Sexual Repression and Games
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.
A dotcom era computer genius and budding entrepreneur simultaneously plays first person shooter games and watches a sorority house shower webcam. In Wayne Wang's The Center of the World (2001), a dotcom era computer genius is unable to relate to women except through computer screens or compensated companionship. On the verge of his Los Angeles based technology company's IPO, Richard Longman (Peter Sarsgaard) takes off for Las Vegas with a stripper (Molly Parker) under strict rules of engagement. The two may or may not fall in love with each other for real as Longman's company IPO makes him impossibly rich ($20 million). The question, which is presumably also operative on a metaphoric level, remains whether money can buy him the love of a stripper with a heart of gold?
In The Big Bang Theory episode "The Dumpling Paradox" (2007), four CalTech graduate students are so absorbed in a multiplayer game that they miss the opportunity for casual sex.
Gamer (2009)
The process of avatar selection for the game "Society" portrayed in the movie Gamer (2009) perpetuates grotesquely exaggerated and singularly mean-spirited stereotypes of gamers as sedentary, debauched, immature and prone to violence.
In War Games 2: The Dead Code (2008), a rogue government created female-coded supercomputer AI named RIPLEY seduces teenagers into engaging in mass murder via videogames. This depiction of games on film is typical of the 2000s critique, in which games serve as a catalyst and point of convergence for societal ills.
Tron Legacy (2010)
• fascist kitsch / robotic cybervixens