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1. 1 2014-09-05T14:17:07-07:00 Steve Anderson 3e015d75989f7e2d586f4e456beb811c3220a805 Media Chronology Steve Anderson 23 A chronological gallery of all media included in this project structured_gallery 2014-09-09T07:35:30-07:00 Steve Anderson 3e015d75989f7e2d586f4e456beb811c3220a805

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• 1 2014-09-04T15:07:18-07:00 Hacking 4 plain 2014-09-06T11:13:34-07:00 An early example of a prototypical gamer-hacker may be found in a 1981 episode titled "Trapdoors" of the buddy detective series Simon & Simon.  Created by Philip DeGuere, Simon & Simon ran for eight seasons on CBS and focused on the contrasting personal and professional styles of two brothers in business as Private Investigators in San Diego, California. Although the show was not overly invested in narratives about emerging technology, the series' creator DeGuere (who wrote the screenplay for "Trapdoors" early in the first season) went on to create the series Whiz Kids (1983-84), which aired for just one season on CBS, about four teenagers who use their knowledge of computers to solve crimes. Where Whiz Kids presumably drew its inspiration from the commercial success of WarGames (1983), focusing on high school students, "Trapdoors" featured a considerably younger child computer prodigy (Robbie Rist), who benignly diverted large sums of money from a bank. When questioned about his online activities, the boy describes playing fantasy games "like Dungeons and Dragons, only better." He goes on to explain how he figured out how to divert funds from the bank after simply "play(ing) with the machine a lot." Instead of pressing charges against the boy, the bank officer offers him a job, noting, "anybody as good with computers as you are is not going to have to worry about earning money." Steven Lisberger's Tron (1982) presented a uniquely personified vision of the functioning of software programs within a computer game system, via anthropomorphized characters and epic narrative struggles. Cinematically, the interface between operator and system combined the mundane drudgery of command line typing with visual spectacles of computer generated imagery in the context of a 3D video game world. The Walt Disney produced Tron also represented a symbolic point of origin for two important trends in Hollywood. First was the emergence of digitally generated effects, for which Disney's existing visual effects and animation departments were ill-equipped, and second was the increasing frequency with which movie studios would attempt to capitalize on direct corporate tie-ins between films and games. Although Disney was disappointed by the relatively low box office returns for the movie, multiple games derived from the film outperformed film sales and kept the franchise alive long enough to warrant production of the sequel Tron Legacy in 2010 and an irreversible precedent was set in the conversion to digital effects in Hollywood. In this scene from John Badham's WarGames (1983), the character played by Matthew Broderick accidentally stumbles into a defense department mainframe via phone modem while searching for games to play on his personal computer. Although he brings the world to the brink of nuclear destruction, Broderick's character remains exempt from condemnation within the narrative logic of the film. The same youthful experimentation that nearly resulted in catastrophe also provided the unconventional thinking that ultimately averted nuclear holocaust by trusting the artificial intelligence of the computer to learn about the futility of nuclear war by playing Tic-Tac-Toe. A likeable, white, middle class, suburbanite, Broderick's character would serve as a prototype for Hollywood's more forgiving treatments of gamer-hackers. However, Broderick's emotionally stable, nice-guy computer prodigy figure was destined to become increasingly rare, as both hackers and gamers grow increasingly linked with antisocial and criminal behavior in the decades that followed.