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Bad Object 2.0: Games and Gamers

Gamer stereotypes on the X-Files FPS

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Sexual Repression Second only to violence, the most common trope in cinematic and televisual depictions of games and gamers deals with game content that is sexually explicit and characters who are sexually repressed or immature. Of course, similar critiques could be directed at much of the history of film and television and, indeed, games often serve as an excuse for bringing titillating narratives to the screen under the guise of posing a critique of the sexual excesses of adjacent media forms. Two episodes of long-running Fox paranormal detective series The X-files (1993-2002) were written by cyberpunk icon William Gibson and co-writer Tom Maddox at the height of the show's popularity, "Kill Switch" (1998) and "First Person Shooter" (2000). Both episodes explore familiar Gibson topics of relevance to 1990s cyberculture: artificial intelligence, video games, the line between virtual and real, and the possibility of transferring consciousness into a computer network. It is possible to analyze these episodes along multiple vectors including gender politics, paranoid culture, anxieties about technology and stereotypes related to video games, cyberculture and computer hacking. The schizophrenia of these episodes may also be understood in terms of the basic incompatibility of cyberpunk anarchism and the middle brow constraints of prime time network television. The "First Person Shooter"episode indulges in snide televisual critiques of the extreme violence and sexism of video game culture, but these ring hollow when the same elements are used to spice up network programming with lurid camera angles on scantily clad cybervixens. Agent Mulder's last diegetic line of dialogue, "That's entertainment!" is uttered with painful irony as he and Agent Scully finally escape from a virtual environment where digital bullets can kill. But the ironic, self-satisfied giddiness of this proclamation is quickly reversed with a dark rumination on man's fundamental relation to technology that is pure Gibson: "Maybe past where the imagination ends, our true natures lie, waiting to be confronted on their own terms. Out where the intellect is at war with the primitive brain in the hostile territory of the digital world, where laws are silent and rules disappear in the midst of arms. Born in anarchy with an unquenchable bloodthirst, we shudder to think what might rise up from the darkness." The sentiment is played straight as part of Mulder's weekly voice journal, but this too is undercut when, on screen, what "rises up" from the darkness of a resurrected computer system is an adolescent male fantasy video game character rendered as a 3D wireframe model. In Wayne Wang's The Center of the World (2001), a dotcom era computer genius and budding entrepreneur is unable to relate to women except through computer screens or compensated companionship. On the verge of his Los Angeles based technology company's IPO, Richard Longman (Peter Sarsgaard) takes off for Las Vegas with a lap dancer (Molly Parker) under strict rules of engagement. The two may or may not fall in love with each other for real as Longman's company IPO makes him a rich man. In spite of his name, Longman's inability to relate to women is underscored in this flashback scene in which he simultaneously plays a first person shooter game and watches a sorority house shower webcam in the past, while waiting for his paid erotic companionship time to begin with Parker in the present. Although Wang's primary object of criticism is the dehumanizing excesses of the dotcom era writ large, the film makes an unmistakable association between Longman's sexual immaturity and his indulgence in video game violence and voyeurism, all of which leads up to a rape scene near the end of the film. Unlike the X-Files' mendacious displacement of titillating content onto video games, the sexually explicit content of The Center of the World (which would have earned it an X-rating from the MPAA) takes place within the diegesis of the film itself. In a first season episode of the CBS comedy The Big Bang Theory titled "The Dumpling Paradox" (2007), four CalTech graduate students are so absorbed in a multiplayer game that they miss the opportunity for casual sex with their neighbor and her friends. This scene epitomizes one of the show's central and recurring tropes by which technology and homosocial bonding among science/computer geeks is placed in direct conflict with heterosexual romance. The opposition between real and virtual sex in games is explored extensively in the companion genre of VR films; while the incompatibility of mature adult sexuality with video game play is highlighted in the films Couples Retreat (2009) and The Break-Up (2006), both of which are discussed in this project under the theme of Social Normativity. The multi-user virtual environment game "Society" portrayed in the movie Gamer (2009) perpetuates mean-spirited stereotypes of gamers as overweight, sedentary, debauched, immature, addictive and prone to violent outbursts. Gamer also makes a point of showing a diverse range of players for the simulation game, ranging from young to old, with a variety of races and genders among the players who interact with each other in the game world. In this scene introducing the game mechanics of "Society," however, it is a grotesquely overweight, male player who selects the real human avatar (Amber Valletta) to control. This unnamed player is uniquely featured among the various Society controllers who appear in the film, suggesting that he is in some ways typical of the constituency the game most successfully serves. Looking beyond video games, Hollywood often extends its critique of virtual worlds in terms of the debasement and neglect of bodies in the diegetic world, but the repulsive extremes presented in this scene are clearly aimed directly at the world of games.