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Bad Object 2.0: Games and Gamers

Social Normativity

Socially normative depictions of games and gamers differ from the conventions of "negative stereotyping" seen in this project's discussions of the purported antisocial effects of video games, such as addiction, violence and sexual repression. What I have termed here "socially normative" are 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 the existing 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 the eyes of Hollywood, at the exact moment when real world games are most actively exploring "serious" topics and potentially beneficial social dynamics, are presented as impotent and irrelevant as agents of societal change and civic engagement.

Among the most relentlessly trivializing visions of games ever produced in Hollywood is the romantic comedy The Break-Up (2006). Starring Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston, The Break-Up is the story of a couple in the process of ending their relationship in part because Vaughn plays video games obsessively on the couch, while neglecting his girlfriend (Aniston). Ultimately, the two decide to continue cohabitating in their jointly owned condominium and proceed to torment each other - Vaughn by coaxing Aniston's male suitors to play video games with him rather than go out on dates with her, and Aniston by exploiting the fact that she is no longer sexually available to her former partner.

In Couples Retreat (2009), Vince Vaughn reprises his role as the quintessential video game obsessed dude, whose game-based homosocial bonding takes precedence over heterosexual romance (see also Mallrats, The Big Bang Theory). 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. When Vaughn turns out to be an expert Guitar Hero player during a macho showdown, the two characters lapse into a different genre of videogame vernacular, receiving directions as if part of an RPG quest. Although they catalyze a competition and reconciliation, games are nonetheless positioned as a trivial distraction, in opposition to the concurrent seduction of the player's wife by a hypermasculine rival in the real world.

This extended sequence from The 40 Year Old Virgin (2005) 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.

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Games of the 2000s Regardless of how you calculate the relative profits of the industries, a crossover point was reached sometime in the first decade of the 21st century, after which games were acknowledged to economically outperform the film and television industries combined. At the same time, the image of games in popular culture was subjected to increasingly blunt critiques for their potentially deleterious effects on social behavior, especially among children. The most common tropes to emerge in the cinematic and televisual depiction of games during the 2000s focuses on three general areas of concern: Violence, Sexuality and Social Normativity. The 2000s also saw the emergence of a strong independent games movement as well as organizations supporting development of games that focus on education, political causes and social justice activism, such as the Serious Games Initiative, which began in 2002, and Games for Change, which was founded in 2004. In 2008, the MacArthur Foundation also initiated its Digital Media and Learning initiative, which devoted significant resources to the study and support for games as an integral part of emerging cultural and academic discourses about civic engagement and youth learning. Within the realm of commercial film and television production, however, a majority of on-screen games continued to be associated with narratives related to antisocial stereotypes. This path presents a variety of examples that support these mainstream tropes, while acknowledging the existence of counter currents and contradictions that also appeared on film and TV during this time.
Sexual Repression 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 soulless 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.

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