Bad Object 2.0: Games and Gamers

Bad to Worse: TV + Games

In two films from the early 1980s, Videodrome (1983) and Poltergeist (1982), the domestic TV set -- which is perhaps not accidentally connected to an Atari game console -- becomes a conduit for sinister forces to enter the home. Both films were also produced shortly before the video game industry crash of 1983, when home gaming systems showed their first signs of posing a viable economic threat to the film and television industries. The addition of game consoles to the domestic TV screen in these two films signifies overindulgence in commercial media at the expense of traditional domestic values. Videogames may thus be understood as amplifying and extending the bad object-ness of television as a feature of American households.

Tobe Hooper's Poltergeist focuses on the television set as a conduit by which evil spirits are able to violate the domestic sphere. Although games do not feature prominently in the film, the presence of an Atari game console on top of the TV set suggests the technology's complicity in the invasion, which takes place after conventional broadcast signals have ceased for the day. In David Cronenberg's Videodrome it is the television signal itself, not the physical apparatus, that is responsible for undermining a viewer's connection to the real world. The Videodrome broadcast contains subliminal signals that trigger hallucinations in viewers whose actions may then be controlled by the broadcasters. Looking closely at the television console in this scene, we see that, in addition to the beta tape deck, the TV is connected to  an Atari game console, which figures prominently, along with several game cartridges, when the television set starts to come to life.

In 1987, long-time TV actor Paul Michael Glaser (best known for his role as "Starsky" on the ABC series Starsky and Hutch) directed The Running Man, set in a dystopian sci-fi future where a hyperviolent game show blood sport has taken over the role of prisons.

Robert Redford's Quiz Show (1994) revived cultural memories of the quiz show scandals of the 1950s, highlighting the lack of ethical standards among ratings-obsessed network executives and their sponsors.

Daniel Minahan's Series 7: The Contenders (2001) returns to the TV game show and blood sport premises of Death Race 2000 and The Running Man to portray a television show in which ordinary citizens are armed and pitted against each other in a fight to the death. Although it was originally conceived as a weekly TV series, Series 7: The Contenders represents a particularly blunt example of the cinematic critique of television, drawing aesthetic inspiration from game shows and reality TV to create a hyper-violent mashup that portrays both television and its audiences as lacking in moral and ethical standards.

Mark Neveldine's Gamer (2009) creates an explicit bridge between the hyperviolence of televised blood sports and the world of videogames. This expository sequence from the movie Gamer is equally mean-spirited toward tabloid television and the gaming industry. Michael C. Hall plays Ken Castle, the creator of "Society'" a Second Life-style virtual world in which users control human avatars instead of computer-generated ones. Interviewed by Kyra Sedgewick on a live TV infotainment interview show, Castle describes his new project, "Slayers," which places "volunteer" death-row inmates in combat situations where they are controlled by middle class teenagers, facing real world life and death battles. This scene is remarkable for its technical explication of the Slayers system as well as its preemptive trivialization of a broad range of ethical concerns. The broadcast is interrupted by a radical group of hackers known as Humanz, embodied as an African-American male (Ludacris) who speaks directly to the TV audience, opposing the technology of Slayers and advocating a return to organic human existence.

Gary Ross' The Hunger Games (2012) extends this premise to a dystopian fascist future society in which teenagers must fight to the death as part of a televisual strategy for maintaining order among the masses. The fascist kitsch that adorns the opening ceremonies of the Hunger Games resembles Leni Riefenstahl's documentation of Nazi rallies and Olympic games, drawing a clear link between televised pageantry and totalitarian government.

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