16-Bit Boy: A Scanner in the Works
By Michael Sterrett
16-Bit Boy is a semi-regular column on retro gaming and a variety of related topics. This time, Michael wonders why the movies’ depiction of gaming, and technology in general, is so fearful…
I was watching HBO’s The Wire recently, when a particular moment got the little wheels in my bonce spinning.
It was a pretty casual scene in which a drug-slinging youngster comes home after a hard day ‘on the grind’, sits himself down in front of his console and begins playing a game. What the scene represented is how ingrained videogames and gaming culture have become in the new millennium. Once again, the cogs began to spin, and I was brought back to the films and TV programmes of my youth that depicted the world of games, and computer technology in general, really rather differently.
The underlying theme prevalent in most of these representations is that computers are empty vessels of benign evil simply waiting for a baddie to harness their powers for their own malevolent ends. This can be seen in flicks like Demon Seed and Westworld, in which us homo-sapiens get well shafted by computer programmed robots that have the effrontery to behave, well, like humans. Curse their shiny metal faces and malfunctioning manacles…
Canadian genre director David Cronenberg is in a league of his own when it comes to technophobia. Jeff Goldblum wouldn’t have ended up as a massive, rank bug in The Fly if his pesky computer had pointed out that he was teleporting alongside a winged friend in the first place. My favourite bit in titanic masterpiece Scanners involves a rouge telepath harnessing an entire computer network via his brain. I very much doubt David Fincher will have any scenes of that kind in his new Facebook film.
Even in recent times, my beloved Buffy The Vampire Slayer had an episode in which a demon seduced the character of Willow through a really clunky looking Internet chat room. And who could forget the god awful Robin Williams shite-fest Toys, in which little kids become dead-eyed murderers within the American military industrial complex by playing shooting games? Although, to be honest, anything is better than spending five minutes with that terrifying, rainbow-suspenders-wearing, troll-faced man-child.
When I look back, there are plenty of really wretched computer game films that I loved. 1989’s The Wizard, starring the kid from the Wonder Years, is basically a trumped-up but thoroughly enjoyable advertisement for the SNES. TRON still fills me with a kind of detached existential foreboding, and Matthew Broderick flick War Games kicks proverbial batty with its endearingly naïve take on Cold War tensions.
But I fear we still have a long way to go before gamers and tech types are cast as anything but square-eyed malcontents with borderline autism. A pertinent example is the computer nerd in recent crap war-horror movie Devil’s Tomb, whose character is called Click. I mean, Jesus, they may as well have called her Screensaver, Mouse Mat or Do-You-Wish-To-Install-The-Missing-Plug-In? Give me Fred Savage and some bloke using a fantastically naff-looking Power Glove controller over that dross any day.
