Gage Katz
Eric Dinsmore
English 114 B
February 27, 2012
Who
is in Control?
In the movie Gamer we follow the story of Kable, and
his controller Simon Silverton. 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”. In “Society”
users take control of live action models that act out their every whim in a
social environment, and in “Slayer” users take control of convicts and place
them in a warzone to fight to the death.
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 occasionally
of opposite sex than that of their avatars, but are mostly portrayed as those
you might find to be downtrodden in the social world, the unattractive, the
overweight, etc. The mind frames of the players are usually perverted and only
use their avatars as a means for sexual exploration, because they may be
incapable in regular life of performing such acts, and are entirely incapable
of performing such acts with the incredibly attractive models that they control.
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 intimate. From what I have seen in the movie the main roles people use
Society for is sex and other generally 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 28th 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 typically wealthy because they have to buy new
weapons and armor for their Slayer which is expensive.
The movie Gamer seems to be playing on cultural phenomena that we can see
in our own lives. The most prominent of which, reflected in society is the act
of changing one’s identity and their social roles once situated behind the guise
of an online avatar. As noted in John M. Grohol’s article “The Proteus
Effect: How Our Avatar Changes Online Behavior”, a study in 2007 has
shown that the use of online avatars not only change our personality over the
web, but also in our day to day interactions.
Participants in the study noted by
Grohol are given either a short or a tall avatar. Those given a short avatar
were more likely to allow being taken advantage of, while the taller was more
aggressive in their dealings. Subsequent interaction with the participants
showed that the effects followed them out of the virtual world, and affected
the real world behavior. What we are seeing here is an online avatar not only
effecting the actions of the user whilst behind their mask, but also in real
life. In the film Gamer we only see those actions that are performed from
behind the controls of the avatar, however the effect of the avatar’s guise is
immense. The user completely ditches any action that one might expect of them
given their personal appearance and what we would imagine their level of
self-confidence to be at, and the dive straight into heavy flirting and quick
sexual encounters.
In reality too we are finding that
it is easier to socialize from behind these avatars, and even personal social
networking sites, than it is to socialize in real life. For instance, as Andrew
Pettigrew noted in his article “The Rise and Rise of Social Networking, Could Facebook
be making us Less Social”, research has been looking into what it means for one
person to call another a “friend” and have found that more and more superficial
relationships are being attributed as friendship. This seems to be breaking
down the wall between what we call acquaintances and actual friends in young
people’s lives. And yes, while social media is not the same thing as an avatar,
it is a form of a created identity that we portray to the world.
As found in Sonia Livingstone and
David Brake’s article “On the rapid rise of social networking sites: New
findings and policy implications”, the use of a social networking site is a
similar tool to the young person as their room’s decorations is. The social
networking site allows young people to express a self to the world from behind
something they have crafted on the internet. These personas are not strictly
their ‘self’ but rather a mask that they have crafted for the world to view
them as.
This act is somewhat similar to the
act of using an avatar to act in ways that you could not, as your online
persona may be portrayed as friendly and outgoing on your social networking site,
which may not be an accurate portrayal of your actual life. For instance one’s Facebook
may be covered in photos of parties, concerts, and trips to the beach, but
these are not the only things that take up their day, and instead of portraying
an accurate picture of the individual, they are selecting only things they wish
to share with the outside world to curtail judgments. This is not such a stretch from sitting behind
an avatar online, as a quick Facebook check may provide a similar effect of
confidence boost outside the virtual world.
Gamer has tapped directly into this
trend of crafting and sitting behind an online avatar, and has taken it to a
possible extreme in which we completely do away with interpersonal
relationships and rely exclusively on online interactions. It’s no so farfetched
an idea when we consider the notes cited above, the rise of social media in lieu
of real interaction, the effect of using an online persona, and the use of
social media to craft our own identities.
Work Cited
Grohol,
John. "The Proteus Effect: How Our Avatar Changes Online Behavior | World
of Psychology." Psych Central - Trusted mental
health, depression, bipolar, ADHD and psychology information .. N.p., n.d. Web.
16 May 2012. http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2009/11/24/the-proteus-effect-how-our-avatar-changes-online-behavior/
Pettigrew,
Andrew . "The Rise and Rise of Social Networking, Could Facebook be making
us Less Social?." .
N.p., n.d. Web. 16 May 2012. <networkconference.netstudies.org/2010/04/the-rise-and-rise-of-social-networking-could-facebook-be-making-us-less-social/>.
Livingston,
Sonia, and David Blake. "On the rapid rise of social networking sites: new
findings and policy implications ." Rapid Rise of Social
Netwroking Sites. N.p., 30 Dec. 2004. Web. 16 May 2012.
<eprints.lse.ac.uk/30124/1/On_the_rapid_rise_of_social_networking_(LSERO_version).pdf>
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