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This movie is a documentary about games which is not to be confused with King Kong or anything to do with that franchise. Everybody knows about video games and games on machines whether they actually imbibe or not. There are a number of questions that continually revolve around the use of these games, especially as the users may occupy a lot of their time on them. The games could be one of several things that could tend towards addictions and while generally keeping the players out of trouble, is it just another virtual world forming at the expense of exploring your own personal reality in more concrete fashion? So it does pertain into such issues as excessive television viewing and excessive use surfing the web or other possible electronic addictions. The movie starts out interviewing people who spend lots of times on these games and their rising culture around these games and it gives a forum for some of the players to express what these games mean to them sometimes in humorous fashion. As the movie progresses, it focuses in on a particularly challenging game called Donkey Kong which is played on a type of a machine usually found in a arcade and even the best players in other games have trouble going anywhere big with this game. Here the film finds some quite interesting underlying psychology which transcends these games themselves and lends into to several aspects of both mass and personal psychology that seems to be active in today’s world. The first presenting character is Billy Mitchell, who has the recognized highest score in Donkey Kong, at 800 and some odd thousand and this record has held into the present times since 1982. There is a community of players that look up to Billy and his superstar status in this and several other games. The second major player to emerge on the stage of Donkey Kong, is Steve Weibe from the state of Washington where he has played Donkey Kong on his own personal machine for years and may be capable of breaking the all time record. He moonlights as a high school teacher when he isn’t playing Donkey Kong. He is more of the prototypical nice guy, who isn’t sure to what to make of the limelight as it begins to come his way. He lacks an abundance of personal confidence to even try and be arrogant but has an underlying skill with his hands and eyes far beyond what other players have in this game that belies this. What unfolds is a challenger meeting the champion, but will there be a willingness to face off head to head in front of a crowd of onlookers, especially on the part of Billy Mitchell, who has everything to lose as he seems to hold the status of a legend in the eyes of others and seemingly himself. Within all this, there are several interesting aspects and a major underlying premise that it quite observable in many different areas not just games. Luckily, as these events unfolded the movie makers had all sides covered in real time as to the behavior exhibited and especially interesting is Billy Mitchell’s reactions as a threat looms on his all time record coming in like an approaching storm nearing the Floridian coast and his rather dogmatic approach to the importance of his record, and his personal ongoing abilities and record setting achievements in this game and others. What was very interesting to me, is something that is found a lot on second looks, that even if people are isolating they are often thinking of the theoretical audience that they are soon hoping to find for their individual exploits and however they choose to approach this audience, whether it be rather head on or in more meandering or buffered fashions both of which were happening in this movie, people will approach their audience sooner or later in one way or another. Personally, having stayed in Denali, Alaska in the summer of 2004, I was reading the book Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer and it is about a young man in his rebellious ways trying to tackle the wilderness of Alaska alone and the big question mark of the book was what were the interior motivations involved with him that led to these extreme chances and to his overrating his ability to handle the wilds despite evidence that he was very smart. The book itself also talks about some of the author of the book’s adventures in Alaska and one as where he climbed what sounded like an unbelievably difficult mountain ridge to the top alone in nearing winter conditions, yet he survived it and the first thing he did was seek out a bar to tell people about it. And the young man who is the subject of the book seemed to think he would survive only to have adventures lures to tell years down the road, although some interpretations would disagree with that. But this book really showed how even extreme isolated feet’s or accomplishments done in extreme islolation are something where people are thinking of their audience. This movie captured this idea on another level, as the record holder for the generation, the still young looking Billy Mitchell kept in touch with his audience, but seems to buffer that or do it in a more roundabout way at times as he seeks to balance retention with the possibility of loss. Then the issue of record holding and breaking, how important is it that the record be done within the confines of certain standards and competition, in any sport, it does seem to mean more to do it with the lights on and with those measuring things up front and present. You do hear of people hitting a baseball 700 feet, but was it confirmed? And when you are talking about records or world records, the audience can be found years down the road. Also, there were some mint nuances to this film, including a sequence of sage advice from the daughter of new comer to the record stage, Billy Wiebes who is the type of guy that somehow has that ability to master something way beyond what someone with a similar effort could get too, kind of reminding you of the golfer that can actually get those vaunted scores for reasons more than the best equipment, training, effort or any specific input that can be imitated to maybe get the same result. The time arch of this film shows that maybe people can be just as big on records as they ever were, and that the era of the records is not quite over yet, despite the lets sit back and get entertained aspect of society that is here now. Then it also shows how culture arises around games and competition and of course an example of this is the race car sport or how culture for example arises around musical bands. This film is worth examining as it captures issues of competition in relationship to the audience, whether that audience be nearby, on the web, or in some record book and how so much is done in citation to the audience and when and where is validation achieved as far as record performances.
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