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

Video Games | ScrewAttack | Angry Video Game Nerd: Super Mario Bros 3 and The Wizard

XBox 360 | Playstation 3 | Nintendo Wii

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.

Finding "The One"

I know, I know, it's been done.  But I wanted to know, "If the world is going to end, which author or Hollywood hero would I have to stalk down and offer up everything I own (including my Boba Fett frosted beer mug) for them to save us all?"

I'm pretty smart, but I figured I'd ask for your guys' help on this.  Every week I'm going to have a match up for you to vote on and by the end of this experiment I'll know who I'm gonna call.  This week will be a match up between Jeff Bridges (Kevin Flynn from Tron), Bruce Boxleitner (Tron and Alan Bradley from Tron) and Lance Guest (Alex Rogan from The Last Starfighter).  I know a lot of you are saying "who the hell is this Lance joker?".  Well, if you don't know I'm begging you to do whatever you need to do to watch The Last Starfighter and find out, for the laughs if nothing else.  Plus, who wouldn't want to see some dude get recruited to save the universe because he's the local arcade junkie?  So anyway, please vote, I'd hate to see the last vote tallied tell me that Neo was the best.

The cake isn't a lie, and it tastes good

  So we just sat through both The Last Starfighter(1984) and Tron(1982), in that order.  In each movie I think there were two focuses:
        
        1. The methods of identifying and the transfer of our hero to another fantastic place, or plane of existence, whichever the case may be.
        2.The consequent social situations.  Including how the situation was handled in each movie and what that handling said about the heroes.

  Considering the time period, I'd say they chose right. The first was needed to provide a plot and story that it was plausible for a gamer hero to emerge and succeed in.  The second adds another dimension to the gamer hero and ironically makes the hero more human, a motif that still persists today.
  1.  The gamer hero was a relatively new concept for mainstream culture and it was necessary for the story to be interesting yet maintain incredibly abstract situations' "acceptability" in pivotal moments.  The introduction in Tron of the laser that turned objects into code and spat them back out again as real made the entire story possible.  Without it, Flynn(Jeff Bridges) would've never been able to explore the crazy, logical, and digital world of programs and data, much less had a chance to drop some major pwnage on the MCP.  Without the sweet arcade game Starfighter(that was apparently free since Rogan needed a loan for school yet played it all the time) in the middle of nowhere from The Last Starfighter, Alex Rogan(Lance Guest) would have never been able to prove himself worthy to some seemingly benevolent opportunist named Centauri who apparently only wants to obtain the reward for finding "the one" as it were. The madness needed a method and those that were utilized made the madness imaginable, grabbing a tangible spot in our conscience. 
  2.  The other thing I noticed was that there were two different social situations that evolved around each protagonist.  In the Last Starfighter, Centauri used a Beta Unit to clone Rogan and take his place at home so that no one would know whats going on. They even used this fact for comic relief with Rogan's brother and girlfriend.  It was comically ironic with his whole community in the dark yet the maintained presence of his family and friends also served to create more suspense by the time the resolution third of the story arc came around.  With Tron, however, there were two gamer heroes: Flynn as himself and Tron who was seen as a hero vicariously  through his user, Alan.  In addition, the two heroes were as physically and figuratively dissimilar as can be, yet they were foils for each other til the end as they worked together.  This not only depicts the gamer hero as a possible future mainstay, but simultaneously suggests two ways that a gamer hero can originate from and assume their role as such.  It should be interesting to see in December if(and I expect how) Tron: Legacy will continue to mark milestones in the evolution of the gamer hero.

p.s.: What do you think is the meaning of the "messenger" or guide that aids in the transfer in the protagonists' reality?  There was Centauri the benevolent mad hatter of military recruitment in Starfighter and there was the MCP doing the transfer and RAM doing the guiding in Tron, but I'm asking in general, not just them.

The Last Star Fighter & Tron

Tron and the Last Star Fighter have two very different depictions of the gamer hero. In The Last Star Fighter the gamer hero is Alex Rogan a poor lower class individual living in a remote trailer park in California. This particular type of gamer hero can be labeled as underdog hero. This type of hero "underdog" can be traced back to many ancient tales such as Aladdin, and Robin Hood. This type of gamer hero is always overlooked and under appreciated, but in the end it the underdog hero always ends up saving the day and getting the girl( which is exactly what happens at the end of The Last Star Fighter only with more cornyness). Throughout the movie Alex is faced with many obstacles in his path that leave him questioning his abilities to be a Starfighter. When Alex is taken to the starfleet base by Centari a clone replaces his role back home this is a new concept to the gamer genre, it is like Super man having a clone of Clark Kent around all the time to further ensure thet no one finds out the truth about his identity. I found that this movie appeals to a more childized version of the gamer hero not found in Tron but in game movies like The Wizard.
In Tron there are two different gamer heros. One hero by the name of Flynn who owns his own arcade and is an avid hacker, and one hero by the name of Tron(who is actually the character Alan who works for major corporaton run by the MCP). Tron and Flynn are two entirely different catagories of the gamer hero. Flynn is different because he is actually a user transported into the system via some super lazer that de-materializes things, Tron is not an actual person but a program designed by Alan to take down the MCP and establish a non-governed free system to all users. This movie appeals to a more broader audience than The Last Star Fighter because programmers and tech related people can relate to everything thats going on in the movie. Tron is much more of a tech-based movie adding to a newer generation of gamer heros such as hackers, but they still remain relevant in the classic example of a hero rising up against authority.

The End of The Beginning

  Over the last few years it has become very apparent that what a "gamer hero" is has changed in many ways, sometimes fundamentally, just as it became obvious with the death of Superman that comics and the like had forever changed. This is the end of the beginning of the gamer hero's initiation into theatrical and literary canon.  Society has acknowledged(finally) and welcomed the addition of this brand of hero to our culture's contemporary archetypes.  The posts that will follow this are the discussion and analysis of the history and characteristics of gamer heroes and this decades long induction.
  Both Mark Homayouni and myself will be posting weekly, reading and responding to comments and questions from anyone, and hopefully slaying some trolls while we're at it. We'll be covering as much as possible from movies like Tron and Gamer to novels like Snowcrash.  We want you to respond, especially if you disagree with what we say(mostly because we like a good laugh), but we really just want to keep the discussion going, so speak your mind and remember: Superman is dead.