The Control of Video Games

America is all about freedom and subsequently control and power. There is no such thing as complete freedom and there never will be. Media is no exception. Television and film give us limited freedom. We can choose to watch a comedy movie instead of a horror, but generally we can't decide what the content of a movie or a television show will be.

In the past two decades video games have risen to the top tier of entertainment. Everyone I know has at least one gaming system and most Americans have computers which allow gameplay on the internet as well as PC games. Humans like to be in control or feel as if they are, even if it is a character in a video game. If I want to shoot someone just to take their money on Grand Theft Auto, I can. There are a few different results that can come from this, which were programmed into the game therefore giving me no control over, but how I have the character react to the consequences is up to me.

When I was little all I wanted to do was watch my sister and cousins play video games. When I was between the ages of about 4-10 I mostly watched them rather than play. I knew how to play and I would every once in awhile, but mostly I was too young to get very far. As I got older I wasn't as comfortable watching and I would irritate my sister by being a sort of "back-seat driver." I would tell her go over there or jump here. I was growing up and I wanted more control over what I was seeing. Needless to say, my sister and I are still avid video gamers now (as much as we can be on a limited budget and working our way through college).

Video games can be an escape into a world where we are something better than ourselves. Who wouldn't love to explode a gas station without consequences in Grand Theft Auto, kill hordes of zombies in Resident Evil, or create and live the perfect life in The Sims (PC version). I can see how easy it would be to get lost in these non-existant (and sometimes fantastical) worlds. Yes, there are limits to what a certain game is programmed to do and content is created by someone else, but there's a level of control in video games that's unavailable in other forms of media (and life itself). However, there are books and movies starting to profit off of the idea of audience control. Choose your own adventure books are a great example and Final Destination 3 on DVD follows the same sort of idea. The movie can be watched in it's intended progression and conclusion or you can click on the choose your path version on the DVD menu. In this version of the film there are places where it will stop and ask which way you would prefer to go or which action should be taken providing many different paths through the movie. While this is more time-consuming and expensive for the filmmakers (more scenes need to be made and a lot more editing needs to be done), it gives the audience control that they want and if you give the people what they want the profits will follow.

In video games we aren't just along for the ride (keeping our hands and feet in the vehicle at all times) we make the ride and navigate our way through it. So who knows where video games will lead us, maybe all movies will function like Final Destination 3. We'll just have to wait and see.

Tolkien and Binary Power

I have read almost all of Tolkien's work prior to the Lord of the Rings, saving his crème del la crème for a rainy day. Boy I was not disappointed! The plot may have moved slow and the dialogue/characters may have felt out of place at times, but other than that I had a very enjoyable reading experience. Maybe even too enjoyable to think critically about the text. So I took some time to look over my notes, gage the general flow of the plot one more time, and sort out the argument I have in my head regarding Tolkien. 

Lets speak of the way that Tolkien portrays women, my main irk. There were a couple conversations regarding the way women are portrayed in LOTR and they are all correct in their own right. The lack of any powerful female characters, aside from Eowyn and Galadriel, is naturalizing the idea in fantasy to associate power and heroism with the masculine. Spot on interpretation, I understand that point of view. Yet the absence of female characters does not show that female power and presence is unimportant. Yes, he may be playing into conventions (Hell, at the time he was writing, he may even be creating them) that place power in a masculine role but that does not mean women are written out of the equation. When looking closely at the characters and the plot, Tolkien may in fact be doing the exact opposite of what most believe. 

Tolkien's feminine characters serve as a counter to the traditional use of power, epitomized in Boramir and Faramir. Traditional power, seen in the Gondorians, is used in an effort to stifle evil in a physical way; they are characterized as brutish warriors who have a mastery over weapons and can kill Orcs, who are the epitome of evil, by the hundreds. Ultimately hubris, or pride, is tied with the traditional use of power; the more you kill the more powerful you become in the eyes of others. Pride bolsters the hero's power personally and publically, thus making the traditional use of power more associated with those characters that embody these masculine traits, which most of the time are men. 

Tolkien's feminine characters critique the physical, masculine power. Instead of pride and physical combat, the feminine qualities of the characters focus on love and healing. These characters offer an alternative that can be summed up as creation over destruction. Love and health are ultimately more important than the traditional power models relied upon by Aragorn or Gandalf. Frodo can only complete his task through the constant love and companionship of Sam and the health/nourishment provided by Galadriel in the form of the Lambas bread. Remember the plot of the novels: the big four (Gandalf, Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas) must distract Sauron so that Frodo can bring the ring to Mount Doom and destroy it. When looking at the plot this way, the masculine power model is subservient to the feminine power model. 

So in the end, it may not be correct to say that Tolkien is sexist or promotes male over female. Tolkien may in fact be creating a binary power structure, one of traditional male qualities and one of female qualities. If in fact this is the case then we are left to wonder, why has fantasy seemed to use the masculine power structure more than the feminine? 

Quantum Leap and Time Travel

Time travel is one of the numerous motifs that consistently appear in the science fiction (SF) genre. In Reading Science Fiction, when the discussion of time travel rises in the pop culture section of the book, it is mentioned that one of the purposed time travel is used by the characters of a story is to fix something in the past that once had gone wrong. When reading this line, I immediately thought of the show, Quantum Leap, which was not mentioned in the articles at all.


Here is a very general description of the storyline from Internet Movie Database (IMDB.com) for those who do not know:
Doctor Sam Beckett led a group of top scientists into the desert to research his theory that a man could time travel within his own lifetime. Unfortunately, in order to save his funding, he was forced to enter the accelerator prematurely and vanished. He then found himself in someone else's body with partial amnesia. His only contact from home is Al, a holographic image only he can see and hear. Setting right things which once went wrong, Sam leaps from life to life, hoping each time that this is the final leap home.

In each episode, Sam must figure out who he is and what he has to make right of the situation he has leaped into.

Though time travel isn't something new in the SF genre, Quantum Leap beings a different aspect of time travel into play. Having watched most of the show, Sam can not control where or when he leaps from time to time. The driving force of these leaps is never revealed; he just hopes the next leap is back to the lab in which he disappeared from. When he leaps into the body of whoever in whatever time, the "actual person" he has left into is back in the science lab in Sam's time, usually confused and scared, not understanding what is happening to him, much like Sam after he has leaped. But once Sam has leaped in a person, he controls all aspects of that person and, not only fixes what went wrong involving that person, he changes the affects of time while the actual person is rendered helpless of control over their own lives. This is a power God-like: almost an all- ruling ability to change- well history! But what if it is God who is having Sam leap around from decade to decade, fixing things that went wrong in the world. This brings as whole new aspect to discussing science in relation to religion. This topic of course would be too in depth for a single blog post, but the connection is there. How can there be a pre-destined plan in a person's life if time travel is possible? Would time travel disprove the existence of [a] God is a person can go back and change history ( which would affect the years after the event)?

These are just a few questions SF, at least not in Reading Science Fiction, has not addressed.