This site requires Javascript to be turned on. Please enable Javascript and reload the page.

Bad Object 2.0: Games and Gamers

eXistenZ interface

This page has paths:

Contents of this path:

This page has tags:

Contents of this tag:

This page is referenced by:

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.