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Bad Object 2.0: Games and Gamers

Teenagers play piano and video games before committing mass murder in Elephant

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Violence Game violence and diegetic violence The cinematic trope of depicting hyperviolence in video games is often linked with violence that takes place in the diegetic world of a film or TV show. This linkage of game violence with the violent film and TV narratives in which they are embedded may serve to reinforce the causal relationship that many opponents of video game violence presume to exist between games and the real world. In using games to signify or underscore the violent tendencies of its own screen characters, Hollywood cleverly distances itself from responsibility for the violent images they themselves are, in fact, creating. Two examples from television series that have otherwise systematically located the roots of violence and criminality in social and economic circumstances offer particularly troubling cases in point. In a season 4 episode of The Wire titled "Soft Eyes" (2006), the son of an incarcerated drug dealer, Namond Brice (Julito McCullum), retreats from the criminal activities he is expected to participate in on the streets of Baltimore, taking sanctuary in his room. Here, he reflexively turns off a television news broadcast about educational reform in order to play the first person shooter Halo 2 (Bungie 2004), sinking into an expressionless trance that signifies his escape from the world outside. Within the narrative of the show, Namond is otherwise characterized as being overly sensitive and ill-suited for the ruthlessness and violence required for success in the family business of street corner drug dealing. Namond's choice to play Halo 2 within the safety of his room heightens the ambivalent relationship he otherwise exhibits toward street violence. Does playing Halo 2 constitute a form of "practice" for when he will eventually be forced shoot real people or does it signify the hopelessness of his situation where the only form of domestic escape available to an otherwise redeemable character lies in screen violence? A similarly ambivalent scene occurs in the AMC series Breaking Bad at the opening of the season 4 episode "Problem Dog" (2011). In an extended sequence prior to the opening credits, Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) plays the hyperviolent, first person shooter game Rage (id Software 2011), the game play of which consists of simply blasting one attacker after another on screen. While video game violence is most often used to implicate players in an amoral economy of violent actions on screen, this scene serves to highlight the moral conflict Jesse feels about having murdered one of his accomplices in the manufacture of illegal drugs. In a series of fleeting flashbacks, Jesse bounces between using a video game light gun (not an actual option in Rage) and the real-world gun he used to kill his partner, while the in-game attackers he is shooting are subliminally replaced with flashback images of shooting his former partner at point blank range. The primary role of these scenes in "Problem Dog" is to highlight Jesse's tortured conscience about the murder, but it also suggests a direct continuity between the hair trigger violence of the first person shooter genre and the televisual act of shooting another person in the head. Elephant (2003), Gus Van Sant's controversial, cinematic treatment of the shooting at Columbine High School in 1999 refused to "explain" the motivations of the teenaged shooters, but it offered some enigmatic domestic scenes with the two kids before the shooting takes place. In this scene, one boy demonstrates virtuosic skill at classical piano playing while another shoots unarmed video game characters on a laptop computer. Van Sant's inferred indictment of video game violence is backed up by extra-diegetic knowledge that the Columbine shooters were indeed avid video game players in the real world, but it fails to contribute substantively to ongoing debates over the purported linkage between screen violence and real world violence. Elephant's ostensible commitment to presenting a multiplicity of opinions (each segment of the film is uniquely devoted to a single character's perspective) is meant to suggest that a simple explanation for the Columbine tragedy will ultimately prove elusive. Van Sant also implicates the internet and television as potential factors in the shooting, with a scene showing the two boys surfing gun websites and watching a television documentary about Hitler while waiting for their mail order assault rifles to arrive. A similar tactic was followed two years later by the controversial video game Super Columbine Massacre RPG! (2005), which also attempted to deal with the tragedy by suggesting multiple explanations for the shooters' motivations. Compared with the fictional first person shooter game that appears in Elephant - an all white landscape in which the player simply shoots a series of walking figures in the back - the game play of Super Columbine Massacre RPG! comes closer to the ostensible goals of the film in terms of resisting a single, reductive explanation. In the end, it is the culture and aesthetics of video games that is most insistently evoked by Elephant. Each of the character-based segments of the film includes at least one protracted following shot that is unmistakably composed to resemble the perspective of a 3rd person video game. At one point during the assault sequence, the camera even shifts to momentarily place audiences in a first person shooter perspective before quickly shifting back. In spite of the filmmaker's attempts to suggest the complexity of potential motivations for the tragedy, the visual rhetoric of video games that is referenced throughout the film provides an overwhelming association between games and gun violence. Gavin Hood's 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 in a military academy who remain morally centered during wartime, in spite of - or perhaps because of - their exposure to video games. Although strategizing and playing simulation games constitutes a majority of the film's screen time and narrative drama, this otherwise innocuous scene exemplifies the generational reversal when the main character Ender Wiggin (Asa Butterfield) takes a break from his studies to play a video game. The game appears to be a simple puzzle game with a mouse who is invited by a giant to make a choice resulting in death or success when choosing a cup to jump into. Instead, the boy chooses a third path, knowing his actions are being observed and evaluated by his trainers. In Ender's Game, cadets are implanted with sensors allowing officers to see through their eyes via a surveillance monitoring system as they cultivate skills in military simulations, interpersonal conflicts, and ruthless competition that would be considered sociopathic under any other circumstances. Ender shows that he has acquired a meta-knowledge of the goals and methods of the academy - in other words, he has learned to "game the system" of the academy - when he uses his diminutive mouse avatar to attack and kill the giant by burrowing into its eye socket, purposefully demonstrating his capacity for ruthless violence. In the end, however, Ender is the lone voice of conscience, who expresses horror at having unknowingly commanded a military campaign against a rival species that results in genocide. Although games are used throughout the film as an integral part of military strategy and training, in Ender's Game, they prove most effective not for adults to diagnose the psychological state of children, but by children to exert control over their own moral development.