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 profiles of 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 this context, are rendered impotent and irrelevant as potential agents of social change or civic engagement.

Swingers (1996)
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.

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.

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