Authentic Simulation, or the Art of Couch Skating

As like many skaters, my interests reach further than simply the act of riding a skateboard. Some make art, some make music, some even ride motocross. I, myself, am a gamer.
Video game culture, and being a gamer, has a lot of parallels, I find, with skate culture. Both acts have been historically scoffed away as being child's play; something cast aside as soon as one gets a driver's license and a girlfriend. On that note, both have historically attracted the socially maladjusted: many a skater who went to high school in the 80s or early 90s will recount tales of how admitting you skated was a sure-fire way to detract attention from the opposite sex - a trait undoubtedly shared by the gamers of the same era. Both have an admittedly shameful history of male-dominated participation, bordering at times on misogyny.

Both have seen an increase in acceptance and casual participation in the last decade, and both have a collective of 'core curmudgeons who often rue that this is the case. So why am I talking about all of this? Well, because today I'm talking about what happens when these two things come together.

Maybe six months or so prior to starting Between Two Junkyards, I had mused about the idea of doing a video-review show all about skateboarding video games, of which there have been countless iterations, dating back as far as the 1986 classic 720 Degrees Arcade game, ported to the Atari 2600. While I could go on for months on end writing reviews of the rarely good, often bad, and occasionally ugly history of skateboarding video games, it ultimately boils down to the fact that, for the last quarter century, video game developers have been trying to emulate the act of skateboarding, without actually using a skateboard.

 

 

Yeah... This seems about right...

What really got my mind stirring on this topic was a recent binge I went on this weekend of video game webcomics. Due to my inherent need to be completely up-to-date on whatever webcomics I read, I came across this strip about Tony Hawk Ride. It brought up an interesting point: it a skateboarding game good because it's fun, or because it's realistic?

Well... kind of both.

In preparation for this blog, I talked to my girlfriend, who both skates and is an avid gamer, her thoughts on the matter:

"[Realism]...because [a more realistic game] helps you learn tricks: if it's easy and you can't fail what's the point? No video game should be like that. Where is the challenge?"

Now, I will defend the first handful of Tony Hawk games to the death - they were great games, and they did the best job possible at the time of capturing the act of skateboarding. Unfortunately, however, as the games progressed, they jumped the shark in an unforgivably huge way...

I heard Brian Herman just Franklin Grinded the Hollywood 16.

RIDE was meant, I suppose, to remedy this, as well as jump all over the Great Peripheral Bandwagon of the late 2000s. The aforementioned comic argued that the game was too real to be fun, though as a skater who actually tried it, it seemed more so that the game was simply trying too hard, and fell flat both in realism and fun. A valiant effort, Tony, but you and I both know that skateboarding is far more complex than the game's controls can account for.

Perhaps EA's Skate series is the closest modern technology has come to offering a fun, challenging, and accurate representation of skateboarding. I know I've spent countless hours playing the games, whose admittedly intuitive control scheme did offer me some assistance on my real-life fakie bigflips. Still, though, at the end of the day, no ammount of thumb-based training can compare to the feeling of actually getting out there and feeling the board under your feet.

Although it is a nice way to kill time on a rainy day.