as a device capable of delivering the masses from totalitarian bondage), The Last Starfighter tapped into nascent PC-era cultural fantasies of technology as a means of improving one's social status. In D.A.R.Y.L. (1985), an android boy who has lost his memory begins to suspect he is not an ordinary human when he turns out to be an expert player of the racing game Pole Position on an Atari home computer system. In this protracted sequence of game play, D.A.R.Y.L. reveals the film industry's fascination with the emerging genre of computer-generated imagery and its willingness to profit from association with video games in popular culture. Narratively, D.A.R.Y.L.'s video game playing skills demonstrate their value when he turns out to be an expert car driver in the real world, allowing him to escape from his military creators. As D.A.R.Y.L.'s social skills and self-knowledge improves -- essentially reforming his autistic-like social tendencies to more socially acceptable behavior -- he is ultimately integrated into his adopted family as if he were an ordinary child. Even during the games-positive decade of the 1980s, few films achieved the level of synergy seen in Todd Holland's The Wizard (1989). Created through a close collaboration between Universal Pictures and game manufacturer Nintendo, the film presented audiences with their first glimpse of both Nintendo's newest version of the popular Super Mario Bros. franchise and its now infamous Power Glove controller. Although released close to decade's end, The Wizard offers perhaps the most unwaveringly boosterish vision of 1980s game culture, featuring multiple, protracted sequences of on-screen game play featuring Nintendo titles, leading up to a climactic showdown in which contestants play Super Mario 3 as a spectator sport at Universal Studios in Los Angeles. Audience reactions to the final competition offer a final moment of redemption and familial bonding toward the withdrawn videogame prodigy who turns out to be using games as a way of working through a trauma related to his sister's death. In Cloak and Dagger (1984), a boy whose PC game play is not valued at home resorts to a fantasy world that extends a game narrative into the real world. This scene is typical of the generational conflict surrounding games as they are often depicted in Hollywood. Although the fantasy narrative of the boy's online game persona initially creates conflict with his uptight military father (Dabney Coleman), a parallel narrative with Coleman's alter ego, the adventurous spy Jack Flack softens the underlying critique of PC games as a destructive presence in the domestic sphere. In Cloak and Dagger, games serve as a form of domestic therapy that supports intergenerational play, a theme that would be explored further in The Wizard (1989) and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1992-99).