Banality
Games of the 2000sThe "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."
Throughout Irwin Winkler's The Net (1995), a female hacker played by Sandra Bullock fends off crude advances via phone and text chat while demonstrating her virtuosic computer skills as a professional software analyst. When Bullock is coding, the film mercifully refrains from the Hollywood convention of inserting 3D graphics and fast-paced fly-throughs to represent the internal functioning of a computer processor and the code that runs it. Instead, 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 entirely mundane, 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 another summer 1995 release, Iain Softley's Hackers. 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 likewise understated, with only 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 its potential for identity theft and criminal abuse, that constitute a far greater threat than everyday game violence.
In Doug Liman's Swingers (1996), vacuousness, profanity and homophobia are a routine part of game play behavior, which is symptomatic of - but not causally related to - the banality of existence for these twenty-something gamer 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, this protracted scene with the EA game NHL Hockey 94 directly addresses the removal of game-based fighting from the 1994 edition of the game in utterly trivializing terms, with one player explaining the decision as, "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 and Van Horn attacks him physically. Not unlike the inconsequentiality of the on screen Gretzky's bleeding head in NHL, the "fight" between Vaughn and Van Horn deteriorates into slaps and homophobic insults. Like everything else in the film, video games are unworthy of serious discussion or critique.
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- Games of the 1990s Steve Anderson