While watching Inception, I could not help but think of all of the ways its subconscious playground compared to the experience of playing a videogame. I believe the film is just a valuable as an exploration of gaming and affect as it is dreaming.

Below is a list of similarities I generated:

(Please note that I realize none of these similarities only apply to videogames. However, I do think that when taken as a group they form a convincing argument for Inception’s game-like qualities.)

1. The film is heavily invested in a set of rules and logics which guide the action and events. The first act is focused on helping the viewer, whose surrogate is Ellen Page’s Ariadne, understand the system.

2. Similar to theories about game avatars, the people within the dreamworld are projections of the users’ subconscious.

3. There’s a heavy focus on the navigation of space. The architect/designer building the world is tasked with creating appropriately challenging labyrinths.

4. The worlds have their own physics engines.

5. The ideas being quested for are locked away like treasures.

6. Time is sped up. (This particularly reminds me of the quick clocks in sports games as well as first-person shooter characters running 15-20 mph.)

7. There are different levels of increasing difficulty.

8. Frequent and/or addicted users have a hard time distinguishing between dream and reality.

9. There are single player and co-op modes.

Can you think of any others?

Kick-Ass is an important film for videogame scholars to see, especially with an audience. Many have made the claim that videogames have influenced film, but this influence has never been more apparent to me than in Kick-Ass. However, my concern is not with tracking the obvious visual/stylistic similarities (e.g. the first person shooter sequence featuring Hit Girl); rather, what  I am interested in is how the apparent but not functionally established connections between gamic logics and filmic logics can actually lead to serious ethical misunderstandings by the audience. Even though Kick-Ass and games are alike stylistically, there are still significant affective and logical differences that, if confused, can lead to ethically troubling audience responses. This ethical confusion, wherein audiences misread a film by applying gamic logics to film, demonstrate the desperate need for better videogame literacies that teach viewers how to interpret and understand games.

Disclaimers: 1. I have not read the graphic novel yet so these reactions are based solely on how I interpret the film (and I would love to hear from someone who has read the graphic novel). 2. I do not believe that games are making people violent. See my chapter in The Meaning and Culture of Grand Theft Auto for how violence in games can be productive. 3. Beware there is a mild spoiler ahead. 4. I understand my argument is based on one anecdotal experience. The point is to throw an idea out there and see what people think.

To Laugh or Not to Laugh

Let me illustrate what I mean by this ethical confusion. Early on in the film, the hero, Dave Lizewski, debuts his Kick Ass persona and is beaten up by thugs, violently stabbed and then hit by a car and left for dead. The purpose of this truly brutal and jarring scene is to disrupt the lighthearted tone of the film’s opening and confront the viewer with the dire consequences, as well as the incredible stupidity/bravery, of what Dave has chosen to do with his life. The entire film relies on this balance of extreme violence, humor, and very real consequences. Each “hero” is introduced with an emphasis on the fact that, while fighting and violence can be dazzling and fun, ultimately pain hurts (Hit Girl via the bulletproof vest sequence and Red Mist’s jump down into the alley) and that things can—and probably will—go very badly. Significantly, Hit Girl and Red Mist’s scenes do not have the presence of danger and the pain they endure is funny, while Kick Ass’s scene is incredibly dangerous and not funny. The decision to show Kick Ass in deep trouble is key to the plot of the film since Kick Ass is the everyman the viewer is meant to identify with. Kick Ass’s asskicking also exposes the fantasies of unrealistic violence in comic books.

Yet the majority of the audience in my theater laughed when Kick Ass was stabbed and laughed even harder when he was hit by the car. They also laughed at many other moments I felt were not supposed to be funny but horrific. From my perspective, and that of the person I saw it with, the audience’s response was disturbing. The inappropriate laughter  is the effect of the transposition, by some viewers, of videogame logics and ethics to other media—in this case, film.

Violence as a Mechanic in Videogames

Here’s what I think is happening: it can be assumed that a lot of the audience for Kick-Ass, especially the predominantly 17-25 year old male demographic of my screening, are videogamers. Death, destruction, and violence are a nearly pervasive element of all videogames and hold, for most games, very little consequence. Games are often allegorical and thus violence can take on a host of different meanings that’s more often than not is reduced to its function as a mechanic of the game. To be reductive, violence is a way to score points or to accomplish goals. As a result, violence in games can almost always be interpreted as funny and in most games pain is just a mathematical value with little affective response from the characters or player. Consider the player of Grand Theft Auto who runs around in a world that resembles real life but those resemblances conceal gamespace that essentially functions as a complex system of obstacles to impede free movement. In this situation, getting hit by a car is structurally equivalent to being hit by a hammer as you try and jump between platforms in a Mario game.

For those audience members at my screening, Kick Ass getting stabbed and hit by a car was funny because they are viewing the film as if it was a videogame. This is a fundamentally incorrect way of understanding what is happening in the film and a detriment to the experience. To look at the character of Kick Ass as a videogame avatar/crash test dummy corrodes the humanity and fragility of Kick Ass that provides the emotional center of the film. I acknowledge that viewers can and should interpret a film differently but to laugh at that scene represents a destruction of the narrative architecture of Kick-Ass. Moreover, the laughter exposes an ethical disposition that is troubling. (NOTE: I do think some videogames have characters that need to be understood as fragile and draw their power from that fragility but they are few and far between. Since games have extra lives and life bars, etc. it is difficult to have a player invest much in their well-being. Of course, permanent death of characters (e.g. Aeris in FFVII) do famously affect players but that is different than emotional concern over injury or brutality.)

The study of videogames is still in its infancy and public discourse around videogames is still painfully immature and reductive. If I am correct in my theories here then there has been no better example to me of how far we still have to go than the reaction to this film. It’s important that we talk about the ethics of games, especially when those ethics begin to creep into other media and everyday life. Games aren’t bad for you and like all other media some games are ethically sound and others are not, but they must be understood on their own terms and the differences between games and other media must be acknowledged.

Twitter is the current hot social network and, for once, I think it is justified. As others have pointed out, what makes Twitter useful is its adherence to simplicity in design and features and the ability to be followed but not follow, or, its asymmetry.

Academics have been especially intrigued by its functionality in the classroom and many have been employing it in novel ways. Dave Parry does a good job of summarizing these various uses and a colleague of Dave’s, Monica Malkin, is featured in a video that demonstrates her use of Twitter as a backchannel.

A backchannel is a networked discussion that occurs behind, but in conjunction with, some kind of primary presentation of material. Twitter is an excellent tool to facilitate such a discussion as evidenced by the video above.

This quarter I am a teaching a standardized and regimented composition course at the University of California, Riverside which I have modified as much as possible to focus on technology and have titled “Culture Machines.” For the first time I have decided to run a course Twitter account and have required all students to sign up and complete a very simple assignment. The idea is to just introduce them to the service and allow them to use it as they see fit. I, however, have been using it extensively as a way to extend the classroom and post interesting links, provocative questions, and announcements.

Students, as expected, had no experience with the service (I believe only one, when surveyed, had tried it) and they were very slow to use it. Twitter tends to have this puzzling effect on new users who find it to be inferior to Facebook or too abstract. Having went through this phase myself, I recognized that what really got me hooked on the service was finding some likeminded friends and entering into conversations (using @ replies) around a central topic – for me it was the 2008 election.

Therefore, to recreate this situation I decided to initiate a backchannel discussion during our week long screening of Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

TECHNICAL DETAILS

I had every student follow everyone else in the class in order to receive all of the backchannel content. To do this I recommended they look on the course Twitter account before class and follow everyone I (the course twitter adminastrator) was following.

I recommended anyone with a laptop bring that to class and use it. For those with iPhones or G1 phones, I recommended they download an application. For others, I instructed them, if they had a good texting plan, to set up their phones for text use with Twitter. This is very easy and the Twitter website provides guides for this sort of thing. It’s important that they have a good texting plan otherwise it could be expensive.

I designated a hash tag for the class to use (#cmact2) so we could all group our tweets together and find them later via a search.

Most students had access to one of the two and set themselves up without any issues. I was suprised by how smoothly that went.

BENEFITS

• Students seemed to take to this concept instantly and enthusiastically. As you can see if you check our feed, many students were participating, responding with each other, and making insightful observations as well as answering each other’s questions. Regular class discussion tended to be dominated by five students but via the backchannel students who had never participated before were very active.
• The backchannel, in a 10 week/50 min./3 days a week class, allowed me to contextualize and provide a commentary for the film during valuable classtime that otherwise would be without any critical discussion or instructor guidance. I loved the ability to, as the film was being screened, point out key moments or potential readings.  I am certain this enhanced the students’ understanding of the film, their investment in it as a critical object, and allowed me to shape their thinking of it, in real-time, in order to match the focus of the assignment (which was a gender analysis of the film)
• The backchannel not only allowed quieter students a more comfortable environment in which to interact and contribute, but also leveled out the divide between myself and my students.

PROBLEMS

• Clicking and typing noises were a little bit distracting in our relatively small classroom (set up for 30-40). Although I did tell everyone to silence their phones, there is really nothing that can be done about the clicking. A good sound system that can overpower this background noise is key.
• Some students, although I had not heard any complaints, might feel a bit alienated by not participating in the feed. To alleviate this I would encourage those students to check the feed after class and contribute. There’s no reason the backchannel cannot be extended to after class.
• The final screening’s backchannel was disrupted almost completely by Twitter’s scheduled maintenance. Unfortunately, Twitter is subject to frequent outages.

POSSIBILITIES

• Some of our classrooms have two projectors and two screens. This would be the optimal set up for a backchannel. The instructor could screen the film on one screen and have the course Twitter feed on the other. This would also help those students who cannot contribute to the feed still feel like part of the activity.

FINALLY

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