Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy User Manual
Page 133
Trigger Happy
135
paranoia Wargames features a young geek hero who
hacks into the Pentagon’s military computer system
because he thinks he’s going to get to play some cool
videogames; in fact, he nearly starts a global nuclear
war. Generally, if a movie shows a child playing
videogames in his bedroom, the message is that this
antisocial kid needs to get out more.
Other films extrapolate some hypothetical
videogame future in order to make more or less
successful points about man’s increasingly intimate
relationship with technology. The abomination that is
The Lawnmower Man typifies Hollywood’s prurient
fascination with the oxymoronic and irremediably
adolescent concept of “virtual sex.” More thoughtful is
David Cronenberg’s orthographically eccentric
eXistenZ, which pictures a biomechanical future whose
characters jack into an animal game “pod” via a slimy
spinal socket, and toys in a rather facile but entertaining
way with the problems of competing realities.
But preeminent in this filmic tradition is The
Matrix, which, despite competition from The Phantom
Menace, was most people’s choice for science fiction
film of 1999. With a cunning script incorporating a
kaleidoscope of Homeric, Christian and Gibsonian