Edge - April 2016

Dispatches
perspective
nathan Brown
Big picture Mode
Industry issues given the widescreen treatment
Illustration kaeru.com.ar
M
y deadline for this column means
that, by the time you read this, the
apparently centuries-long process
through which the United States selects its
candidates for the presidency will be several
weeks closer to finishing. A would-be
POTUS spends almost as long running for
the Oval Office as they will sitting in it, and,
watched from afar, it’s a tortuous process.
You’re invested in the result because it will
doubtless impact your life in some way, but
not so invested you don’t spend the best part
of 18 months rolling your eyes in front of the
news, wondering when it will all be over.
As I write this the Iowa primary is just
coming to a close. After months of shouting,
pointing and slandering each other’s
characters, voting records and mothers, the
wrestlers have finally stepped into the ring.
The presidential race is still a long, long way
from being over, but at least it’s started. It’s
going to be boring. It’s going to be
infuriating. It’s going to feel like it’ll last for
ever. Yet it’s absolutely irresistible.
I’m struck by the way the USA has
managed to turn something really quite
tedious – the process of deciding which
stuffed shirt gets to complain about
Congress, sign off on drone strikes, and do
nothing about gun crime – into a year-long
game. It’s a season, a tournament, with
preliminaries and knockout rounds and a
grand final with ‘super’ in the title. Candidates
compete in a race to the Whitehouse. The
language used by players, pundits and
passers-by alike isn’t that of the political
establishment, but of the sporting class.
Peppering the post-match coverage of the
Iowa primary were countless references to
Ted Cruz’s ‘ground game’ – a political idiom
borrowed from gridiron, and more recently
MMA, but which I will always associate with
fighting games. I heard a colleague praise the
way Street Fighter V is “all about the ground
game”, rather than emulating the tricky
complexity of its predecessor. The ground
game is about the fundamentals: running
I’m struck by the way the
USA has managed to turn
something really quite tedious
into a year-long game
with the ball, engaging with the electorate at
street level, or just being really good with
Chun-Li’s standing fierce punch. There’s
pride, and praise, to be had in being brilliant
at the basics.
Another essential skill for an aspiring
leader of the free world is self-aggrandising
bluster, something we’re starting to see more
of in fighting games now that the
competitive scene is growing in popularity.
As production values ramp up, a generation
of top-level players raised on WWF Raw
half-jokingly big themselves up in interviews
and flex for the intro-video cameras. The
fists and feet start to fly and commentators
assess the candidates’ – sorry, the players’ –
form, their momentum, their mental
condition; the things that affect success
beyond pure ability. Politics and videogames:
two distant, disparate things that fancy
themselves as sports. It’s easy enough to see
why. Both crave legitimacy on a wider scale,
the political athlete seeking power, the
eSportsperson after wealth and acclaim, each
knowing that excellence is worthless if
nobody’s paying attention.
As you’ve probably worked out by now, I
think about fighting games a lot. I like
finding comparisons between fighting games
and real-life things even more. Obviously one
can over-think these things, draw
comparisons where none exist and later end
up regretting it. So to save myself from
writing myself into a dead-end of wankhattery,
I thought I’d bring this month’s
musings to a close by asking: if presidential
candidates were Street Fighter characters,
which ones would they be? It’s the sort of
hard-hitting, insightful reportage on which
this esteemed publication made its name.
Bernie Sanders is Dhalsim. He’s been
around forever and always had his fans, but
his unconventional tactics meant he went
virtually ignored by the mainstream for
years, until he had grown too powerful to
ignore. With his strong ground game, Ted
Cruz is the Ryu of the piece, the safe, slightly
obvious pick for those afraid of change.
Hillary Clinton is… I dunno, Chun-Li? I never
said this process was perfect.
It is, however, for Donald Trump. With
his ludicrous shock of blond hair and
needlessly flamboyant style, he’s quite
obviously Ken Masters. Both present
themselves as unpredictable, dangerous,
stylish alternatives to the status quo. In
truth, both will be figured out rather quickly,
when people realise that they’re just like the
other guy, except now a load of stuff’s on fire.
Nathan Brown is Edge’s deputy editor. After 20 years playing
Ken, he’s in SFV’s training mode, trying to learn Dhalsim
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