A night with the nerds at The Hobbit

Didn't realise that Osama bin Laden got a small part in The Hobbit!

THERE was a distinct feeling that the Nerds were in town at the weekend, jam-packed into screen 2 of the local fleapit.

Oh yes, you could count the anoraks and spot the saliva of anticipation for the cinematic marathon that is The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. There were a couple sitting just along the aisle from us, laden with two huge barrels of popcorn, offering a painfully dull critique how the movie plot differed from the book in their nasally monotone voices. 

I should have wised up and chatted to them earlier, because unless you’ve got a degree in Tolkein-ism, then the plot is so tough to follow. At times you haven’t got a clue who’s who, what’s going on or wonder if these characters do have mystical magical powers, why don’t they use them straight away and not right at the death.

Even some of the fight scenes were bizarre, straight out of the A-Team story book where our heroes never suffer a scratch despite being out-gunned and surrounded, fleeing under a hail of arrows and axes, chased by a pack of wolves, and yet who still walk tall after suffering back-breaking falls down a mountain crevice. It’s got all the credibility of Spice Girls: The Movie.

If you’ve not witnessed Peter Jackson’s two and three-quarter hour slog of JRR Tolkein’s classic novel then be warned; take a good cushion, an armful of provisions including a flask of coffee or some cans of Red Bull, and possibly a pillow because it’s going to leave you numb in the bum with a huge dose of anti-climax at the end.

To be blunt I’m not into these Geeksville movies - Harry Potter, Lord of The Rings or The Hobbit - yet millions clearly are. I went because I fancied a night out at the cinema,  X-Factor is done and dusted, I was intrigued about the movie and I also quite like Martin Freeman from The Office and Love Actually.

So fair play,I sit firmly in the non-Geek minority aisle, since The Hobbit has already broken two US box office records to become the biggest grossing Christmas movie of all time across the Atlantic and judging by the queues at the cinema it is bound to enjoy similar success in this country.

But what disturbed me most from the evening was not the movie, it was the trailers targeted towards this 12A audience with Christmas just around the corner. Advert after advert publicised the latest high action computer games, most of them war games based along the predictable lines of Call of Duty: Black Ops II with death and destruction their main agenda.

Now kids have been playing war games since Noah was in nappies and fantasy role play has always been part of those childhood milestones – maybe war has been too naively portrayed in the past as a game when the enemy gets up and walks away at the end.

But coming on the day when the world was reeling the shootings at the school in Connecticut which left 20 children dead along with five of their teachers, along with the lone gunmen and his mother, witnessing trailer after trailer of this computer carnage at the cinema left you with an uncomfortable feeling. One advert even offered punters the incentive of a free, realistic gun if they pre-ordered the new game.

For Call of Duty: Black Ops II, described as a “first-person shooter game” which was released to an eager audience last month, there was one telling review critical of the opening battle in the game where the player guns down fleeing Africans rebels.

The video game talk show Good Game felt this scene was added purely for shock value, adding: "The landscape of shooters is changing somewhat. The fact is that everyone loves playing military shooters, but we're also realising that we don't want to glorify aimless killings. A lot of games are trying to make you feel that conflict and even make you feel bad about what you're doing. But I don't think it's been handled very well here.”

It doesn’t take a huge leap of faith to realise that studies have shown how violent video games can make teenagers more aggressive. Of course, you’ve got to take these surveys with a huge pinch of Paxo, but one Canadian team carried out pretty extensive research annually among almost 1,500 teenagers across four school years from the ages of 14 through to 18.

The findings, published in September, are really interesting because they give the first indication of a clear link between a sustained period of playing violent games and subsequent increases in hostile behaviour.  Girls who played them were affected just as much as boys.

The research team at Brock University argued that violent games could "reinforce the notion that aggression is an effective and appropriate way to deal with conflict and anger."

Their evidence suggests how long-term players of violent games could become more likely to react aggressively to unintentional provocations such as someone accidentally bumping into them.

The teenagers were asked a series of questions such as how often they pushed or shoved people and whether they frequently kicked or punched people who made them angry.

Others who regularly played non-violent games did not show any evidence of increased aggression.

The trend remained even after the researchers took into account other factors that could be linked to aggression such as gender, parental divorce and marijuana use.

Of course, we have no idea what drove Adam Lanza to kill his mother on Friday, drive to the elementary school in Newtown and open fire on the innocent children and their teachers, before turning the gun on himself. This has much to do with the American guns laws and their ludicrous, selfish belief under the Constitution to be able to bear arms.

However, in a broader context, given the more violent world we live in, one wonders how much of the daydream world our children now live in can lead them to mixing up reality with fantasy with such fatal consequences.

Is glorifying killing through these video games going to wean the aggression out of these nerds or merely fuel the fire?