Leave it to the New York Post to find some dark humor in the increasingly brutal Democratic nominating contest. Today, via The New York Times‘s Friday Happy Hour, I was introduced to the tabloid’s “2008 Democratic Fight Night” game, which brings visual verve to all those boxing analogies we were subjected to courtesy of the Pennsylvania (because Rocky’s from Philly!) primary.
“Fight Night” isn’t so much a game as an extended joke—a set of movable images and coordinated sounds that are vaguely controlled by you, the “player.” Its punchline (pun, okay, intended) is in the sound and the graphics: the candidates’ faces become increasingly bruised with each successive round of punching; the audience cheers. It’s ridiculous.
Though I found myself literally laughing out loud at the sheer absurdity of the thing, the cartoonish randomness of the “game” seems, at this point in the nominating contest, incredibly apt. Pow! Whiz! Bang! Moving either forward or backward, in farcical violence, with no nuance, little control, and little apparent point.
Apt, indeed.
Megan Garber is an assistant editor at the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University. She was formerly a CJR staff writer.