Bad Object 2.0: Games and Gamers

Violence

Game violence and diegetic violence
The cinematic trope of depicting hyperviolence in video games is often linked with violence that takes place in the diegetic world of a film or TV show. This linkage of game violence with the violent film and TV narratives in which they are embedded may serve to reinforce the causal relationship that many opponents of video game violence presume to exist between games and the real world. In using games to signify or underscore the violent tendencies of its own screen characters, Hollywood cleverly distances itself from responsibility for the violent images they themselves are, in fact, creating. Two examples from television series that have otherwise systematically located the roots of violence and criminality in social and economic circumstances offer particularly troubling cases in point.

In a season 4 episode of The Wire titled "Soft Eyes" (2006), the son of an incarcerated drug dealer, Namond Brice (Julito McCullum), retreats from the criminal activities he is expected to participate in on the streets of Baltimore, taking sanction in his room. Here, he unhesitatingly turns off a television news broadcast about educational reform in order to play the first person shooter Halo 2 (Bungie 2004), sinking into an expressionless trance that signifies his escape from the world outside. Within the narrative of the show, Namond is otherwise characterized as being overly sensitive and ill-suited for the ruthlessness and violence required for success in the family business of street corner drug dealing. Namond's choice to play Halo 2 within the sanctuary of his room heightens the ambivalent relationship he otherwise exhibits toward street violence. Does playing Halo 2 constitute a form of "practice" for when he will eventually be forced shoot real people or does it signify the hopelessness of his situation where the only form of domestic escape available to an otherwise redeemable character lies in screen violence?

A similarly ambivalent scene occurs in the AMC series Breaking Bad at the opening of the season 4 episode "Problem Dog" (2011). In an extended sequence prior to the opening credits, Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) plays the hyperviolent, first person shooter game Rage (id Software 2011), the game play of which consists of simply blasting one attacker after another on screen. While video game violence is most often used to implicate players in an amoral economy of violent actions on screen, this scene serves to highlight the moral conflict Jesse feels about having murdered one of his own accomplices in the manufacture of illegal drugs. In a series of fleeting flashbacks, Jesse bounces between using a video game light gun (not an actual option in Rage) and the real-world gun he used to kill his partner, while the in-game attackers he is shooting are subliminally replaced with flashback images of his former partner being shot at point blank range. The primary role of these scenes in "Problem Dog" is to highlight Jesse's tortured conscience about the murder, but it also suggests a direct continuity between the hair trigger violence of the first person shooter genre and the televisual act of shooting another person in the head.

Elephant (2003), Gus Van Sant's controversial, cinematic treatment of the school shooting at Columbine High School in 1999 refused to "explain" the motivations of the teenaged shooters, but it offered some enigmatic domestic scenes with the two kids before the shooting takes place. In this scene, one boy demonstrates surprising skill at classical piano playing while another shoots unarmed video game characters on a laptop computer. Van Sant's inferred indictment of video game violence is backed up by extra-diegetic knowledge that the Columbine shooters were indeed avid video game players in the real world, but it fails to contribute substantively to ongoing debates over potential linkage between screen violence and real world violence. Instead, Elephant's explicit commitment to presenting a multiplicity of opinions (each segment of the film is uniquely devoted to a single character's perspective) suggests that a simple explanation for the Columbine tragedy will ultimately prove elusive. Van Sant also implicates television as a potential factor in the
shooting, with a scene showing the two boys watching a television
documentary about Hitler while waiting for their mail order assault
rifles to arrive. In the end, though, it is the culture and aesthetics of video games that is most clearly evoked by Elephant. Each of the character-based segments of the film includes at least one protracted following shot that is unmistakably composed to resemble the perspective of a 3rd person video game. At one point during the assault sequence, the camera even shifts to momentarily place audiences in a first person shooter perspective before quickly shifting back. Although the filmmaker's goal was to suggest the complexity of potential motivations for the tragedy, the visual rhetoric of video games provides an overwhelming association between games and gun violence.

Trainers in a military academy can see through a cadet's eyes via a surveillance monitoring system as they cultivate skills in video games, violence and ruthless competition that would be considered sociopathic under any other circumstances. Gavin Hood's Ender's Game (2013) is anomalous in the history of games on film in reversing the generational condemnation of games and violence. In this case, it is the teenagers who remain morally centered during wartime, in spite of - or possibly because of - their exposure to video games. Although strategizing and playing simulation games constitutes a majority of the narrative's screen time and narrative drama, an otherwise innocuous scene

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