For Reals This Time

For Reals This Time

Listeners of the Joystiq Podcast may have heard them read my e-mail congratulating JC Fletcher for receiving an E3 Award.  So thanks be to Joystiq for rewarding shameless pluggery with a quick site mention.  I guess I'm actually going to have to buy someone a beer now.

The title of my post this week is "What Hollywood Doesn't Know About Videogames Could Fill the Grand Effing Canyon," and all evidence to this point is contained within a single movie trailer.

 Since it's not entirely fair to judge a film based solely on its trailer (although that did keep me from seeing the Silent Hill movie), I will not be making any guesses as to the quality of Gamer.  However, having watched that trailer, I feel confident in declaring that the following two points constitute what Hollywood thinks it knows about videogames:

1.)  Videogames are exclusively about shootin' and killin', and gamers will eventually become the New Gladiators.

2.)  Videogames blur the lines between fantasy and reality, until eventually we will not know what is real and what is not, and it will be like totally crazy, man.

In fact, the plot of Gamer sounds like it came from the head of someone who faded in and out of consciousness while drinking cough syrup and watching a movie marathon on the SciFi Channel.  It is equal parts eXistenZ, The Running Man,, and this Onion article.

Granted, a film based on, say, Noby Noby Boy, would be very difficult to make, and may even qualify as a hate crime.  But who says that actiony, shooty games are the only ones that make sense for TV and movies?

And sometimes they don't even make sense.  Remember that episode of "The X-Files" where the kid who played Donkeylips on "Salute Your Shorts" and his testosterone-laden buddies go into the virtual-reality first-person shooter game and get killed by the cyber-dominatrix who was programmed by the shy nerd woman to exact revenge upon her male coworkers for appreciating neither her talent nor her mousy not-hot hotness?

Seriously.  That's what happened.

There has to be a middle ground between Tetris:  The Movie and Let's Go Kill Some Dudes, right?  Because there are games that exist between those two extremes.  Hollywood's treatment of videogames as a plot element seems limited to either "Videogames will ruin everything," or "Videogames are for lazy boy-men."  And the only thing that determines which of these will be used is whether or not the movie is a comedy.

In fact, I can only think of one film that has handled videogames in a fair, non-violent, and realistic way, and features gameplay that accurately represents what we see in our own homes, and not some pixelated, blocky-gon crap cooked up by an underpaid, overworked special effects team.  Only one film has captured both the positive and negative effects of gaming on people of all ages.  This film is smart enough, sure enough, and brave enough to declare that people from all walks of life, all genders and backgrounds, can come together under this hobby we love so much.  It puts its foot down and says, "No!  Videogames are not just for boys and men with no necks!  Videogames are fun!  Videogames are for everyone!  And yes...videogames can capture your heart and mind while crippling your hands.  And you know what else?  They may just save your damn family, too."

Here's the bad news:  that film was a hundred-minute-long commercial for Nintendo.

All I'm saying is that I think we can do better than The Wizard.  I don't think that's too much to ask.

-Evan