Alviiiin!

Last weekend I went to see Alvin & the Chipmunks, the squeakquel (do you see what they did there?), as one of the joys of parenthood is going to see kids' movies (though for every 'Alvin' there's an 'Up', I suppose). Not much of a subject for a videogame blog, you might think (if there's a spin-off game, I don't want to know of its existence), but one of the main human characters, Toby, is a gamer and the film uses his gaming habits as lazy, short-hand characterisation for 'loser'.

Once upon a time, I took a few classes in Communications Studies at university. I know what you're thinking and you're right - it was a load of old wank, taught by narcissitic arseholes. However, some of it rang true, particularly regarding cultural hegemony. Now, it's been a while since my studies (and I dumped communications studies and graduated in politics in any case) but cultural hegemony basically means (I think) that the beliefs of the ruling classes in society becoming thought of (by all of society) to be the 'norm'.

I doubt very much if Gramsci, whose theory it was, ever considered the possibility of gamers or gaming - he died in the thirties and I'm sure he'd have thought by 2010 workers would have seized the means of production and we'd be living in a socialist utopia by now - but his theory is relevant in considering Toby.

Toby first appears in the film playing on a black DS (with headphones) and mono-syllabically interacts with the three chipmunks and his grandmother, who is also present. He's not a kid or a teenager, he is an adult male and the subtext of his using a gaming device in his first scene, is that the viewer is being told that he is somehow 'other', that behaving in this way is not what an adult make should be doing. In the same scene, his grandmother says that he is staying with her while he works out what to do with his life, which, she posits (disapprovingly), seems to resolve around playing videogames.

Throughout the film, Toby plays games - Xbox 360, Wii, DS - and they are shown as having a negative effect on his life (he falls asleep in his bed with his 360 headset still attached and he is late in getting the chipmunks up for school, for example). He is a shy, anti-social, klutz and, the viewer is being shown, that is inextricably linked to his gaming - one leads to the other.

I would be lying if I said that I didn't identify (loser status aside) with Toby (albeit I'm older). I play all of the systems he does (and more), I wear 'geek-chic' t-shirts and hoodies (as he does), I have scruffy hair (though, admittedly, I have less than he does). But I have a wife and family and a reasonably successful career, which Toby most certainly does not.

You could argue that this type of portrayal of gamers has been going on since the 80s and this is only a cheaply-produced, half term cash-in movie but I don't think that that argument is sound. It is exactly in this type of throwaway mass market movie that cultural hegemony would show itself - if you want to influence the masses, aim at the mainstream, not the arthouse. What seems odd now is that the target audience of the movie would have been immersed in gaming their whole lives and so, possibly, would their parents. Gaming is as much a factor of their lives as TV or music, which is why the subtext in the movie was so jarring for me - gaming no longer equates to geeks in their bedrooms, it is just another part of life, certainly for the target audience.

Oh, and marxist cobblers aside, the film was crap.