Spike Lee and Video Games

Okay, so the whole violence in video games thing is nothing new. However, this particular take on it comes from an interesting source: director Spike Lee, known for his politically charged and frequently controversial films. Movie industry trade publication Back Stage has a story up about a scene from Lee's recently released film Inside Man, in which a young hostage shows his captor scenes from a particularly violent video game. The article goes in to the rise of machinima--using video game footage or game engines to construct short films--and how it has become used for a variety of types of movie, including those with political or social messages. The "game" Lee featured in his film was custom made for the movie, and its purpose from his perspective is twofold: it is a criticism of the increasingly violent nature of video games, as well as of what he describes as an "infatuation with violence and gangsta rap among the black community." Furthermore, he believes those two phenomena are intertwined to some degree.

The director gave the House of Pain artists two stylized and exaggerated mock-ups of loose game play meant to appear in the movie for about a minute. One showed a savage stick-up at an ATM, the other a disturbingly graphic drive-by shooting -- both end in homicide.

"In the script, it was supposed to be very violent game a kid was playing, and he was supposed to be really desensitized to the violence of the game but (enamored by) the glamorized gangsta lifestyle," [graphic artist] Alba said. "The title of the game is 'Gangstas iz Genocide' so, to some extent, there was an equation that being in a gang has an element of race -- (Lee) was very specific that the characters be black."