Bad Object 2.0: Games and Gamers

Bad Object 1.0: Television

Games are not the only medium to be subjected to frequent derision in the eyes of Hollywood. Movies have long posed pointed critiques of television and its viewers, presumably as a response to the devastating economic impact of television on the film industry after World War II. The rapid dissemination of television into American homes during the 1950s caused cinema attendance to drop precipitously and the film industry has never achieved anything close to the market dominance it enjoyed prior to the war. In the digital era, however, the brunt of cinematic vilification has shifted from TV to video games, producing an echo chamber for familiar moral panics about violence, addiction and anti-social behavior. These damaging tropes of games and gamers may be viewed in relation to the historical lineage of computer hacking and generational anxieties about “new technology” in general, but it is important to acknowledge the historical continuities with Hollywood's critique of television. This is relevant both because it prefigures the industry's critique of games and gamers and because it demonstrates that games are not alone as the "bad objects" of popular culture. In addition to briefly sketching the history of cinematic critiques of television here, I will suggest that dedicated game consoles that are played on TV sets, as distinct from games that are played in arcades or on general purpose home computers, have been more consistently associated with anti-social behavior on screen.

In the examples that follow, it is possible to see a series of transitions in the critique of television by Hollywood. Whereas the earliest films about TV focused on indictments of the medium itself - either as a technology as in Murder by Television or as a mechanism for social control as in A Face in the Crowd - to critiques that focused on the deleterious effects of TV on individuals seen in Being There and Network. Cinema's growing acceptance of TV as a medium during this period strongly correlates with the movement toward integrated ownership of film and TV production companies by large media conglomerates. Large, multinational, integrated media corporations would have found it in their interests to exploit economic synergy between the two industries rather than maintaining old rivalries. An important distinction must be made, however, between the conglomerated media industries of Hollywood and the computer and games industries of Silicon Valley. As we will see in the paths that follow, the antipathy between Hollywood and games represents a more intractable problem of economics and cultural discourse, which has not (yet) been resolved by mergers and acquisitions at the corporate level.

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