Who is Controlling You?

Gage Katz

Eric Dinsmore

English 114 B

February 27, 2012

Who is Controlling You?

In the movie Gamer, gender and economic class play a huge role in who is being played and who is actually playing. Gamer takes place in the near future in a world where people can control other people. In Gamer two games “Society” and “Slayers” were developed to let human beings use other human beings as “avatars”.

Society is an interactive social based game that lets “actors” volunteer to be played by random people and not have any influence on what happens to them. The people who pay to play avatars in Society, are usually middle class and of opposite sex than that of their avatars. The mind frames of the players are usually perverted and only use their avatars to get off, because they may be incapable in regular life. In certain scenes in the movie Kable’s wife who is an actor in Society, being controlled by a fat sweaty man who eats waffles in a power chair, starts conversing with another player and they quickly head to an apartment and are begin to get freaky. From what I have seen in the movie the main roles people use Society for is sex and sexual interactions, and do things they wouldn’t be able to do in real society.

Slayers on the other hand is a completely opposite from Society. The people who are in slayers are Death Row inmates that were given a second chance at life by surviving 30 rounds of Slayers. The people who control these inmates are generally wealthy from what is seen in the movie. The most famous of the Slayers is Kable. Kable is on his 28^th round of Slayers which has never been done before. Kable’s player is a rich seventeen year old who has played Kable since the beginning. He was offered countless times hundreds of millions of dollars to sell Kable. The type of people who are playing slayers are hardcore gamers that love to play shooters and are rich because they have to buy new weapons and armor for their Slayer which is expensive.

The gender of people who are the “avatars” in society are about even ratio male to female, but in Slayers the majority are male and in the whole movie you only see one female Slayer. I think this is because women are less inclined if they are on death row to go into slayers.