The Gamechangers (Owen Harris, 2015)

[colinr0380]

An interesting piece about a legal challenge to Rockstar Games from a crusading lawyer representing families of police officers shot by a supposedly violence addled teen who played Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. This is contrasted against the Houser Brothers preparing their next game, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, which sparks another whole controversy about the hidden, though not deleted, Hot Coffee sex scene left on the disc.

Strangely the best aspect of this fim is also where it comes up short as well. Everything is far too balanced for any drama at all to get built up - we just move back and forth from one side to the other, both acting stupidly and paying for the consequences, until we get to an ending that I get the impression thinks that it is still unbiased, while actually weighting its argument one way quite insidiously. But I'll get to that later.

I really liked the free flowing structure of the film, even if I was a little uncomfortable by some of the equations that it appeared to be making. Something like the black teen killing the cops (interestingly we never get to hear anything of the teen's home life, apart from seeing a brief scene of the kid transfixed by his computer games while a woman walks by in the background smoking a spliff. Which gets ironically contrasted with the other 'instigator' of a crisis later on of the modder in the Netherlands who found the Hot Coffee scene playing San Andreas over the period of days in dissolves whilst his, presumably classier, girlfriend sits on the couch behind him engrossed in the most highbrow form of media, a book!), that moves into the Housers declaring that they want the first black lead character in videogames in their newest GTA game, which seems to be implicitly suggesting that the teen committed all these actions and felt connected to the videogame even when it featured a white game character, so what could happen if the sense of identification (even down to picking clothes and hairstyles) was heightened even more?

It was quite interesting though that the film seems to be trying to equate the two main characters of the lawyer Jack Thompson and Sam Houser. In the early scenes the parallels are one to one: Jack describes himself as a crusader like Batman (perhaps he has tried the Batman games since in order to live out the power fantasy 'for real'!) or Elliot Ness, whilst Sam covers his office in framed pictures of Don Simpson and the Pacino Scarface film. Though there is a slight but key difference in that Jack is in a 'real, respected profession' whilst inadvisably pretending to be a superhero and stringing his clients along for his own goals; whist Sam is in an 'underdog, but lucrative' profession (something which the ending emphasises, but I'll get to that!) and has made a string of videogames influenced purely by American movies, music and pop culture in general and in his strand of the film is wanting to break away from that and produce something 'real'. This eventually is what causes Sam to request an explicit sex scene for San Andreas, though ironically even in wanting to make something better than movies, the team's references are still films, just Last Tango In Paris and 9 & 1/2 Weeks this time!

Both also spend all night slaving away over computers at least, although in Jack Thompson's case this looks to be inadvisable as in addition to preparing his case he starts sending out e-mails personally attacking the computer game publishers over the filth that they make! That is his downfall more than his core case being a spurious one. In fact I think his case gets thrown out before it even gets tested because of his constant out of courtroom television appearances and harrassments! But all of his appearances on Good Morning America, despite getting him disbarred from practicing law, are what gets him noticed and a telephone call from, well, "It's Hillary". So despite his failings as a lawyer and circumvention of the legal system to such an extent that he gets dismissed from it, he still gets the bill passed by proxy by catching the ear of the person with the power to push such a thing through.

Sam on the other hand pushes his staff harder and harder through their 'crunch' period on their new game and is portrayed as the kind of chummy manager who can suddenly let paranoia overwhelm them when they are faced with a crisis, as shown in the scene of firing (or rather getting somebody else to fire) a blameless employee (who it seems was the genesis behind the Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis game!) because he cannot fire his brother or partner for their stupid actions of trying to pin the blame for the Hot Coffee sex scenes on modders rather than admitting it had been there in the game already.

And they both have social support networks that enable them to try and be the best at what they do. We see throughout the film the consequences the people around our main characters are facing from their driven actions. Sam pushes his staff so hard they begin to break and leave him. Jack and his wife get hate calls and things thrown through windows, and his teenage son gets bullied at school for being the son of someone trying to clamp down on their favourite games. There is a very nice scene between the son and his dad around Jack planning to talk about the dangers of video game violence at his son's school. His son is understandably not wanting this and begs him not to, but Jack (after some teasing by beginning with "the video games are Evil") reads him a little of his speech, which is quite level headed and they have a nice moment together. The problem (and the film doesn't address this) however is that the core issue of daddy coming to school and lecturing the kids, however erudite and caring the speech will be, is still going to get his son beaten up! Jack, and it seems the film either, just cannot see that. Or is so tied up in his own thoughts on the subject that he is not seeing the damage he might be causing to others. Ironically like Sam Houser!

By far my favourite part of the 'paralleling' between the two characters came at the end, when both Jack and Sam were going for separate forms of questioning, Jack to see if he was going to be disbarred as a lawyer for his actions, and Sam to be questioned by the Feds over his responsibility for wanting to put sex scenes in a general release computer game in the first place. Instead of focusing on them though, we see the effect this has on the people in their lives who care for them, as Sam's brother Dan calls to check up on him and we see Jack's wife, caring and supportive as always, waiting for the result at home and commiserating with Jack on his dismissal.

A problem here is that while the film tries its best to parallel the two main characters there is always going to be a contrast between a deeply religious family man just trying to protect people from what he sees as depraved violence, and a young ambitious videogame programmer and company director trying to push the boundaries of his medium. The sympathies of the audience would seem naturally to gravitate towards Jack's side of the argument (especially when they face real world repercussions for his crusading compared to Rockstar just getting away with a slap on the wrist for the Hot Coffee incident) when compared to a ruthless businesslike developer turning real violence into simulated entertainment and then moving on to the next thing with a trail of shattered staff members left in his wake, even if that seems to be the norm for the videogame business.

Also, while the film seems to have done a lot of its research into this specific sector of the videogame business in all of its mentions of the different Rockstar studios, the table tennis matches, 'crunch' periods, the creation of the RAGE graphics engine, the Hot Coffee incident, the ESRB ratings board and the commercial suicide of releasing a game Adults Only with the sex scene rather than Mature without (think R versus NC-17 in the film world) which is more than I would normally expect from a film dealing with the subject of videogames (though it is sad to think that praising for any research seeming to have been done on the subject was a step up!), I got the strong impression that the filmmakers did not really do much wider research beyond Grand Theft Auto itself.

For instance see that brief scene of the soldiers training using computer games with the Colonel running the games saying that this shows how computer games train kids to kill, whether 'legitimately' here giving soldiers the edge in combat, or somewhere 'out there' on the streets (in the scary ghettos maybe) showing average kids how to live a gangster lifestyle, with the suggestion that both are preparing a younger generation for their role on either side of an upcoming conflict. But with a bit more research the filmmakers could, instead of using footage from Call of Duty, have dug a little deeper and talked about the U.S. Army's own recruiting tool videogame (available on Steam!) that was created exactly around the early 2000s period depicted here - the slightly worryingly titled game called America's Army!

Another key thing that this film does not get into however, probably due to its focus on the Grand Theft Auto series as the be all and end all of video games, is the whole controversy (again with Jack Thompson leading the charge) over what could more properly have been termed a 'murder simulator', all the violent executions that could be performed in the first Manhunt game (from 2003, coming in between the two GTA games that this film focuses on) and then the even more controversial Manhunt 2 game in 2007 (I wonder if this was a case of Rockstar, having gotten the reputation, deciding to give the campaigners the kind of game they presumably wanted and to fully embrace the Adults Only certificate?). It is one of the few video games still to have been banned in the UK (by the BBFC refusing a certificate) though ironically is available, with the AO rating in the US, presumably because it only features graphic killings rather than explicit sex! The Manhunt games were probably even more of a key element of Jack Thompson's whole violence in video games campaign, though they are never even mentioned here, presumably because the filmmakers wanted to focus much more on the big name brand of Grand Theft Auto. Just on looking through the Wikipedia article relating to him, it appears that Thompson had also criticised the GTA games in previous law cases as early as Grand Theft Auto III whereas this film is suggesting that it was entirely this one case involving Vice City that focused Thompson on video game violence and GTA in particular. His disbarring also appears to have occurred a number of years later in 2008 (post Manhunt 2), not quite as quickly, or even simultaneoulsy with Houser's pulling up on the Hot Coffee situation, as implied here.

The end of the film shows Sam Houser leaving his interrogation with just a slap on the wrist suddenly seeing the game from an omniscient third-person GTA perspective (the same rather morally dodgy way the film showed the teen killing the police officers early on). As the city around him dissolves away into a video game one he drags a person out of their car, commandeers it and zooms off with the cops in pursuit, suggesting quite forcefully after all of the attempts at being unbiased earlier that even the creators of videogames live in fantastical worlds of their own, detached from reality.

We then get three title cards to end the film. One describing how successful GTA IV was in 2008, another describing how even more successful than that GTA V was in 2013, and the last saying that the teen who killed all of those cops earlier in the film is still on death row. Which is quite a hamfisted way of equating the two subjects, and if it wanted me to feel some kind of anger towards the success of GTA as contrasted against the sad fate of a cop killer, it did not really work. I really felt that at the end there should have been one final title card saying "In 2015 the BBC made a film about a highly financially successful videogame franchise", as more than any messages about whether violence is right or wrong or the arguable effects of violent imagery on young people, the only thing this film emphasised to me was that the mass media only seem to care about two kinds of games: Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto. And that is not because of their notoriety or quality and arguments about either, or their undeniable impact on the cultural zeitgeist, but because of the enormous amount of money that those franchises have made. The entire existence of this TV movie is proof that significant financial return in the end matters more in getting represented than any kind of moralising about the impact of videogames, good or bad, does.