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1. 1 2014-08-25T11:55:56-07:00 Steve Anderson 3e015d75989f7e2d586f4e456beb811c3220a805 Sexual Repression Steve Anderson 2 plain 2014-08-26T10:57:35-07:00 Steve Anderson 3e015d75989f7e2d586f4e456beb811c3220a805

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• 1 2014-08-26T10:49:03-07:00 Antisocial stereotypes 24 text 2014-09-03T09:39:14-07:00 During the 1990s and 2000s, cinematic depictions of games and gamers shifted to present a more troubling vision of games and gamers, often focusing on three general areas of antisocial behavior: addiction, violence and sexual repression. I am wary of the danger that analyzing tropes may serve to reify the very categories this project aims to critique. My hope is to move this discussion through a trajectory that acknowledges the damaging stereotypes represented by this work, while simultaneously including examples that are exceptional or indigestible to representational reading. The terminal points of this discussion include two critical vectors in which I find grounds for hope. First is an excavation of examples drawn from the 1980s, when many of the genre's most critical tropes had not yet been fully formed. 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. Conspicuously missing from this survey is the cinematic genre of "VR films," which enjoyed a brief but highly visible period of proliferation in the early-mid 1990s. Although many of these films involve or are in dialogue with the narrative conventions of "game films," the social anxieties they most commonly evince are more clearly related to culturalanxieties surrounding computers and artificial intelligence (e.g., replacement of human with machine intelligence; loss of touch with reality) than games, as such. Generational roles are reversed in this 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 by an alien race. The addictive qualities of the game are linked to sexual pleasure, which is ironically resisted by two teenagers, who are ultimately forced 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 addiction and therapy with the episode "It's Only a Paper Moon" in 1998. 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." Videogames play a relatively minor role in Iain Softley's Hackers (1995), but they contribute to 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 through 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. 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 relation to 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. eXistenZ (1999) Loss of touch with reality; some sex, some violence 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? Elephant (2003), Gus Van Sant's controversial, cinematic treatment of the school shooting at Columbine High School in 1999 refuses to "explain" the motivations of the shooters, but it offers some enigmatic domestic scenes with the two kids before the shooting takes place. In this scene, one boy demonstrates skill at piano playing while another shoots unarmed video game characters on a laptop computer. A later scene shows the two boys watching a television documentary about Hitler while waiting for their mail order assault rifles to arrive. The Wire "Soft Eyes" (2006) violence The Big Bang Theory, "The Dumpling Paradox" (2007) • Sexual repression 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. Gamer (2009) The process of avatar selection for the game "Society" portrayed in the movie Gamer perpetuates grotesquely exaggerated and singlularly mean-spirited stereotypes of gamers. Tron Legacy (2010) Breaking Bad, "Problem Dog" (2011) The hyperviolence of TV's Breaking Bad pales by comparison with the first person shooter game played by Jesse at the opening of this Season 4 episode titled "Problem Dog." While video game violence is most often used to implicate players in an amoral economy of violent actions on screen, this scene with Jesse playing the FPS game Rage is used to highlight the moral conflict he feels about having murdered one of his accomplices in the manufacture of illegal drugs in order to save his partner.
• 1 2014-09-04T14:25:05-07:00 Sexual Repression 21 plain 2015-01-14T08:06:59-08:00 Second only to violence, the most common trope in cinematic and televisual depictions of games and gamers deals with game content that is sexually explicit and characters who are sexually repressed or immature. Of course, similar critiques could be directed at much of the history of film and television and, indeed, games often serve as an excuse for bringing titillating narratives to the screen under the guise of posing a critique of the sexual excesses of adjacent media forms. 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 relation to 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. In Wayne Wang's The Center of the World (2001), a dotcom era computer genius and budding entrepreneur 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 lap dancer (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 a rich man. In spite of his name, Longman's inability to relate to women is underscored in this flashback scene in which he simultaneously plays a first person shooter game and watches a sorority house shower webcam in the past, while waiting for his paid erotic companionship time to begin with Parker in the present. Although Wang's primary object of criticism is the dehumanizing excesses of the dotcom era writ large, the film makes an unmistakable association between Longman's sexual immaturity and his indulgence in video game violence and voyeurism, all of which leads up to a rape scene near the end of the film. Unlike the X-Files' mendacious displacement of titillating content onto video games, the sexually explicit content of The Center of the World (which would have earned it an X-rating from the MPAA) takes place within the diegesis of the film itself. In a first season episode of the CBS comedy The Big Bang Theory titled "The Dumpling Paradox" (2007), four CalTech graduate students are so absorbed in a multiplayer game that they miss the opportunity for casual sex with their neighbor and her friends. This scene epitomizes one of the show's central and recurring tropes by which technology and homosocial bonding among science/computer geeks is placed in direct conflict with heterosexual romance. The opposition between real and virtual sex in games is explored extensively in the companion genre of VR films; while the incompatibility of mature adult sexuality with video game play is highlighted in the films Couples Retreat (2009) and The Break-Up (2006), both of which are discussed in this project under the theme of Social Normativity. The multi-user virtual environment game "Society" portrayed in the movie Gamer (2009) perpetuates mean-spirited stereotypes of gamers as overweight, sedentary, debauched, immature, addictive and prone to violent outbursts. Gamer also makes a point of showing a diverse range of players for the simulation game, ranging from young to old, with a variety of races and genders among the players who interact with each other in the game world. In this scene introducing the game mechanics of "Society," however, it is a grotesquely overweight, male player who selects the real human avatar (Amber Valletta) to control. This unnamed player is uniquely featured among the various Society controllers who appear in the film, suggesting that he is in some ways typical of the constituency the game most successfully serves. Looking beyond video games, Hollywood often extends its critique of virtual worlds in terms of the debasement and neglect of bodies in the diegetic world, but the repulsive extremes presented in this scene are clearly aimed directly at the world of games.
• 1 2014-09-03T09:46:59-07:00 Games of the 2000s 17 plain 2014-09-04T13:05:12-07:00 Game violence and diegetic violence The cinematic trope of depicting hyperviolence in video games is often linked with violence taking place in the diegetic world of a film or TV show. Because the relationship between these two realms is not always obvious, this investigation is best served by specific examples. In The Wire episode "Soft Eyes" (2006), the son of a drug dealer Namond Brice (Julito McCullum) retreats from the criminal activities he is expected to participate in, taking sanction in the home. Here, he turns off a television news broadcast about educational reform in order to play the hyper-violent first person shooter Halo 2. The deliberate hyperviolence of TV's Breaking Bad (AMC 2008-13) pales by comparison with the first person shooter game played by Jesse at the opening of the season 4 episode titled "Problem Dog" (2011). While video game violence is most often used to implicate players in an amoral economy of violent actions on screen, this scene with Jesse playing the FPS game Rage is used to highlight the moral conflict he feels about having murdered one of his accomplices in the manufacture of illegal drugs. 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 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. A later scene shows the two boys watching a television documentary about Hitler while waiting for their mail order assault rifles to arrive. Sexual repression After violence, the most common trope in cinematic and televisual depictions of games and gamers deals with game content that is sexually explicit and characters who are sexually repressed or immature. Of course, similar critiques could be directed at much of the history of film and television and, indeed, games often serve as an excuse for bringing titillating narratives to the screen. 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 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 social ruthlessness that would be considered sociopathic under any other circumstances. 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. Social normativity What I have termed here "socially normative" depictions of games and gamers differ from the conventions of "negative stereotyping" seen in the preceding examples of addiction, violence and sexual repression in cinematic games. Social normativity refers to those depictions of games and gamers that serve to suppress the transformative potentials of interactive entertainment, framing them instead within a reassuring context of containment and continuity with existing gender relations and social order. Although they may indeed sometimes be understood as "negative," these depictions are most important to understand as being trivial, with a scope of consequence that is limited to a single relationship or insular social milieu. Games, in this context, are rendered impotent and irrelevant as potential agents of social change or civic engagement. Released in 1996, Doug Liman's Swingers prefigures a genre of cinematic treatments of games that came to fruition in the 2000s when console games were fully integrated into the domestic lives of the twenty-something generation. Vacuousness, profanity and homophobia are characteristic of these twenty-something gamer dudes, for whom the trivial banality of game worlds is coextensive with the real world. Swingers also represents the introduction of the paradigmatic gamer-dude character coined by Vince Vaughn, which would reappear with only minor variations in subsequent romantic comedies The Breakup (2006) and Couples Retreat (2009). The Breakup (2006) Vince Vaughn chooses video games over his girlfriend in The Breakup. In a battle between the sexes among a couple in the process of breaking up, videogames exacerbate the divide between men and women. A generation earlier, this scene would have played out over the image of a loutish male watching TV rather than paying attention to his partner. Couples Retreat (2009) Vince Vaughn continues to typify the quintessential video game obsessed dude, whose homosocial bonding takes precedence over his heterosexual romantic relationship. This scene also continues a long tradition of cinematic depictions of showcase game play sequences that directly incorporate game aesthetics but provide little narrative exposition. 40 Year Old Virgin (2005) This extended sequence crystallizes many of the social tensions that surround depictions of video games on film, when stereotypical gamer dude homophobia is intercut with attempted heterosexual romance. This scene brings together multiple tropes in the representation of video games on film and television: hyperviolence, homophobia, social awkwardness, introversion, antisocial behavior, linkages between sex and violence, etc. The implicit critique of video games and the derogatory use of "gay" in gamer vernacular speech is muddled by the film's ambiguous attitude toward games and other artifacts that question the main character's masculinity. Basically, this film's politics are a mess and most of the reasons for it are evident in these scenes.