There's a single reason Casey Heynes
commands our respect. It's not for what he did, even though what he
did is what rechristened him in the waters of the Internet--anyone
who's spent a little time on the wrestling mat knows how trivial it
is to pick up someone half your own size, even if it's deadweight.
No, our respect comes from what Casey didn't do. He didn't kick or spit on the
bully while he was down, he didn't threaten the
cameraman, and he didn't pump his fists triumphantly in the air at
passersby. After his momentary, violent outburst (perhaps a necessary
evil of adolescence), the Zangief Kid walked away.Zangief Kid - The Game is a fairly sophisticated work of tabloid game flame-bait, reasonably well-integrated into Twitter and Facebook and sporting its own rankings board. Built in Unity, presumably because the subject demands a schlocky presentation in low-poly 3D, the game presents players with a short stretch of recycled school hallway and a horde of scrawny bullies to wade through. It's not an accurate spatial recreation of the outdoor area where the confrontation took place, and it ignores the important contextual detail of fellow students walking by to witness the event. It's side-scrolling brawler boilerplate.
And this certainly isn't the first time we've seen school violence captured in videogame form. As in the case of Super Columbine Massacre RPG's derivatives, we can't deny the "commentary" or satire that's at least nominally intended by its creators. And their right to creation is equally undeniable, even if, as Gonzalo Frasca has written before, we must always interrogate our decision to make a game about an event such as this one. It also makes sense to view Zangief Kid - The Game as a conceptual polar opposite of Jordan Magnuson's recent notgame Loneliness, which deals directly (if weakly) with the general social alienation that we can assume to be much more prominent in Casey's life than momentary episodes of bullying.
On a surface level, the game's procedural rhetoric is clearly stated on its title screen "warning" label: "You can only hit after you get hit. That's the bullying retribution rule." The Zangief Kid can only attack once his "health bar" is depleted by three punches from a bully, at which point the space bar will execute a signature pile-driver. When players reach an arbitrary end to the school hallway zone, they are lauded for "crush(ing) the bullies with a sense of vengeance." If this were the game's sole rhetorical move, as the game's creators seem to believe, then we could safely file this newsgame away as teaching us nothing new about the genre.
One aspect of the game, however, requires further examination. Like any reasonable arcade-style game, it has to calculate the player's score in some way. Here the creators chose to keep the somewhat bizarre equation completely transparent, recalling the algorithmic openness of Rohrer's Crude Oil: It's possible to attain a fairly high score, in the 40s, by playing the game as a pacifist (giving the lie to the end screen's celebration of "vengeance"). For all but the most dedicated players, it makes the most sense to simply dodge the enemies and make a bee-line for the level's exit. The leaders on the ranking boards, however, have cracked the game's possibility space to attain an optimal score, somewhere around 51 seconds (by my estimate, this entails a near-constant horizontal motion punctuated by exactly five bully takedowns). What do we do with information like this?
Scoring has been a near-constant thorn in the side of our research studio during the (ongoing) development of The Cartoonist. It's not entirely clear if and when a game's score should be considered part of its procedural rhetoric or something ancillary, when it should be ignored or even removed, or how to judge (or abstract) its design and integration into a game's goal structure. Scoring is certainly constrained by explicit rules that can be analyzed and critiqued, but it nevertheless often feels arbitrary. Playing "for score" is different from playing to "survive," "finish," or "win." What percentage of a game's players actually pay attention to score, and does that percentage vary by depth, genre, or the presence of multiplayer functionality?
We can certainly say that the scoring in Zangief Kid - The Game makes it an entirely more interesting artifact, but might it not chafe against how the rest of the game feels or how we feel about its modeling of the real-world event? The more we think about the algorithm, the less sense it makes as a simulation. Being the Zangief Kid isn't about optimizing a ludic reward system. It's not about vengeance or dodging the never-ending swipes of a flood of scrawny bullies. Being the Zangief Kid is about a momentary lapse in judgment, brought on by the dual gazes of a camera and passing girls, resulting in a dangerous act of retaliation that we instinctively recoil from in discomfort and concern while understanding completely.
The invocation of "just fun" on the game's opening screen isn't the defense of a speech act. It's an excuse, one for being completely incapable of capturing even a sliver of Casey's experience. The lesson to be learned here is that Frasca's initial questioning of whether or not to make a game about a violent, personal event can be taken even further: the design of a scoring system in a procedural rhetorical or newsgame context is also a matter of taste and judgment, not to be taken lightly.
