Bad Object 2.0: Games and Gamers Main Menu Introduction Bad Object 1.0: Television Hollywood's critique of TV Games of the 1970s The earliest depictions of video games on film Games of the 1980s Experimentation and dispensation Games of the 1990s Cultural anxieties and responses Games of the 2000s Violence, sexuality and social normativity Counter-currents Exceptions and reconfigurations Media Chronology A chronological gallery of all media included in this project G|A|M|E Journal

Generational conflict

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In Toys (1992), Robin Williams discovers that his family's toy company is developing war games for children to play that are being used in real world military missions. The children in this scene, who believe themselves to be innocently playing videogames are in fact blowing up real people and military targets. This is typical of the Hollywood critique of games, in which players are consistently victimized, hyperviolent and stripped of any real world agency by game manufacturers.


In spite of the film's focus on emerging technologies of the 1990s, videogames play a relatively minor role in Iain Softley's Hackers (1995). However, games play a key role in an initial gender-based competition cum romance between teenage hackers Angelina Jolie and Johnny Lee Miller. When Miller defeats Jolie at a public arcade version of Wipeout (Psygnosis 1995), it sparks a rivalry that can only be resolved through a competition in computer hacking and ultimately by the two teaming up to defeat a cynical black hat hacker and systems administrator (Fisher Stevens). As is often the case with videogame narratives on film, on-screen gameplay is used as a surrogate for the relatively non-visual activities of computer programming. Unlike video games, which had fully entered the visual vocabulary of Hollywood by mid-decade, depictions of computer programming still ranged from real-time keyboard typing of The Net (1995) to extremes of psychedelic, 3D motion graphics that appear in several different scenes of Hackers, drawing overt parallels between the fluidity with which the film's teenage cast is able to traverse urban spaces and digital environments, as compared with the constipated physical and technological blockages of older generations.

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  1. Games of the 1990s Steve Anderson

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