Nerds on film
Summary Description Hollywood is the last bastion of IT cluelessness, says Simon Vandore
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Roullas Top10 Simon Vandore

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Article Topic Vandore
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Story Group 000702
Post Date 30/06/2000 07:55 AM Status Posted Entered by Simon Vandore on 23/06/2000 01:00 PM


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Introduction
A recent episode of The X-Files concerned a first person shooter game with a virtual reality interface which kept killing people for real.

Body
Scully saw the game as a testosterone-fuelled timewaster while Mulder revelled in the digital gorefest. The episode ended with (spoiler alert!) the game's only female programmer admitting the killer was a godlike female entity she had added as her only avenue for satisfaction in a masculine environment.
The majority of gamers are definitely male, but in every online game I've played about 10 to 20 percent identify as female. Some may be lying, but some women also identify as male for safety in online environments, so this is not a reliable figure. But The X-Files' portrayal of the sexual stereotypes was disturbingly condescending, particularly towards the female programmer.
Hollywood might rely on Industrial Light & Magic, Pixar and Australia's own Animal Logic (Oscar winners for The Matrix) for special effects wizardry, but it doesn't understand their world. Even in the US, where the Internet is so pervasive and so much of the economy revolves around IT, computers in films still bleep and bloop when a key is pressed. They're always about to explode or 'go critical'. Warnings and error messages take up the whole screen, in huge flashing letters. And computer viruses become unstoppable nemeses, not preventable annoyances.
The novel that coined the term 'cyberspace', William Gibson's Neuromancer, contains a passage about a modem. It was written a decade before the Internet boom and Gibson now admits he had no idea what a modem was -- the word just sounded good. But he managed to blend it convincingly into his story.
Even to the untrained eye it was ridiculous to watch Mulder and Scully's friends the Lone Gunmen claim they were re-routing the foobar to the dingbat (or something) when they were clearly just prodding a standard beige PC. I remember another X-Files episode where the same bunch of nerds said they were going to "play a round of Dungeons and Dragons" in memory of a dead friend. I'm not a D&D player but I do know that a round is the equivalent of having everyone place one letter on a Scrabble board, then packing up the game. Not much of a tribute. And I hear the Lone Gunmen are about to get their own show . . .
Even in The Matrix, that holiest of recent geek holiness, Neo's computer behaved unlike anything known to your average PC vendor. At least that film escaped the sins of The Net, Hackers, You've Got Mail, Independence Day and so on. I'm struggling to think of any movie that has accurately portrayed technology, despite the information revolution.
Why do film-makers make us cringe this way? There are thousands of us geeks out here, waiting to act as consultants! Most would probably do it free of charge, just for the sake of avoiding that feeling of incredulous disappointment when the star walks up to an Internet terminal and gets instant, TV-quality videoconferencing with one press of the Escape key. Duh!
Vandore is published every Friday on Newswire. You can contact Simon Vandore at svandore@acptech.net.


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Hollywood is the last bastion of IT cluelessness, says Simon Vandore.

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