'First Person Shooter' took a little longer to get going than it should have, but it turned into a pretty decent episode once it picked up. I wasn't thrilled with the reason for the killer's existence and independence, but I guess it worked.
So yeah, gamer culture is probably one of the most misogynistic subcultures out there. I know plenty of women gamers and they have some truly horrific stories about the things they've heard in games or even in real life about the fact that they're gamers. So I'm not at all surprised that this episode exists or that it depicts the environment at the development studio as one of rampant sexism.
As this was also co-written by William Gibson, it bore some similarities to season five's 'Kill Switch', though I think that was a better episode. Conceptually, this was OK, but it took too long to develop and not quite enough time to resolve. I felt they spent way too much time setting up the 'villain' and the game itself instead of getting both to the main action and the answer to the main mystery.
Early on, though, I figured Scully would end up rescuing Mulder in the game, and honestly, that whole sequence was kind of epic. Forget the villain for a moment, and just focus on Scully unloading round after round from an automatic weapon. While I'm not into FPS or virtual reality video games, that did seem pretty awesome. And Scully seemed kind of into it.
And the game did, in fact, seem more compelling than a typical first person shooter. Interactive games are actually physical, and maybe a technology that realistic could have some real world uses, too, beyond just entertainment. Wait, maybe that's a bad thing. They'd first be used for killing people horribly, not unlike the content of the game itself, like pretty much every new technology that ever comes out.
So this was obviously influenced by other science fiction media of the time, most notably The Matrix, but also some other much older science fiction, like say, TRON.
The technology, as it is in most modern science fiction that's supposed to otherwise take place in the present day, was shaky at best and they never really addressed the 'how' of most of it. In The Matrix, and in the X-Files episode, 'Kill Switch', (and hell, even in Red Dwarf's 'Better Than Life' and 'Back to Reality', and that's not even real science fiction) we're clearly shown people in their virtual reality setups while they are playing out their scenarios in the game or simulation. We know that what's going on is nothing more than an immersive experience, and while death in The Matrix does result in death in reality, it's not as physical as it was shown here.
Even a violent death inside would simply cause a person's vital organs to shut down in their chair, but not for the same violent death to play out in real life.
But then, perhaps that was the point here. What began as just a program or even just an avatar somehow turned real and was able to interact with the real world. I guess it only makes slightly more sense than the idea of a person becoming completely digitised and disappearing from reality while immersed in the game?
The resolution also seemed extremely shaky - any time someone in sci-fi talks about someone or something 'jumping programs', you know you're about to hear some truly absurd explanation for how an otherwise innocent creation became a violent killing machine in a place it shouldn't have even existed in the first place.
So let's just say a wizard did it. Because that's about as logical as an avatar jumping programs and feeding off testosterone, right?
I don't blame Phoebe - she's right, she needed some way to fight back against the attitudes of her coworkers and the industry as a whole. Honestly, I place more of the blame for what happened, or worse, what could have happened had the game been released, on Ivan and the people who cared more about shareholder value or whatever than you know, safety. Though I'm pretty sure that if people started dying playing this game, the company's value would take a hit, too.
I think the main things I disliked in this episode were that Mulder was somehow completely reduced to a gross teenage boy, along with the Lone Gunmen. I don't think it was as out of character for them as it was for him, though, because even Scully seemed surprised to see Mulder acting that way, but kind of took it for granted that the Lone Gunmen would. I think sometimes this show tries a little too hard to be funny and in episodes that aren't well paced or where the plot is questionable, it suffers for that, because the humour just seems misguided or out of place, as it does here.
Thankfully, that bit was largely ignored once the rest of the plot actually got going.
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