by A. Marshall

Created on: October 05, 2009

Gamer is set in the near future where the public are addicted to two online games owned by the Castle corporation, called Society and Slayer. They are both exactly what they sound like, a social game where people get to meet people, go to nightclubs and have sex, and a battle game where the players get to kill each other The thing that fascinates players about the games is that the avatars are real people, with nanites in their brains that enable them able to pick up a signal and follow instructions.

The avatars in Society do it for pay. It's relatively harmless although players can have the avatars doing some fairly unpleasant and degrading things. However, the avatars in Slayer are likely to get killed, so the only players are death row inmates who have been promised their freedom if they can complete thirty games.

Kable (Gerard Butler) is the champion avatar of Slayer, with only three more games to go before he gets his freedom. No-one has ever made it out alive, and although the public are cheering him on, it seems that the owner of the game, Ken Castle (Michael C Hall), is out to stop him succeeding. Kable knows too much about what really goes on. But he is dependent on the gaming skills of his player, spoiled rich boy Simon (Logan Lerman) to survive. Meanwhile Kable's wife Angie (Amber Valletta) earns a living as an avatar in Society while she tries to regain custody of their daughter who has been fostered by a rich family.

As you might expect the Slayer game is dizzyingly fast, loud and full of splatter, but there are interesting little quirks such as pixilated moments where the action catches up, which is what the player would see. It gives a deliberate sense of unreality to it, so that it doesn't seem to really matter that these are real human beings getting killed. There's a point to this, which is that we begin to grasp the detachment of Simon in his online world where he seems to lead a busy social life, without actually coming into human contact. He seems to have got everything, but in reality is desperately lonely.

In the meantime, Angie is effectively a prostitute, selling her body for the use of anyone who wants to pay to use her as an avatar. One player in particular that we see is a grossly obese and sweaty naked man who gets his kicks by getting her to dress in tarty clothes and flirt with other avatars. Her disgust is clear to see, but she has no control over what she says or does. It graphically illustrates that in online games people

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