Gamer
Movies (as well as books and music) should be able to teach something while entertaining you.
The message behind ‘Gamer‘ isn’t hidden, but the close-minded will rail against the movie because they didn’t get it.
Every day you here stories of in-game violence potentially corrupting the people that play them. And the counter-argument is that most would never think to act on that inhibition in the real world.
But what if the people in the game were real people? The kind where “Boom. Head shot!” meant no ‘respawn’?
You could be anyone you wanted, but you could only be that person until they died. What kind of life would you live in this “virtually real world”?
According to the movie, we’d act exactly the same. We’d follow through on all the vulgarities that few like to talk about. In a few parts of the movie, you see operators continue to work their ‘avatars’ even in spite of potentially losing them (when you see the movie look for a part where Kable meets up with Angie in ‘Society’ for an example).
And yet I wonder if it would go down like that. Remember, we already have a virtual second chance in ‘Second Life’ and from what little I can tell, it remains a fairly clean environment… though that may be because of the admins limiting items of a violent nature. Not being a part of the SL world (or WOW for that matter) means I could be very wrong here.
Unfortunately, the truth is that society is rarely civil.
“Everybody’s looking for something
Some of them want to use you
Some of them want to get used by you
Some of them want to abuse you
Some of them want to be abused”
-Eurythmics (It sounds cooler when Marilyn Manson sings it… as I said at the start, even music should teach)