Remember that nyquil fever dream you had that meshing together a bunch of hot girls, samurai, powered-armor, dragons, World War I, sword and gun fights, a bordello, medieval castles, and a lot of mascara?  Well, Zach Snyder does.  And he made it into a new music video movie: 




Now before you gripe about how unrealistic it is that any movie featuring REC7 Barrett M468s, M4 SOPMODs, HK UMP45s and HK MP5s can be set in the 1950s, that little chronology faux pas (and the other tiny anomalies) are explained by implying the surreal events are all in the protagonist 'Baby Doll's head.  And she's in an insane asylum to be 'fixed'.  (C'mon, even the MP5s didn't show up until the late 60s.  Duh.)

Taking a moment to blink after the trailer ended, I was immediately surprised by two thoughts.  One, I never like how dark eyeliner makes a person look in real life, yet somehow it can look kinda cool in movies.  And two, video games seem to have helped push the boundaries of how we accept the absurd.

As pop culture has become more completely entrenched in newly developed electronic technologies (and vice-versa,) hitching onto this runaway connection is our corporate tolerance for what was previously, well, nonsense.  From the Surrealism movement of the 1920s on up to campy anime-inspired Saturday morning cartoons (R.I.P ), the entertainment and introspection of our current day is laced with ideas so strange and bizarre, only Jules Verne could have predicted it.

While our modern culture gates itself with a Renaissance-modeled glorification of reason and intellect, peering through the portcullis reveals a growing acceptance of outlandish and strange media.  It has become so widespread, it can take a moment to remember just how patently absurd it is to accept what video games take as commonplace:  ducking behind cover in a shootout and regaining lost health, picking up an item that instantly heals you, finding food in random items such as candles, streetlamps, and...garbage cans?  How about jumping a height equal to or greater than your character's own height, 'double' jumping, the ability to both see and dodge ballistic weapon-fire, hitting anything while going over fourty or so miles an hour and not destroying either you or your vehicle, or every female video game character not requiring extensive back corrective surgeries?

It goes on so extensively that listing the absurdity in gaming is itself absurd.  There is so much we have to just accept and realities to ignore while playing a game, that we can't truly keep track anymore.

(I find it hilarious when I hear comments like, "its so unrealistic that Mario falls into the water and dies in one level, then swims submerged for three minutes in the next level."  Really?  We're going to discuss physics continuity in a game that allows your avatar to take a person-sized flower and use it to throw fireballs from his hand?)
 
From storytellers around a campfire, to fantasy and sci-fi books, our fiction media has always been rich with unreal concepts, and movies like the Matrix and the recent critically acclaimed Inception take an approach of layering the absurd with ideas grounded in a definable reality.  Even the upcoming Sucker Punch attempts to explain itself with the 'all in her head' setup so that even the biggest nerds won't be put off by the true absurdity just featured in the trailer. 

But do we need to justify our love of the absurd?  It seems common now that we, a western culture that prides itself in technology and 'forward thinking', need an excuse to rationalize the absurdity in our entertainment.  Interestingly, this nowadays onus to explain away absurdity in our entertainment seems divergent, even counter, to the video game mentality of old.

In the beginning of video gaming, there was no real interest in explaining why you were a mechanical fly/spaceship in Yar's Revenge.  (They did, in a pack-in comic that is only really desirable to collectors.)  Pac-Man only developed a loose and bizarre story for the sake of continued sequels.  Monkey steal your girl and wreck a construction zone filled with dangerous chemical barrels and cement pans commonly mistaken as pies?  Well, soon-to-be-plumber-boy, you know what to do.  Where did the monkey come from?  What does he want with the rather unattractive Pauline?  Where is the police, Humane Society or PETA in all of this?  Who cares!

These simpler gaming days were developed with simpler needs in mind.  Space Invaders were just that:  bad guys from space literally viewed in black and white.  The Cold War mentality in the 70s and 80s, with its clearly defined (in the minds of America and her allies, anyway) construct of 'Good' and 'Evil', helped explain unspoken notions of the developer's intentions.  There just wasn't as much of a reason to define why something was good or bad, or even why there was conflict.  The most liberal ideas of developers were often shoved under the rug for the sake of levity; Dave Theurer's original intent for Missile Command was to show the unending futility of nuclear warfare, as the game never ends and it is only a matter of time before the game's cities are destroyed.  The developer even punctuates the somewhat political nature of the statement by stating 'The End' instead of the classic 'Game Over' upon losing a game.  While the original coin-op had no storyline and indeed did not require one, the Atari 2600 VCS port's instructions included a sci-fi explanation of the "peaceful world of Zardon and the invasion of the Krytolians."  Keep it light for the kids, even if the adults can chuckle at a "Rush 'N Attack."  Wink.

As games matured, sprites and textures replaced the details that imagination wrapped around our digital pictures.  While the absurdity was no less surreal, the game's graphics described in specific details what years ago our minds just made up.  More and more, some of us wanted to know who was in that other tank or jet in Combat, even if it was just a blurb in the instructions that stated some goofiness about robots and aliens.  Sure, plenty of us didn't care (many still don't) but as the violence and dark themes in games became a stalwart of the industry, many gamers (and parents, and politicians) just wanted a little comfort knowing that Shang Tsung was really an evil sorcerer and not some Chinese dude looking for his cancer-stricken son who just happened to walk by a fighting tournament.  While many gamers don't need a positive context for their avatar's actions in a game (indeed, playing the bad guy is more popular that ever) the fact that there is even a 'good' and 'bad' side to play as is something that defines our industry as closer to actual role play as opposed to static books or movies.  As games reach an ever-widening demographic, the responses to 'realistic' or obtuse morality issues will have to grow with it.

Story explanations helped the industry develop the antagonist/protagonist themes in gaming and gave context to the absurdity onscreen.  But often, it is not a game's story that helps us just 'go along with it', but the stories we are familiar with beforehand.  For example, the Mushroom Kingdom's likeness to Lewis Carroll's 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' novels probably helped lay the groundwork for gamers accepting the outlandish universe.  After all, many of us were perfectly familiar with the day-glow colors, eating to change size, even mushroom architecture, from a cartoon that debuted three and a half decades before.  Now we've grown so used to the idea that touching an anthropomorphized star makes us invincible for a few seconds, that new Mario game oddness like flying around in a bee costume seems to make perfect sense.

Which sums up our industry's acceptance of absurdity as a whole.  Early works broke ground on all these strange ideas, and later works just expound on it so we no longer question why gaming reality is such an unfathomable thing.

An interesting development over the the last decade has been the goal of introducing less absurdity and more 'realism' in gaming.  Getting into this debate is another topic entirely, but it is perhaps peculiar that developments such as morality systems and more graphically displayed violence is considered to add more 'depth' to a video game.  Modern Warfare's now infamous airport scene, in which the player (acting as a secret undercover agent) helps gun down dozens of civilians, would not be as unsettling to most of us if the game used a more cartoon-like graphical design, or if the action were turn-based instead of real-time.  That the scene is made to play out as 'real' as current technology allows is a trend that will continue, with consequences that both the gaming industry, government, and consumer public will have to face.

In the meantime, we have gamers and critics that complain that Halo is too unrealistic for them, or they are too old for another Mario.  Instead of opening up a laundry list of reasons why 'realistic' games really aren't, or that a gamer is never too old for a fun, well designed game, it is perhaps best to accept that everyone has their internal limits on just how much and what type of nonsensical fantasy is too much for them.  Arguing over what each of us can tolerate for absurdity is, well, absurd.  I'll go see Sucker Punch, my sister will go see the next Twilight movie, and while neither of us will convince each other that the other movie is just too dumb for us, we can agree that we just like what we like. 

No matter how absurd it appears to anyone else.

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