Heart and Mind

It's So Fake that it Looks Real

OK, so December was a bust, blog-wise. Seriously, though, isn't that kind of expected? I mean, I'll refrain from saying, "With the holidays and all I have been just so, so busy," because that is so common it's trite. But there's a reason why every asshole in town gripes about how "crazy" thing are leading up to Christmas. I actually had plans to update the blog right after the last entry and finish up my thoughts with part 2 of my observations on "Black Friday." But, alas, that's a seasonal and time sensitive kind of thing. It's no fun talking about the day after Thanksgiving when Christmas has already come and gone. So, we'll have to wait until next year for that post. In the meantime, here's hoping we can get back into the swing of things like the glory blog days of October, and we'll start things off with some useless thoughts inspired by a pro wrestling video game.

So, I was watching some kids play a wrestling video game today. I don't know which one and I don't know what gaming system they had. Video games are one of those things that I am completely out of the loop on. I know probably as much about them as your stereotypical grandmother does. Truly, video games are something I dug as a kid, but pretty much lost complete interest in. The modern games—though graphically impressive—just do nothing for me. (Sorry, Paul.)

Anyway, here I was, looking at this state-of-the-art game with these incredible (which is typical these days) graphics and the thing that struck me was that the wrestling characters' moves, mannerisms, and motions completely and accurately mimicked the "real life" wrestling on TV performed by real people. So...why is that remarkable? After all, most of the video games are highly realistic these days.

Well, here's why: because the video game accurately imitated violent wrestlers on TV, who themselves are imitating violent actions, but not doing so accurately, The wrestling on TV looks fake because the participants have to literally "pull punches" so they don't kill each other. So the game looks totally real in imitating the something that looks very unreal. It's backwards, man. It's like an professional actor in a movie acting like a regular guy who doesn't know how to act.

I can imagine there are a lot of people out there who would say, "Hold it, dude! Wrestling is not all fake! These guys get hurt and they put their bodies through more stuff than you can imagine and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah." To those people I say, "Chill out and get a grip." I used to be a big wrestling fan and I still am a fan of the "business," so to speak. I watch all those documentaries on the wrestling world and I have lots of books on my shelves about wrestling. I'm not saying these wrestlers are hacks--but some wrestling aficionados have been watching wrestling so long that they no longer can be objective enough to realize how fake the stuff looks. Consider this example...

When a wrestler punches his opponent, what does he do? Instead of smashing him in such a way that would certainly break both his opponents face and his own hand in a real-life bar-room brawl, he takes a bit off of his swing and delivers this overly unconvincing blow. AND..... what else does he do? Think about it before reading on and you'll doubtlessly know what I'm talking about. When he delivers his unconvincing punch, he stomps his foot on the ground and a loudish "thud" can be heard. A wrestling promoter would have you believe that when a hulking, 300-pound muscle head punches a fellow of similar ilk squarely in the face, the sound that it makes is akin to the sound that is made when you stomp on a wrestling mat with a boot.

It's all silly and all unconvincing—but let's get back to the video game. The real kick about the video game is that it imitates this unreality and it doesn't have to! We know why the real performers do what they do, and it probably was especially true that there was no other way to do it back when wrestling originated in the sideshow acts back in probably the 1800s. But this is a video game. The performers in the game can hit each other as squarely as they want, and they can do it without stomping their feet, and the sound that results can accurately reflect the bone-on-bone sound that it would in real life...and no one would get hurt. But they don't .

If they did, it would allow the game to successfully achieve what the real-world pro wrestling never has been able to achieve: convincing violence. And yet, people would think it looks unreal because it wouldn't accurately reflect the unreality. People would think the game looks fake because it didn't look fake, and that's ironic.

It's ironic, but it's not surprising. When I was in college, a couple friends and I used to do a fair amount pro-style wrestling. We even got pretty good (for part-time amateurs) at doing some impressive and high-flying moves. But we never aspired to look real. We aspired to look like wrestlers. We'd give mock interviews and assume the roles of some imaginative wrestling characters and purposely try to sound like we were terrible actors. Because that's what we were imitating.

posted by Steve @ 7:05 PM