Is it VR or is it a video game?
1 2014-08-07T10:37:08-07:00 Steve Anderson 3e015d75989f7e2d586f4e456beb811c3220a805 3025 1 Virtual reality anticipates the rise of commercial video games plain 2014-08-07T10:37:08-07:00 Critical Commons 1994 Video Mad About You "Virtual Reality" 2012-08-31T18:44:11Z Steve Anderson 3e015d75989f7e2d586f4e456beb811c3220a805This page is referenced by:
- 1 2014-08-26T10:49:03-07:00 Games of the 1990s 36 plain 2014-09-04T14:45:55-07:00 During the 1990s, cinematic and televisual depictions shifted to present a more consistently troubling vision of games and gamers, often focusing on three general areas of antisocial behavior: addiction, violence and sexual repression. The terminal points of this discussion include two critical vectors in which I find grounds for hope. First is the legacy of games as potential catalysts for adolescent freedom and competence, which, although less common in the decades after the 1980s, is not entirely eradicated. Second is the appearance in the 2010s of a narrative counter-current in which video games play a productive role in the reconstitution of families and the domestic sphere, the very cultural formations that much of the moral panic surrounding video games supposes to be at risk. Cultural associations between gaming and antisocial behavior have been supported by social scientific research, much of which presumes that games manifest causal "effects" on their players, which may be observed in the real world. It is beyond the scope of this project to recapitulate the body of theoretical writing that seeks to decenter the importance of "effects" research, but I would emphasize that I hope to actively distance this project from effects-based models whenever possible. Emergent tropes: generational conflict; reality and its other Generational roles are reversed in the 1991 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG), titled "The Game," in which an alien video game technology causes the entire Enterprise crew to become addicted to the game, making them vulnerable to mind control. The addictive qualities of the game are linked to sexual pleasure, which is ironically resisted by two teenagers, while the adults in the episode cheerfully embrace their addiction and ultimately physically force all crew members to submit. In it's continuing mission to deal with pressing social issues, TNG here resorts to multiple cliche's of the moral panic surrounding videogames. In addition to sexual pleasure and addiction, the games become vehicles for mind control and alien invasion. TNG also explored the issue of video game addiction in the season 3 episode "Hollow Pursuits" (1990), in which it is revealed that Lt. Barclay is using the Holodeck to escape from reality. The spinoff series Deep Space 9 would return to the themes of adolescent addiction and games as therapy with the episode "It's Only a Paper Moon" in 1998. In this episode, an adolescent boy has taken refuge in the space station's "holo-suite," which is generally used for recreation and alternative narrative scenarios. A meeting of station officers and concerned parties including a therapist and physician is convened to discuss the situation. The suggestion that spending time in a virtual world may serve a therapeutic function is initially ridiculed, but is ultimately accepted as a course of action by which it is hoped the boy may return to normal functioning. This virtual reality-based gaming sequence in Brett Leonard's The Lawnmower Man (1992) opens with the promise that, "in here, we can be anything we want to be." In this fantasy of the cinematic imaginary, bodies become liquid and unconstrained by laws of physics and biology as they play out the ultimate in VR fantasy narratives, tapping into the character's "primal mind" until it becomes a literalization of Julian Dibbell's cautionary tale of early internet culture, "A Rape in Cyberspace" published in The Village Voice in 1993. 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. The "Virtual Reality" episode from NBC's prime time television comedy Mad About You (1994) crystallizes numerous stereotypes of the cultural imaginary surrounding virtual reality in the 1990s. Series protagonist Paul Buckman (Paul Reiser) has decided to invest in a virtual reality system developed by a preteen computer genius, which allows for an impossible array of VR experiences spanning the usual range of erotic, exotic or adventurous experience. Narrative tensions emerge over whether the system should be regarded as a "video game," a trivializing designation in the mid 90s, which would mark it as an illegitimate investment. After Paul tests the system with a virtual encounter with supermodel Christie Brinkley, he later attempts to assuage the resulting domestic turmoil with his wife (Helen Hunt), by dismissing the experience as being simply "a video game." 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. Swingers (1996) eXistenZ (1999) Two episodes of long-running Fox paranormal detective series The X-files (1993-2002) were written by cyberpunk icon William Gibson and co-writer Tom Maddox at the height of the show's popularity, "Kill Switch" (1998) and "First Person Shooter" (2000). Both episodes explore familiar Gibson topics of relevance to 1990s cyberculture: artificial intelligence, video games, the line between virtual and real, and the possibility of transferring consciousness into a computer network. It is possible to analyze these episodes along multiple vectors including gender politics, paranoid culture, anxieties about technology and stereotypes related to video games, cyberculture and computer hacking. The schizophrenia of these episodes may also be understood in terms of the basic incompatibility of cyberpunk anarchism and the middle brow constraints of prime time network television. The "First Person Shooter"episode indulges in snide televisual critiques of the extreme violence and sexism of video game culture, but these ring hollow when the same elements are used to spice up network programming with lurid camera angles on scantily clad cybervixens. Agent Mulder's last diegetic line of dialogue, "That's entertainment!" is uttered with painful irony as he and Agent Scully finally escape from a virtual environment where digital bullets can kill. But the ironic, self-satisfied giddiness of this proclamation is quickly reversed with a dark rumination on man's fundamental relationto technology that is pure Gibson: "Maybe past where the imagination ends, our true natures lie, waiting to be confronted on their own terms. Out where the intellect is at war with the primitive brain in the hostile territory of the digital world, where laws are silent and rules disappear in the midst of arms. Born in anarchy with an unquenchable bloodthirst, we shudder to think what might rise up from the darkness." The sentiment is played straight as part of Mulder's weekly voice journal, but this too is undercut when, on screen, what "rises up" from the darkness of a resurrected computer system is an adolescent male fantasy video game character rendered as a 3D wireframe model.
- 1 2014-09-04T14:48:57-07:00 Banality 25 plain 2014-10-07T09:45:16-07:00 By the mid-1990s, the technology of video games and virtual reality had fully penetrated popular culture, making non-disruptive appearances on prime time network television and non-technology oriented genre films alike. No longer a novelty, in these examples, games are woven into the everyday fabric of cinematic and televisual narratives. The "Virtual Reality" episode from NBC's prime time television comedy Mad About You (1994) crystallizes numerous stereotypes of the cultural imaginary surrounding virtual reality in the 1990s. Series protagonist Paul Buckman (Paul Reiser) has decided to invest in a virtual reality system developed by a preteen computer genius, which allows for an impossible array of VR experiences spanning the usual range of erotic, exotic or adventurous experience. Narrative tensions emerge over whether the system should be regarded as a "video game," a trivializing designation in the mid 90s, which would mark it as an illegitimate investment. After Paul tests the system via a virtual encounter with supermodel Christie Brinkley, he later attempts to assuage the resulting domestic turmoil with his wife (Helen Hunt), by dismissing the experience as being simply "a video game." In Irwin Winkler's The Net (1995), a computer hacker (Sandra Bullock) displays virtuosic computer skills as a software analyst, moving seamlessly between video game play, system debugging and internet chat rooms as part of her daily, isolated existence. In scenes like this one, where Bullock is debugging the code for Wolfenstein 3D, her interactions with both the game and the computer are presented as a routine part of her job, rather than a spectacle of computational virtuosity. A stark contrast may be made between similar scenes in The Net and Iain Softley's Hackers, which came out just a few months later. Throughout Hackers, scenes of computer programming are dominated by psychedelic computer graphics that take over the screen whenever code is written or data is accessed online. In The Net, the Wolfenstein 3D game play sequence is understated, showing just enough first person shooter violence for Bullock to euphemistically declare the game's hyperviolence to be "very dynamic" before hurrying back to her isolated life of online pizza deliveries and cyberchat rooms. In the end, the film's critique is aimed not at games or gamers but at the internet itself, with a potential for identity theft and criminal abuse that far exceeds the threat of everyday game violence. Kevin Smith's teenage slacker comedy Mallrats (1995) alternately celebrates and condemns the feckless existence of teenagers engaged in a series of inconsequential activities and relationships. In this scene, which is meant to pass for an internal critique of the main character's (Jason Lee) inability to take his life (or relationship with his girlfriend, Shannen Doherty) seriously, video hockey serves as a distraction from their semblance of a love life. At other points in the film avoidance of adult responsibility is achieved through an obsessive and equally trivial relationship to television, comic books and hanging out at the mall. The persistently ironic stance of the film makes it difficult to decode this scene (and numerous others) in terms of its gendered critique of games. For Doherty, videogames represent not only a disruption of her relationship, but the antithesis of the substance and consequentiality she desires from life. At the same time, her romantic idealization of "noble" careers and life goals is ridiculed by both the logic of the film and Lee's character, who is distracted from her breakup speech by his game controller. The following year, Doug Liman's Swingers (1996) highlighted vacuousness, profanity and homophobia as routine parts of videogame culture. This immature, solipsistic behavior is portrayed as symptomatic of - but not causally related to - the banality of existence for three twenty-something dudes (Vince Vaughn, Jon Favreau and Patrick Van Horn). It would be difficult to "blame" video games for the empty narcissism of the Southern California social milieu constructed in Swingers. In fact, in this protracted scene featuring the EA game NHL Hockey 94 Van Horn directly addresses the removal of game-based fighting from the 1994 edition of the game in utterly trivializing terms: "I think kids were hittin' each other or somethin'." Moments later, the discussion of game violence transitions from the screen to the characters in the room after Vince Vaughn cheats to make Wayne Gretzky's head bleed, prompting Van Horn to attack him physically. Not unlike Gretzky's graphically but meaninglessly bleeding head in NHL, the "fight" between Vaughn and Van Horn degenerates into slaps and homophobic insults. In the world created by Swingers, video games are just one more element of an overall landscape of trivial inconsequentiality.
- 1 2014-09-04T14:49:28-07:00 Generational conflict 4 plain 2014-09-05T12:59:17-07:00 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. The "Virtual Reality" episode from NBC's prime time television comedy Mad About You (1994) crystallizes numerous stereotypes of the cultural imaginary surrounding virtual reality in the 1990s. Series protagonist Paul Buckman (Paul Reiser) has decided to invest in a virtual reality system developed by a preteen computer genius, which allows for an impossible array of VR experiences spanning the usual range of erotic, exotic or adventurous experience. Narrative tensions emerge over whether the system should be regarded as a "video game," a trivializing designation in the mid 90s, which would mark it as an illegitimate investment. After Paul tests the system with a virtual encounter with supermodel Christie Brinkley, he later attempts to assuage the resulting domestic turmoil with his wife (Helen Hunt), by dismissing the experience as being simply "a video game." This virtual reality-based gaming sequence in Brett Leonard's The Lawnmower Man (1992) opens with the promise that, "in here, we can be anything we want to be." In this fantasy of the cinematic imaginary, bodies become liquid and unconstrained by laws of physics and biology as they play out the ultimate in VR fantasy narratives, tapping into the character's "primal mind" until it becomes a literalization of Julian Dibbell's cautionary tale of early internet culture, "A Rape in Cyberspace" published in The Village Voice in 1993. 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.