Military training on tablet computers in Ender's Game
1 2014-09-04T14:28:11-07:00 Steve Anderson 3e015d75989f7e2d586f4e456beb811c3220a805 3025 1 Cadets in a military officers academy are trained to use violence to succeed in video game simulations plain 2014-09-04T14:28:11-07:00 Critical Commons 2013 Video Ender's Game 2014-09-04T19:55:11Z Steve Anderson 3e015d75989f7e2d586f4e456beb811c3220a805This page has paths:
- 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
This page has tags:
- 1 2014-09-05T14:44:14-07:00 Steve Anderson 3e015d75989f7e2d586f4e456beb811c3220a805 Media Works Cited Steve Anderson 7 A chronological listing of media samples included in this project structured_gallery 2014-09-05T16:25:43-07:00 Steve Anderson 3e015d75989f7e2d586f4e456beb811c3220a805
This page is referenced by:
- 1 2014-09-04T14:21:52-07:00 Violence 10 plain 2014-09-07T15:48:24-07:00 Game violence and diegetic violence The cinematic trope of depicting hyperviolence in video games is often linked with violence that takes place in the diegetic world of a film or TV show. This linkage of game violence with the violent film and TV narratives in which they are embedded may serve to reinforce the causal relationship that many opponents of video game violence presume to exist between games and the real world. In using games to signify or underscore the violent tendencies of its own screen characters, Hollywood cleverly distances itself from responsibility for the violent images they themselves are, in fact, creating. Two examples from television series that have otherwise systematically located the roots of violence and criminality in social and economic circumstances offer particularly troubling cases in point. In a season 4 episode of The Wire titled "Soft Eyes" (2006), the son of an incarcerated drug dealer, Namond Brice (Julito McCullum), retreats from the criminal activities he is expected to participate in on the streets of Baltimore, taking sanction in his room. Here, he unhesitatingly turns off a television news broadcast about educational reform in order to play the first person shooter Halo 2 (Bungie 2004), sinking into an expressionless trance that signifies his escape from the world outside. Within the narrative of the show, Namond is otherwise characterized as being overly sensitive and ill-suited for the ruthlessness and violence required for success in the family business of street corner drug dealing. Namond's choice to play Halo 2 within the sanctuary of his room heightens the ambivalent relationship he otherwise exhibits toward street violence. Does playing Halo 2 constitute a form of "practice" for when he will eventually be forced shoot real people or does it signify the hopelessness of his situation where the only form of domestic escape available to an otherwise redeemable character lies in screen violence? A similarly ambivalent scene occurs in the AMC series Breaking Bad at the opening of the season 4 episode "Problem Dog" (2011). In an extended sequence prior to the opening credits, Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) plays the hyperviolent, first person shooter game Rage (id Software 2011), the game play of which consists of simply blasting one attacker after another on screen. While video game violence is most often used to implicate players in an amoral economy of violent actions on screen, this scene serves to highlight the moral conflict Jesse feels about having murdered one of his own accomplices in the manufacture of illegal drugs. In a series of fleeting flashbacks, Jesse bounces between using a video game light gun (not an actual option in Rage) and the real-world gun he used to kill his partner, while the in-game attackers he is shooting are subliminally replaced with flashback images of his former partner being shot at point blank range. The primary role of these scenes in "Problem Dog" is to highlight Jesse's tortured conscience about the murder, but it also suggests a direct continuity between the hair trigger violence of the first person shooter genre and the televisual act of shooting another person in the head. 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 teenaged 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. Van Sant's inferred indictment of video game violence is backed up by extra-diegetic knowledge that the Columbine shooters were indeed avid video game players in the real world, but it fails to contribute substantively to ongoing debates over potential linkage between screen violence and real world violence. Instead, Elephant's explicit commitment to presenting a multiplicity of opinions (each segment of the film is uniquely devoted to a single character's perspective) suggests that a simple explanation for the Columbine tragedy will ultimately prove elusive. Van Sant also implicates television as a potential factor in the shooting, with a scene showing the two boys watching a television documentary about Hitler while waiting for their mail order assault rifles to arrive. In the end, though, it is the culture and aesthetics of video games that is most clearly evoked by Elephant. Each of the character-based segments of the film includes at least one protracted following shot that is unmistakably composed to resemble the perspective of a 3rd person video game. At one point during the assault sequence, the camera even shifts to momentarily place audiences in a first person shooter perspective before quickly shifting back. Although the filmmaker's goal was to suggest the complexity of potential motivations for the tragedy, the visual rhetoric of video games provides an overwhelming association between games and gun violence. 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 ruthless competition that would be considered sociopathic under any other circumstances. Gavin Hood's 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. Although strategizing and playing simulation games constitutes a majority of the narrative's screen time and narrative drama, an otherwise innocuous scene
- 1 2014-09-04T15:03:16-07:00 Independence 9 plain 2014-10-06T13:40:39-07:00 The moral panic that characterizes much of the contemporary cultural discourse surrounding videogames condemned the notion of teenagers using games to assert or develop their independence. However, a subset of films from the 1980s resisted the blanket condemnation of games and their emancipatory potential for young people. In the low-budget, youth-oriented feature film Night of the Comet (1984), Regina, a teenage girl played by Catherine Mary Stewart, uses her work time in a movie theater to play video games, provoking the ire of her boss during unnecessarily protracted game play sequences of the Atari game Tempest (1981). In addition to using her video game prowess to resist doing menial chores in the theater, Regina is saved from destruction when a comet strikes the earth because she is having sex with her boyfriend in the theater's projection booth. Contrary to the narrative conventions of mainstream teen movies of this era, both video game skills and teenage sex are rewarded rather than punished. The film also does not hesitate to position Stewart as the undisputed champion of the Tempest game, causing her to be upset when a male challenger's initials appear among the top ten scores of the game. A similar scene recurs a decade later in the movie Hackers (1995), when Angelina Jolie's top score is beaten by her future love interest Johnny Lee Miller. However, the character of the sexually liberated girl gamer played by Stewart in Night of the Comet reverts to more traditional gender roles the very next year, when Stewart is relegated to the role of the neglected girlfriend in The Last Starfighter (1984). Decades later, when Hollywood returns to the narrative conceit of video games superceding romantic relationships in films such as The Breakup (2006) and Couples Retreat (2009), home consoles may be seen to play a very different role than the exo-domestic arcade consoles of The Last Starfighter. In The Last Starfighter, a teenage video game prodigy (Lance Guest) earns the adulation of his intergenerational trailer park community by breaking the high score record on the Last Starfighter arcade game, not realizing that the game was being used by an alien civilization to recruit expert players to assist them in an intergalactic war in the real world. The sequences of simulated game play were produced by Atari in anticipation of a Last Starfighter video game release that fell victim to the game industry crash of 1983. Although they are being used to cultivate teenage military competence -- a problematic conceit that returns in Toys (1992) and Ender's Game (2013) -- the general framing of videogames as catalysts for teenage competence and independence from parental or societal control is uniquely characteristic of the decade's dispensation toward games and their potential for positive impact on real world social behavior. Released the same year as the McIntosh computer (which was memorably marketed as a device capable of delivering the masses from totalitarian bondage), The Last Starfighter tapped into nascent PC-era cultural fantasies of technology as a means of improving one's social status. In D.A.R.Y.L. (1985), an android boy who has lost his memory begins to suspect he is not an ordinary human when he turns out to be an expert player of the racing game Pole Position on an Atari home computer system. In this protracted sequence of game play, D.A.R.Y.L. reveals the film industry's fascination with the emerging genre of computer-generated imagery and its willingness to profit from association with video games in popular culture. Narratively, D.A.R.Y.L.'s video game playing skills demonstrate their value when he turns out to be an expert car driver in the real world, allowing him to escape from his military creators. As D.A.R.Y.L.'s social skills and self-knowledge improves -- essentially reforming his autistic-like social tendencies to more socially acceptable behavior -- he is ultimately integrated into his adopted family as if he were an ordinary child. Even during the games-positive decade of the 1980s, few films achieved the level of synergy seen in Todd Holland's The Wizard (1989). Created through a close collaboration between Universal Pictures and game manufacturer Nintendo, the film presented audiences with their first glimpse of both Nintendo's newest version of the popular Super Mario Bros. franchise and its now infamous Power Glove controller. Although it comes close to decade's end, The Wizard offers perhaps the most unwaveringly boosterish vision of games culture, featuring multiple, protracted sequences of on-screen game play featuring Nintendo titles, leading up to a climactic showdown in which contestants play Super Mario 3 as a spectator sport at Universal Studios in Los Angeles. Audience reactions to the final competition offer a final moment of redemption and familial bonding toward the withdrawn videogame prodigy who turns out to be using games as a way of working through a trauma related to his sister's death. In Cloak and Dagger (1984), a boy whose PC game play is not valued at home resorts to a fantasy world that extends a game narrative into the real world. This scene is typical of the generational conflict surrounding games as they are often depicted in Hollywood. Although the fantasy narrative of the boy's online game persona initially creates conflict with his uptight military father (Dabney Coleman), a parallel narrative with Coleman's alter ego, the adventurous spy Jack Flack softens the underlying critique of PC games as a destructive presence in the domestic sphere. In Cloak and Dagger, games serve as a form of domestic therapy that supports intergenerational play, a theme that would be explored further in The Wizard (1989) and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1992-99).