Bad Object 2.0: Games and Gamers

Games of the 2000s

Game violence and diegetic violence

The cinematic trope of depicting hyperviolence in video games is often linked with violence taking place in the diegetic world of a film or TV show. Because the relationship between these two realms is not always obvious, this investigation is best served by specific examples.

In The Wire episode "Soft Eyes" (2006), the son of a drug dealer Namond Brice (Julito McCullum) retreats from the criminal activities he is expected to participate in, taking sanction in the home. Here, he turns off a television news broadcast about educational reform in order to play the hyper-violent first person shooter Halo 2.

The deliberate hyperviolence of TV's Breaking Bad (AMC 2008-13) pales by comparison with the first person shooter game played by Jesse at the opening of the season 4 episode titled "Problem Dog" (2011). While video game violence is most often used to implicate players in an amoral economy of violent actions on screen, this scene with Jesse playing the FPS game Rage is used to highlight the moral conflict he feels about having murdered one of his accomplices in the manufacture of illegal drugs.

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 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. A later scene shows the two boys watching a television documentary about Hitler while waiting for their mail order assault rifles to arrive.

Sexual repression
After 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.

A dotcom era computer genius and budding entrepreneur simultaneously plays first person shooter games and watches a sorority house shower webcam. In Wayne Wang's The Center of the World (2001), a dotcom era computer genius 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 stripper (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 impossibly rich ($20 million). The question, which is presumably also operative on a metaphoric level, remains whether money can buy him the love of a stripper with a heart of gold?

In The Big Bang Theory episode "The Dumpling Paradox" (2007), four CalTech graduate students are so absorbed in a multiplayer game that they miss the opportunity for casual sex.

Gamer (2009)
The process of avatar selection for the game "Society" portrayed in the movie Gamer (2009) perpetuates grotesquely exaggerated and singularly mean-spirited stereotypes of gamers as sedentary, debauched, immature and prone to violence.

In War Games 2: The Dead Code (2008), a rogue government created female-coded supercomputer AI named RIPLEY seduces teenagers into engaging in mass murder via videogames. This depiction of games on film is typical of the 2000s critique, in which games serve as a catalyst and point of convergence for societal ills.

Tron Legacy (2010)
• fascist kitsch / robotic cybervixens

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 social ruthlessness that would be considered sociopathic under any other circumstances. 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.

Social normativity
What I have termed here "socially normative" depictions of games and gamers differ from the conventions of "negative stereotyping" seen in the preceding examples of addiction, violence and sexual repression in cinematic games. Social normativity refers to those depictions of games and gamers that serve to suppress the transformative potentials of interactive entertainment, framing them instead within a reassuring context of containment and continuity with existing gender relations and social order. Although they may indeed sometimes be understood as "negative," these depictions are most important to understand as being trivial, with a scope of consequence that is limited to a single relationship or insular social milieu. Games, in this context, are rendered impotent and irrelevant as potential agents of social change or civic engagement.

Released in 1996, Doug Liman's Swingers prefigures a genre of cinematic treatments of games that came to fruition in the 2000s when console games were fully integrated into the domestic lives of the twenty-something generation. Vacuousness, profanity and homophobia are characteristic of these twenty-something gamer dudes, for whom the trivial banality of game worlds is coextensive with the real world. Swingers also represents the introduction of the paradigmatic gamer-dude character coined by Vince Vaughn, which would reappear with only minor variations in subsequent romantic comedies The Breakup (2006) and Couples Retreat (2009).

The Breakup (2006)
Vince Vaughn chooses video games over his girlfriend in The Breakup. In a battle between the sexes among a couple in the process of breaking up, videogames exacerbate the divide between men and women. A generation earlier, this scene would have played out over the image of a loutish male watching TV rather than paying attention to his partner.

Couples Retreat (2009)
Vince Vaughn continues to typify the quintessential video game obsessed dude, whose homosocial bonding takes precedence over his heterosexual romantic relationship. This scene also continues a long tradition of cinematic depictions of showcase game play sequences that directly incorporate game aesthetics but provide little narrative exposition.

40 Year Old Virgin (2005)
This extended sequence crystallizes many of the social tensions that surround depictions of video games on film, when stereotypical gamer dude homophobia is intercut with attempted heterosexual romance. This scene brings together multiple tropes in the representation of video games on film and television: hyperviolence, homophobia, social awkwardness, introversion, antisocial behavior, linkages between sex and violence, etc. The implicit critique of video games and the derogatory use of "gay" in gamer vernacular speech is muddled by the film's ambiguous attitude toward games and other artifacts that question the main character's masculinity. Basically, this film's politics are a mess and most of the reasons for it are evident in these scenes.

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