Bad Object 2.0: Games and Gamers

Introduction

This is not a history project. Nor is it about video games and the people who play them. Instead, this project focuses a narrow beam on the cultural discourse surrounding game culture as it has been refracted by the lenses of American commercial film and television. The primary evidence considered in this project is thus not games themselves, but a multitude of examples drawn from film and television in which games and gamers have been envisioned by Hollywood over the past four decades. This study considers a broad cross-section of cinematic and televisual games, tracing their evolution from objects of fascination and technological possibility in the 1970s and 1980s to objects of derision and catalysts for antisocial behavior in the 1990s and 2000s. This evolution maps revealingly onto the changing economic circumstances of the games industry, describing a direct correlation between the economic viability of the industry and its negative depiction in Hollywood. These examples also evince a marked distinction between the consistently critical depiction of home console games and the more generous treatment of games that are PC-based or located outside the home, in arcades or other contexts.

During the 1980s, Hollywood generated a profusion of narratives involving games and gamers, sometimes as part of a central narrative conceit, other times as background or peripheral elements. A thorough history would situate these depictions as part of a dense array of cultural responses to the appearance of game consoles and personal computers in American homes that included advertisements, news reporting, print and radio journalism and much more. Recurrent patterns of cultural resistance and acceptance of new technologies have been usefully documented and theorized by others (cf: Schivelbusch, McLuhan, Marvin, Spigel, et al). While these models have informed my investigation, it is important to remember that this project addresses not the technologies themselves, but the layer of popular cultural discourse that emerged around them on film and television. The overall historical trajectory mapped by this project moves through recognizable stages, but my aim is to focus on specific representational gestures rather than broad patterns. This allows us to make important but easily overlooked distinctions among various genres and platforms of games and how they are imagined on film and television. Arcade games, for example, were subjected to much less withering critiques than their home console counterparts; PC-based games were likewise more commonly granted nuanced treatment in the eyes of Hollywood. How can we explain these differences? A closer look at the evidence offered by film and television at various points in time, viewed in light of the material circumstances of the industries involved may provide some answers.

The basic contours of my own argument are simple. From its origins in the 1970s and continuing through the end of the 1980s, Hollywood's vision of game culture was remarkably accepting; narratives were largely balanced in terms of gender and the youth culture emerging around games was portrayed with relative respect. During this time, the games industry was still establishing its foothold in the homes of North America and making its way into the leisure time of families. In spite of stunning profits in the earliest days of the 1980s, the industry suffered a massive collapse in 1983, followed by a rebound of home consoles in the 1990s that placed it in more direct competition with the film and television industries. By the 2000s, console games were throroughly integrated into American homes posing for the first time a viable threat to the hegemony of the film and television industries for commercial entertainment. A little more than two decades after suffering near total economic collapse, the games industry would surpass the earnings of the film industry and have continued to far outdistance it in the years to follow. Throughout this period of ascendance, cinematic tropes of gaming shifted to a more uniformly critical depiction, with gamers consistently associated with a range of antisocial behaviors, especially violence, addiction and repressed sexuality. Ultimately, I will argue that depictions of games on film and television include both a dominant discourse of denunciation and notable exceptions that allow for more complex or resistant alternate readings.

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