1 Movie Review - Gamer - Thu 6 Jan 2011

Movie Review - Gamer (2009)


My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Gamer is set in a world where you can either be the player or the played - where real people are used as avatars in two real-life video games - Society and Slayers.


Society is much like the real "game" Second Life, where you control an avatar, making them go anywhere in the game and do anything you please. The difference here is that Society’s avatars are real human beings - usually people down on their luck, who have agreed to be “played” as a way of earning money.


Slayers is much darker. The avatars in Slayers are death-row inmates that have opted to become a part of the game in the hope that they may actually survive and not be put to death. If they are able to make it alive through 30 games, they are pardoned and set free. Suffice to say, it has never happened.


Enter John Tillman a.k.a Kable (played by the handsome Gerard Butler), who has made it successfully through 27 games, and is looking to be the first avatar ever to be set free. Kable has become a global celebrity, with almost everyone wanting him to make it through, except for Ken Castle, the creator of Slayers (played by TV’s Dexter, Michael C. Hall), who has other things in mind.


I love the concept of this film. It is both original and imaginative, and really makes you think about the ethics of life, death and self-control, but alas, it is poorly executed. The plot is too erratic, and to match this, the cinematography is so frenetic it could send a healthy person into seizures. All at once, it’s colourful and noisy before going dark and quiet, and so many blink-and-you’ll-miss-it images are flashed at you over and over again that it’s hard to work out what is actually happening.


Butler is handsome, but that’s about it. He’s a cardboard cutout with a heartbeat. I guess that’s to be expected given the nature of his role, which is a character being controlled by a 17 year old boy.


The movie’s saving grace is the performance of exquisitely evil Michael C. Hall, who does psychotic oh so well. He is both likeable and detestable - managing to reel you in quickly with comedy before suddenly pushing you away with his sub-human indifference. My favourite scene would have to be Hall’s choreographed rendition of “I’ve got you under my skin”. Given that it’s towards the end, it makes having watched that much of the movie seem almost worth it. 


This film could quite possibly appeal to Gen Y viewers who supposedly love the frenetic - but for me, it was just too surreal.

Here's the movie trailer on Youtube (if you work where I do, you won't be able to see the embedded video below, but you can check it out at home):

5 Warriors AND Women

Meet Violet. This is my avatar in the game Fallout: New Vegas. Fallout is quite possibly my favourite game of all time (although, remember I’m a bit of a noob, and haven’t yet played a HUGE number of games to compare). 

There are many, many reasons why I love this game - far too many to go into right now - but one of the main reasons is that you can play a female character of your own design. Of course, as in most video games, the design choices are limited - she is still generally young, she is heavily made up and has a figure I could only dream of - but at least she is dressed for her environment (as opposed to being half-naked), and if I wanted to, I could make her older (but alas not fatter).  

When I think of the (roughly twelve) Playstation games I have played so far in my noobtastic career, I can think of two where you could actually choose to have a female avatar, and two more where you could kind of play as a female, while the main emphasis still remained on the male characters (think Madison Paige in Heavy Rain). 

Now, if we think about the statistics I quoted in my first post, the fact that there are more games with male avatar choices than females makes sense - the game developers want to appeal to a male-dominated (only just!) market. 

But why, oh why, does the majority (of this minority) of female characters have to be the half-naked, anatomical equivalents of Barbie™? Is it because male gamers won’t play a game where the female characters aren’t “hot”?

If you’re up for a bit of heavy reading, you should check out this “feature” by Shaylyn Hamm (which is actually part of her thesis on the aesthetics of female video game characters). In this “feature”, Hamm talks about the wide variety of male characters (in terms of body shape, clothing and facial structure) and the limited design of female characters over a number of different games. 

As a part of her thesis, Hamm designed two new female characters for the multiplayer game Team Fortress 2, based on the male characters already in the game (the Medic and the Heavy Weapons guy). You can see her female characters here. 

I love them.

Neither of them are “pretty” or “ugly” and they are both dressed for their environment (i.e. fully clothed!). To me, they look like real women just doing their job, and I can honestly say if given the choice, I’d rather play as these women than the Barbie doll doppelgangers of most video games today. 

What do you think of Shaylyn Hamm’s designs? If you’re a guy and the option was there to have either a male or female avatar, would you ever choose to play as a girl? Let me know! :)