4.28.2010
Hackers & The Wizard
As the iconic portrayal of the gamer hero emerges throughout the decades new characteristics are being applied that pertain to newer technological advances. In the film Hackers the hero can be described as trustworthy, intelligent, owning expert video game and hacking abilities, and as always irresistible to the female protagonist. At the start of the film a Seattle youth named Dade "Zero Cool" Murphy is arrested and charged, at the age of 11, with crashing 1,507 systems in one day and causing a single-day 7-point drop in the Stock Market. As a result he is banned from owning or operating computers or touch-tone telephones until his 18th birthday. As Dade enters high school he is introduced to a woman named Kate who seems to strike his interest most sexually. As Dade slowly unravels the puzzle of a mysterious hacker named Acid Burn he soon finds out it is actually Kate and the two team up along with friends( including Shaggy from Scooby Doo, who apperently plays the 90's version of Shaggy in this film, Scooby is played by Angelina Jolie she is definetly no Laura Croft in this film). As the team unravels the plan of the evil foe called "The Plaugue" (which is the lead security official of an oil corporation). Dade's friends are in danger of The Plauge and it is up to him to save the day. After pulling off some impressive hacking tricks Dade is able to expose The Plauge of his evil plan and justify his surpremacy as an apha hacker. The hero in this movie does not beat anyone up or kill anyone, it is his up to date exquiste technological skills that seperate him fro the norm of the average computer nerd/hacker. This hero's characteristics have evolved with the new wave of technology that was the e-hype of the 90's. The internet was relativly new then and someone possesing superior abilities in hacking were veiwed as "godlike".
4.27.2010
Osmosis, mitosis, and stuff
As we enter the gamer hero's sophomore decade there seems to be something analogous to mitosis taking place with the gamer hero's key identifiers and identity as a whole. The first movie we watched this week, Hackers (1995), is a prime example of both offshoots of the split while The Wizard (1989), our second film, more aptly addresses the latter change in the hero. The split I'm referring to is best explained as one part the creation of the gamer hero's hacker sub type, and the other part being the portrayals of differing gamer hero identities; which may have helped lead to the current overall acceptance of gamer heroes in mainstream media.
Hackers put forth a lot of new ideas as far as who a gamer hero could be. One of the most important aspects covered in the movie was the fact that there wasn't a single character in the movie that could have saved the day. Each character had multiple accomplishments under their belts by the end of the movie, not to mention the two weird Asian guys that helped at the very end. There was Dade, or Zero Cool, who is the most likely of all of them to be considered the hero, Kate AKA Acid Burn played by Jolie who is both love interest and super hacker somewhat on par with Dade, and then there is a cast of about 4 or 5 other hackers, all with their own style, personality, and back story. I read an interesting article the other day on Kotaku about avatars in reference to how the gaming community is beginning to demand that they be more and more customizable, creating a more authentic in game identity for the player. The other important thing to consider is the most obvious thing that happened to the gamer hero in the movie Hackers was that the gamer hero began to expand his/her prowess into other fields besides just gaming. The gamer hero thus begins to include those who use the hardware and software related to playing video games or simply those enveloped by the culture. This phenomenon has become apparent in the literary world as well. The novel Epic contains a "real" world where the virtual world is used to govern (sometimes indirectly) in the stead of true heads of state or governments. This inspires rebels and appointed officials alike to hack the system to do anything from gain access to the virtual world to creating an "invincible" player character. Hacking takes many forms in the gaming world and is therefore understandable that hackers would eventually claim their own piece of game hero pie. Now you hardly see any heist, science fiction, or gadget heavy super hero movies without the presence of some sort of hacker. Even Mission: Impossible incorporated the hacker with an outlandish history (apparently still one of the most inventive ways people have come up with for developing the gamer and/or hacker hero...) of gaining access to top secret government information but is also willing to risk his entire future for the team, not to mention that by then hackers were so prominent in movies that none other than Michael Clarke Duncan takes the mantle for a spin (but only after the initial scrawny white boy hacker met a fairly gruesome end).
On to The Wizard, which now that I really think about it is re-telling Rain Main(1988) except in this the Tom Cruise parallel is benevolent from the beginning. The movie also acts as the first unveiling of in game footage in a feature film as a way of advertisement. In addition to the plethora of games that are actually depicted/mentioned in the movie, Super Mario 3 gameplay is revealed at the end of the movie in the form of the final challenge in Jimmy's adventure, the type of thing that you see everywhere at E3 these days. In spite of all this, The Wizard still manages to create a new type of gamer hero in a few ways. The hero, Jimmy, is a disturbed little boy that has all but gone catatonic after the death of his sister and is about to be placed in a home by social services due to custody issues when Corey, Fred Savage, runs away with Jimmy. They set out on a journey to California to enter a nationwide gaming competition after Corey realizes at a rest stop that Jimmy is a beast at video games, earning 500,000 points in the Double Dragon arcade in the span of about 3 minutes (for more on how ridiculous certain game related scenes in the movie are check out the Angry Nintendo Nerd video at the end of the post). Anyways, the whole point of Jimmy succeeding in the contest is to prove that he's not as useless as he seems, winning the contest would be a source of validation for the poor little guy. Winning would prove (I assume) that his brain works just fine and he doesn't need to be placed in a home. When looking at the big picture of this movie, its gamer hero is a child protagonist with huge mental blocks that literally bases his success in the real world on his success with video games which actually kind of makes sense by the end of the movie. Jimmy is no abstracted form of gamer though, his relationship with video games is directly responsible for how his story unfolds, much like Alex Rogan from The Last Starfighter or the kid who controlled Gerard Butler's character in the movie Gamer(2008). Gaming acts as a looking glass through which who the gamer hero is in each of these movies can be seen. While Hackers added a sub type to the gamer hero ranks, The Wizard stayed true to the most literal definition while simultaneously experimenting with using the idea of a gamer hero to appeal to much younger audiences than movies that came before it.
In the end, the gamer hero seems to have always been either the abstracted form, represented most often by hackers the way it is in Tron and Hackers, or the most literal form that we see in movies like The Last Starfighter, The Wizard, and Gamer --which is on the docket for this coming week. The most interesting thing going on by the time Hackers came out is obviously the search for the ideal archetypal identity of the gamer hero, or even just an honest portrayal of what gamers are like. The latter being something I have been constantly dismayed with, especially when the actors on Big Bang Theory are button mashing when playing Halo(not what happens/how it's played), can no one do the gamer justice?
p.s.: check out this article about Cory Doctorow's latest novel, the comments made by the reviewer are surprisingly relevant to this specific discussion of the gamer hero.
Video: Angry Nintendo Nerd review of Mario3 and The Wizard -- movie review round half way through
Hackers put forth a lot of new ideas as far as who a gamer hero could be. One of the most important aspects covered in the movie was the fact that there wasn't a single character in the movie that could have saved the day. Each character had multiple accomplishments under their belts by the end of the movie, not to mention the two weird Asian guys that helped at the very end. There was Dade, or Zero Cool, who is the most likely of all of them to be considered the hero, Kate AKA Acid Burn played by Jolie who is both love interest and super hacker somewhat on par with Dade, and then there is a cast of about 4 or 5 other hackers, all with their own style, personality, and back story. I read an interesting article the other day on Kotaku about avatars in reference to how the gaming community is beginning to demand that they be more and more customizable, creating a more authentic in game identity for the player. The other important thing to consider is the most obvious thing that happened to the gamer hero in the movie Hackers was that the gamer hero began to expand his/her prowess into other fields besides just gaming. The gamer hero thus begins to include those who use the hardware and software related to playing video games or simply those enveloped by the culture. This phenomenon has become apparent in the literary world as well. The novel Epic contains a "real" world where the virtual world is used to govern (sometimes indirectly) in the stead of true heads of state or governments. This inspires rebels and appointed officials alike to hack the system to do anything from gain access to the virtual world to creating an "invincible" player character. Hacking takes many forms in the gaming world and is therefore understandable that hackers would eventually claim their own piece of game hero pie. Now you hardly see any heist, science fiction, or gadget heavy super hero movies without the presence of some sort of hacker. Even Mission: Impossible incorporated the hacker with an outlandish history (apparently still one of the most inventive ways people have come up with for developing the gamer and/or hacker hero...) of gaining access to top secret government information but is also willing to risk his entire future for the team, not to mention that by then hackers were so prominent in movies that none other than Michael Clarke Duncan takes the mantle for a spin (but only after the initial scrawny white boy hacker met a fairly gruesome end).
On to The Wizard, which now that I really think about it is re-telling Rain Main(1988) except in this the Tom Cruise parallel is benevolent from the beginning. The movie also acts as the first unveiling of in game footage in a feature film as a way of advertisement. In addition to the plethora of games that are actually depicted/mentioned in the movie, Super Mario 3 gameplay is revealed at the end of the movie in the form of the final challenge in Jimmy's adventure, the type of thing that you see everywhere at E3 these days. In spite of all this, The Wizard still manages to create a new type of gamer hero in a few ways. The hero, Jimmy, is a disturbed little boy that has all but gone catatonic after the death of his sister and is about to be placed in a home by social services due to custody issues when Corey, Fred Savage, runs away with Jimmy. They set out on a journey to California to enter a nationwide gaming competition after Corey realizes at a rest stop that Jimmy is a beast at video games, earning 500,000 points in the Double Dragon arcade in the span of about 3 minutes (for more on how ridiculous certain game related scenes in the movie are check out the Angry Nintendo Nerd video at the end of the post). Anyways, the whole point of Jimmy succeeding in the contest is to prove that he's not as useless as he seems, winning the contest would be a source of validation for the poor little guy. Winning would prove (I assume) that his brain works just fine and he doesn't need to be placed in a home. When looking at the big picture of this movie, its gamer hero is a child protagonist with huge mental blocks that literally bases his success in the real world on his success with video games which actually kind of makes sense by the end of the movie. Jimmy is no abstracted form of gamer though, his relationship with video games is directly responsible for how his story unfolds, much like Alex Rogan from The Last Starfighter or the kid who controlled Gerard Butler's character in the movie Gamer(2008). Gaming acts as a looking glass through which who the gamer hero is in each of these movies can be seen. While Hackers added a sub type to the gamer hero ranks, The Wizard stayed true to the most literal definition while simultaneously experimenting with using the idea of a gamer hero to appeal to much younger audiences than movies that came before it.
In the end, the gamer hero seems to have always been either the abstracted form, represented most often by hackers the way it is in Tron and Hackers, or the most literal form that we see in movies like The Last Starfighter, The Wizard, and Gamer --which is on the docket for this coming week. The most interesting thing going on by the time Hackers came out is obviously the search for the ideal archetypal identity of the gamer hero, or even just an honest portrayal of what gamers are like. The latter being something I have been constantly dismayed with, especially when the actors on Big Bang Theory are button mashing when playing Halo(not what happens/how it's played), can no one do the gamer justice?
p.s.: check out this article about Cory Doctorow's latest novel, the comments made by the reviewer are surprisingly relevant to this specific discussion of the gamer hero.
Video: Angry Nintendo Nerd review of Mario3 and The Wizard -- movie review round half way through
4.26.2010
We Have A Winner: round one
Ok so we have a winner for the first week's three way match-up between Flynn, Tron, and Alex Rogan. These heroes put their lives/existences on the line to show that nerds rule and bad guys still drool. So, in the spirit of brevity, here is your winner:
FLYNN, Jeff Bridges in the movie Tron 1984.
ROUND TWO: This new round is a match up between the hackers from the movie Hackers (1995), for reasons that I(de gnomer) will discuss in my post later tonight, or Alex (Allen Covert) from Grandma's Boy(2006).
p.s.: if you can put yourself through a story told via a series of montages then give Hackers a look, plus it has Angelina Jolie in her third movie since her third feature film, Cyborg2 (1993), you know, before she went all Tomb Raider and "I-really-wish-there-were-more-obscure-movies-for-me-to-get-half-naked-in-so-the-movie-actually-does-well-at-the-box-office-and-its-super-deep-meaning-is-heard-by-everyone-who-thinks-I'm-brooding-and-righteous".
p.p.s: if you didn't catch the literal implication of "series of montages" until just now then we probably don't agree on a lot of things.
FLYNN, Jeff Bridges in the movie Tron 1984.
ROUND TWO: This new round is a match up between the hackers from the movie Hackers (1995), for reasons that I(de gnomer) will discuss in my post later tonight, or Alex (Allen Covert) from Grandma's Boy(2006).
p.s.: if you can put yourself through a story told via a series of montages then give Hackers a look, plus it has Angelina Jolie in her third movie since her third feature film, Cyborg2 (1993), you know, before she went all Tomb Raider and "I-really-wish-there-were-more-obscure-movies-for-me-to-get-half-naked-in-so-the-movie-actually-does-well-at-the-box-office-and-its-super-deep-meaning-is-heard-by-everyone-who-thinks-I'm-brooding-and-righteous".
p.p.s: if you didn't catch the literal implication of "series of montages" until just now then we probably don't agree on a lot of things.
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