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OCTOBER 2008 Friday, October 3, 2008 We are heading up north to Petoskey for the weekend. I hope it's not too cold.
Thursday, October 2, 2008 The topic of Donkey Kong interested me because while I've never been great at video games, I did often enjoy arcade-style games as a child and could usually get through at least one or two boards before losing all my lives and walking away. But Donkey Kong was just impossibly hard. I remember once my grandfather took me to an arcade once when I was in Florida and gave me five bucks. I blew it all on Donkey Kong and couldn't get past the fourth platform on the first board. I felt sad about not doing well and wasting five bucks, but he bought me an ice cream cone and one for himself and didn't seem too concerned about the whole matter. Anyway, about the movie: a few things really struck me. First is that all of the stereotypes about video game addicts being skinny nerds who have an annoying aura of false superiority fueled by crippling insecurity is, more or less, true. Or it's at least true by what's in the movie. The challenger to the Donkey Kong community is a guy who had been laid off. He needed something to keep his mind occupied to keep himself from going nuts (and to keep himself from driving his wife nuts), so he set out to break the Donkey Kong record. He seemed like a genuinely good person, and not at all nerdy or dorky or annoying. He wasn't one of them (them = the aforementioned nerds), but was instead just a normal guy from Washington state who gave himself a goal. A strange, difficult goal. I don't think he knew what he was in for. Because then there were the gamers. Oh, the gamers. The reigning Donkey Kong champion also had a wife, but I think he was the only hardcore gamer who actually had a woman in his life. As in, ever. Most of these guys still looked like they were in the seventh grade chess club. Which, you know, was fine in seventh grade. Anyway, the reigning champ was a complete asshole who wanted nothing to do with this nice-guy challenger, despite the fact that said challenger traveled over 1000 miles on more than one occasion to play "live" in front of a crowd and challenge the champ. And the champ, despite his being married and all, was still this raging nerd with an overinflated ego that was based solely on his ability to play a video game. And he had a mullet. A mullet! Watching the documentary unfold, you couldn't help but root for the nice-guy challenger and hope that the champ would soon be the victim of something very horrible. And, the champ had his little group of disciples, one of whom was truly an asshole who hated the nice-guy challenger, probably because the challenger's success now meant that no one would be paying attention to him (the disciple). Meanwhile, there's all this drama going on, and you get all caught up in rooting for the nice-guy and hoping the challenger drowns in a pool of his own vomit, and then you stop and realize that you are getting all worked up over the outcome of an arcade game. And not just any arcade game, but an arcade game that no one outside of this asshole-nerd community really cares about anymore. And in that way, The King of Kong is brilliant. The filmmakers captured what I had hoped to capture with a documentary I made about people who collect and obsess over Fiestaware: that what's ordinary for most people is truly a dominant way of life for select others. This documentary transcends its topic and really gets to some core human issues: being a good person, being honorable, and doing the right thing. Highly, highly recommended. |
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