Blog Post 8: Bogost Observation

In what we have read in Bogost so far, he has covered the concepts of art, empathy, reverence, music, and pranks. Of these, I'm going to be covering the discussion of pranks in this blog post.

Bogost starts his discussion of pranks by stating that by definition, "Pranks are a type of dark humor that trace a razor's edge between amusement and injury." (Bogost, 37) In simpler terms, pranks are inherently funny due to a combination of risk and reward for the one performing the prank, and the varying ways the target can react in response to the successful execution of a prank. Bogost uses examples from video games such as SimCopter and it's inclusion of "himbos," a bizarre term used for the male bimbos which Jacques Servin programmed into the game to simply walk around and interact with others. Additionally, he shows that the entirety of games can be a prank, such as Syobon Action, a pseudo Mario clone that outright punishes the player for following traditional genre conventions of platforming games.

To extend upon Bogost's writing, I feel the need to discuss the nature of relationship I share with numerous online friends. Specifically, while we get along, none of use hesitate to relentlessly mock and prank one another, though the latter tends to appear far more commonly than the former. This particular story is a prank of sorts I pulled without the intention of it even being a prank, and was just trying to sound as ridiculous as possible. What did I do, you may ask?

I told my friends I was hired as the school cafeteria's official "Pancake Puncher."

To my friends, it makes sense that I punch these into existence. No, seriously.

To iterate, during a somewhat serious talk about jobs, I decide to make my friends laugh by saying I was hired as a "Pancake Puncher" because the school's pancakes were too fat to be considered pancakes, so I had to punch them into shape. The others expressed interest in this statement, and encouraged me to keep talking, at which point I thought they were playing along. Only close to 10 minutes later, after one of my friends left for the night, did I discover that yes, my friends thought I was serious.

As it turns out, they had come to associate me and the exceedingly bizarre happenings that occur to me on an alarming basis as average, and were willing to believe almost anything that flew out of my mouth. In this case, one of my friends actually went to see if he could find a job as a Pancake Puncher somewhere. You have no idea how much I wish I was making that statement up.

Such an event, in retrospect with this reading of Bogost on pranks taught me something seemingly fundamental about them. If you can cast a haze of the bizarre and insane around yourself at all times simply by what happens in your day to day life, you can weave the most ridiculous, pointless pranks into reality simply because your friends and family will have seen and heard stranger things from you. In simpler terms, if the circumstances allow it, you can weaponize the concept of "Truth is stranger than fiction" whenever you feel like playing a prank on your friends.