Life is full of decisions: the true trouble is never in the deliberation process, but in living with the consequences thereafter.

It always boils down to that essential question: Who are others?

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s post, which discussed the grandeur of rapidity via speedrunning , as I dig my digits into the notion of a second playthrough of Metal Gear Solid 3 (MGS3), and the effort is indeed quite a gas of an experience, as I run through the jungle with breakneck speed and a suppressive sense of wonder to my hastened conquest. One of the ironies of speedrunning any game, is that in some respects, the effort involved almost becomes a boss run gauntlet of sorts, as they represent the only normal parts of gameplay that remains unskippable, at least, if one is forgoing a sequence breaking kind of speedrun, which ends up seeing the player skipping entire swaths of the game full stop, as they glitch their way to the end credits through shim-shamming circumnavigational nonsense. I am aware one is able to skip “The End” battle, by popping the old man in his chrome dome way before the legitimate encounter, but I believe there is no non-lethal way to do it, and since my playthroughs are of the highest caliber of play (see: non-lethally), snuffing out The End in such a manner for me, exists only in the vein of a quick laugh in a dead end future of reloading, that was truly never meant to be in the first place.

In what quickly becomes a morbidly interesting moment of baffling incongruity, along the lines of struggling with a suspension of disbelief, I look to the notion of accepting certain absurdist realities that MGS3 is predicated upon. To wit; for some reason, I am able to accept the notion that somehow, trained soldiers are simultaneously both competent enough to be recruited, but equal parts amazingly vapid enough to not notice the painfully obvious; that of which is Snake being able to sneak by the men in question, as they hand wave the idea that they did not in fact just see a grown ass man dry hump his way past them on the jungle floor, the very same man they are tasked with finding and taking out. With that acknowledgment in mind, we then observe the incongruity inherent in the suspension of disbelief involved, the very same of which involves seeing a dog do very much the same thing in response to Snake, but for some reason, the dog’s reaction (or lack there of) is astonishingly far beyond the pale of reason in the same breath.

I’m no dog whisperer, mind you, but I feel as if I know enough about canines to be adequately equipped with the knowledge that no dog is so detached from the reality of his senses, Snake would be able to get away with that horseshit without getting his ass torn to shreds. Even the oldest, most arthritic pooch with severe congestion and most decayed sense of vision, would still not be deceived by such farce, and likely be panting his little heart out, as he slowly watched Snake crawl across an open field; the man bearing crossed fingers and a misplaced sense of adeptness in the matter. Just to be clear: the dogs function properly enough when actively hunting, as they work in alert mode, and tonally make sense in hunting Snake in the sewers as he makes his escape from Groznyj Grad, but in regular stealth sections? The uncanny valley of replication they represent in the manner of being stand ins as dogs seems so violating in pretense, I would suggest just don’t even have the dogs at that point, and save yourself the embarrassment in the process.

I don’t even think my trouble in accepting the unreality of dog inefficacy stems from me being incredibly pro animal or all ra-ra cheerleader mentality for the awesomeness that is our furry friends, I think it just boils down to the stangulation of common sense itself that I just can’t parse the difference one iota. It’s interesting, too, the more I think about it, in that human beings seem easier to replicate in virtual format, at least in terms of physical movement, but when I consider most onscreen appearances of a virtually generated animal, maybe save for birds, the majority of the time, the animals on screen don’t even get close to realistically passable, and that is purely in the mechanics of its movement, and maybe on a deeper level, in recreating the metaphysics of the animals spirits…this is before we take into account how it interacts (or doesn’t) with the reality that surrounds it. Quite the interesting phenomenon worth further investigation into, I feel.

As I remain entrenched in the thought of the replication of animals in the virtual realm, however, the notion of it becomes noxiously nauseating rather significantly, as the best way to create realistic digital copies, is usually by relentless study of the element in question. The obvious problem one runs into near instantaneously, is the need to model/record/make real the acts and sounds of a dog getting hurt or displaying pain, which comes with a nasty Catch-22 of sorts, as the only way to create that realism of the fictional is by making real what any reasonable person would not want to manifest in actual reality, which yet leaves you in an another sorry state of a dilemma related to fictionalizing said gruesomeness, which still carries an irony about it, as the act of making fake a reality of this disturbingly dark nature somehow still carries the same bizarre weight of dark abyssal energy not safe for this dimension. This entire train of thought may remain a moment where the loss of accuracy is absolutely worth the cost of retained sanity, as almost any other recourse in the matter is perversely psychopathic, even through basic levels of conceptional gesturing. Just to give you an idea of how easily troubling this level of fictionalization gets, I’m reminded of a moment in time when I was playing Mario Kart: Tour, which, just for the sake of reminder and radical explication, is a cartoonishly stylized kart racing video game for mobile devices from Nintendo, and even in this ridiculously absurdist example that is leagues removed from reality, still somehow manages to fuck up the pretense of making animal violence too real, as one of Poochy’s welps he let’s out after being hit by a shell sounds so deeply upsetting, I would rather just not race with him, just in the notion of not even simulating the possibility of the act in the first place.

Exceedingly strange subject material to detail today, and not necessarily a planned endeavor, but the tangent caught me as I considered the ramification of virtualizing man’s best friend, and the cautionary tale of tremendous woe that comes along with it. Even though the comparison I’m about to throw down may seem like a disparity plagued with abnormality as a reference point, I think much like the idea of love and relationships being replicated in games, and the barbarically daft ways we go about attempting to recapture the magic of it all in such a reductionist format, helps to shine the light on the metaphysical realities that accompany these elements in the way of the visceral tendencies that embody them, and the impossible magic that goes along with them. What we take for granted as a given simplicity in the form of love, relationships, and dogs, ends up being a herculean task of replication, as getting them just right in any form of virtual reality seems to be one of those moments of impossible magnitude hither to unknown. I wager a guess one could go mad even trying to replicate such moments with extreme accuracy, and if one was insane enough in even the attempt of fathoming getting the details just right, one hears the faint echoes of critique not too dissimilar to Ian Malcom’s claims from Jurassic Park: people being so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.

A valuable lesson to retain by almost any measurable metric.

-Pashford