Tony Hawk's Pro Skater
Friday, November 11, 2005
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater
For the past couple of weeks I've been assembling poetry to put into a manuscript, my first. I don't much like the process and have been avoiding it for years. My whole world lately is one I've invented, which is not as good as it sounds, especially since it's full of unfinished lines and things I thought sounded good at one time but make no sense in retrospect. Embarrassments and mistakes I thought were corrected but weren't. Worst, I gave a really top heavy and unmeticulously edited version of it to John Ashbery at the Robert Creeley Memorial the day before Halloween. It was the first time I had ever met the man. I sputtered compliments, hellos and goodbyes in no particular order and then backed away, leaving him smiling mysteriously with my (then) 100-page manuscript in his hand. I gave a copy to my old teacher Tom Raworth, too. I dread that more, since I actually expect to hear back from him.
I'm not a meticulous person, and it takes tear gas and air raid sirens to make me so. But I'm determined not to give out another bum manuscript. I shuffle poems around until I can't read them anymore and then take a day off, staring into space, and then read my own poetry again, adding and subtracting things, sharpening and dulling as needed. I am usually not this way for any extended period of time. I'm even getting to be a New Yorker--uptight and insupportably absorbed with what I've taken to call my "work." Such provincialism can't be sustained. It's hell on my personal life, and it's hell on creating anything new, or for reading or watching anything with more than half attention. So I play Tony Hawk's Pro Skater instead.
Tony Hawk is someone I've known about ever since high school. He's a giant in the skateboarding world. I used to see pictures of him up on some of my friend's walls where other wise one would have pinned a picture of Darryl Hannah. At first, I didn't understand what information those old pictures from Thrasher magazine were attempting to convey. Tony Hawk looked like one of my friends, except upside down. Upside down, holding a skateboard, blond bangs flipped out like a California road sign. How did he get that way? How is it sport? I never saw any of my friends doing that. It was only later I became familiar with the tricks and apparati of skating culture, the half-pipe and the kickflip, et al, though I've never spent more than 3 seconds on a skateboard myself, and that clinging to a fence. I watched and admired. So when, many years later in 1999, they released Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, I had been primed from youth to accept it. I took to it like the wheelbase of a skateboard takes to a low, unpainted bike rack.
One of the advantages of The Tony Hawk series is its relative benignity. People don't blow apart into chunks of bloody ham in this game. There are no guns or rocket launchers. Often one falls off his skateboard, and there is a good special effect for this, a sort of football crunch on the simulated pavement--but, after all, it's something you do to yourself and not to others. Music plays in the background, and if you have the right system, you can load your own music to play over the game. I even once set it to play W.H. Auden reciting his own poetry. It was a novel thing to do but not particularly helpful, hearing "Musee des Beaux Arts" recited in Auden's authoritative but still welcoming British manner while you're trying to stick a digital 360 Indy Nosebone Revert to Manual. On the other hand, I've found that Desmond Dekker compliments the game nicely.
There is no single point to the game. One enters a stage--usually a city like Venice Beach or Minneapolis, bundled up and stacked and vaguely cubist, like a Joseph Stella painting, into something skateable. Once there, one checks off goals like "collect the letters that form SKATE" or "ollie the fire hydrants." Yet there are essential skills to traversing the landscape, and there is always some point total you're trying to beat. Attempting to meet these point totals lends the game an certain poetry of mathematics. This mathematical element is any video game's strongest claim for consideration as an art form--all video games have as their base some permutation in number, thus the constant and accumulating "body counts" and "multipliers" which form the core of gameplay. It is the language the programmers of the game best understand and manipulate, and when done right, one gets the impression of some basic mathematical mind communicating through the medium of elves and martians and skateboarders. So, for those of you snobbish enough to bother criticizing videogames as a general phenomenon, your jumping-off point would be, instead of saying "why don't you get out there and play your own game," or "make your own images," to say, "why don't you get out there and do your own math." which calls into question the whole edifice of whether or not art is an active or passive experience for the recipient. Either way, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater is exemplary in illustrating the especially artistic way in which videogames exploit mathematics.
The front end of the game starts simply and becomes more complex as one progresses. This progression from simple beginning to complex ending is another signature of well made videogames. You begin with a character. Alternately, you can design a character in a rough approximation of face and streetwear and name him after yourself. Either way, the face of your character remains eerily transfixed whether he's standing still or moving at 90 miles per hour. This is an eccentricity that has to do with the limitations of the technology. If the graphics engine were stronger (and someday it will be) the character's face would be embroiled in all the eye-rolling ecstasy and pinched agony of a mask (can we say it and risk sounding like Camille Paglia? Oh, all right...) of that great catch-all for academic types who want to justify something pop-cultural, the Commedia dell'Arte (I feel dirty). Okay. You put that character into an opening stage, usually a simple and enclosed stage with obviously skateable landmarks. You collect points and objects.
In this case, one accumulates points by doing tricks. There are tricks performed by moving your skateboard into mid-air, either by jumping off of something like a rail or the third story of a building or by leaping upwards from a quarter pipe (a quarter pipe: imaging cutting a massive pipe into quarters and running wheels at high speed up its concave side). An example is the Kickflip, which grants you something like 100 points. Then there are tricks on the street, which have a lot to do with leaping onto rails and flowerboxes and grinding the wheels of your skateboard into the edge and riding forward. Grinding a rail, depending on how long it is and how long you can balance on it, will net you between 50 and 300 points. The total goes up if you do something novel, like a Nose Grind, which sounds like what it is.
There is a great advantage to linking these tricks together, as the point totals are multiplied by the number of tricks you can link together. Thus it's very basic to go from a 50-50 Grind (100) to a kickflip (100) to a Nosegrind (150) and then perform a Benihana (150) to land the trick at 500 points times 4 equals 2,000.
Recent iterations of the game have included linking moves like Manuals (sort of moving forward on the flat earth balanced on two wheels of your skateboard) and Reverts (a move in which you skitch your board at the foot of a half-pipe to move an air trick into a street trick). Thus, if you're merely average, you can earn 310,500 points moving across a surreal downtown Tokyo by way of Nollie to Kickflip to 50-50 Grind to Airwalk to Nosebluntslide to Method to Front Manual to Stalefish to 360 Varial to Ollie North to Revert to Front Manual to Nosegrind to Tailgrab to Frontside Smith Grind to Cannonball to Backside Crooked Grind to Judo to Madonna to Wrap Around to Pivot Manual to 900. IF you want an illustration of how this corresponds to real skating, consider that when Tony Hawk--the real Tony Hawk, whose expressions owe nothing to the Italian theater--achieved the 900 (that is, a 900 degree turn in midair) a few years ago, it was a skating event not unlike man's first steps on the moon. So impossible are the permutations of your video game avatar's feats that the character begins to resemble a fish on a line, flopping and twisting from ground to air. Now and again, you'll catch a glimpse of the character's digitized face doing its best Buster Keaton impression as his limbs mechanically flail through their paces.
The system tallies these points up on screen by name and with a running total beneath it, each trick bubbling up like the first rainwater on aluminum siding, and if you land the trick you are rewarded with a hip-hoppy sort of taa-daa! noise. If you "bail," the accumulated total turns blood red and drips off the screen like bugs off of a windshield.
Is this good for my work? For yours? Possibly. In short doses, it may shuttle us out of our world and give us critical distance in a short amount of time. It is an utterly disorienting experience that can be turned on and off. The game itself is roughly analogous to writing poetry. One tricks on a line as far as he or she can possibly take it, and attempts to trick out of that line as elegantly (or as justifiably) as possible without bailing. There is movement and variety without the burden of authorship. The problem is the addictiveness of videogaming, the constant perfection of form and line without consequence. There are times in the early afternoon when I stop to take a videogame break and only look up later to find myself reeking of ass-sweat, screaming at the television screen as the light from the window begins fading to black, at which point I know that the day has been shot for good.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 1:14 PM,
