Bad Object 2.0: Games and Gamers

Games of the 1980s

A comparatively forgiving vision of video games is articulated by Hollywood throughout the decade of the 1980s. During this period, an increasing number of games made their way into Hollywood narratives in spite of the industry's economic downturn of 1983-85. This period also saw a nascent surge in corporate rivalry between the two industries, epitomized by Universal's lawsuit brought against Nintendo over the company's spectacularly successful game Donkey Kong. In a heavy-handed attempt to capitalize on video game industry profits, Universal sued Nintendo for trademark infringement of its remake of King Kong (1976), but was defeated in the court and numerous subsequent appeals after it was proved that Universal themselves had previously won a court case establishing that the figure of King Kong was in the public domain. Ironically, the antagonism between the two companies had sufficiently subsided by decade's end to allow them to produce The Wizard (1989) in close partnership. This apparent schizophrenia may be seen as symptomatic of the disruptive impact of games on the entertainment industry during the 1980s, which did not result in the manifestation of any singular response in the narratives of Hollywood.

Given the complexity and contradictions of the two industries' rising economic and cultural entanglement, it is also important to make a distinction between the depiction of arcade and PC games vs. home console games during this period. On the screens of Hollywood, PC games were often presented as coextensive with the emerging world of computer programming -- a technical skill with economic and professional rewards -- as distinct from home console games, which were strictly used for entertainment. With console games connected to TV sets in the home, their literal substitution for TV watching as a leisure activity was indisputable, a distinction that would grow increasingly stark in the decades that followed. Although "computer experts" were commonly featured in Hollywood narratives of the PC-era, the association of computer "hacking" with criminal activity was not codified in Hollywood until the early 1990s. During the 1980s, in fact, computer skills were often non-judgmentally linked with gaming skills, and PC-based game systems were seamlessly repurposed to other ends.

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