Banality
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.