Humans of Mortal Kombat

Daina Bouquin 0:24

I want you to picture a room in Chicago in nineteen ninety-two. Not a glamorous room, just a space. It's hot under a few makeshift lights. There's a plain backdrop hanging on a wall, and a single bulky video camera sitting heavy on a tripod. In the middle of this boring room full of lights, there is a guy in Spandex shorts. His name is Daniel Pisina. He is a martial artist, and he is throwing a punch. He throws it again and again. There are a few other people rotating through this hot room over the course of a few days. There's Daniel's brother Carlos. There's a fitness and aerobics instructor named Elizabeth Malachi. She's wearing a green workout leotard. These people have day jobs. They teach classes. They are people who know the exact weight of their own limbs and who know how their bodies move through the air and across a mat. Behind the camera are a couple of guys named Ed Boone and John Tobias. They make video games and they are tired of the pixelated little characters. Up until this point, the people inside the arcade machines were cartoons. Little clusters of colored squares waddling across the screen. They are charming, but they are flat. Ed and John wanted something else. They wanted the sweat. They wanted the heavy, undeniable reality of a heel hitting a jaw. So they asked Daniel to put on a yellow ninja hood. They asked him to throw a grappling hook. They asked him to fall down, to pantomime what it might look like if his spine were to suddenly be ripped from his back. And he does. He falls on the mat. He throws an uppercut at nothing. They get it all on tape. And then begins the quiet, tedious magic of the 1990s. Back at the computer, someone sits down with the video footage, and frame by frame, pixel by pixel, they cut Daniel out of the background. They erase the room. They erase the mat. They trace the line of Elizabeth's leotard. They isolate the movement. They take the physical reality of these people and turn them into little pixels on a screen. And you might know what happens next. They build a game called Mortal Kombat. It arrives in bowling alleys and pizza parlors and darkened arcades. It glows and it is loud. Kids crowd around the sticky cabinet, slamming the plastic buttons, completely mesmerized. The violence in the game shocks parents and politicians, ultimately sparking congressional hearings. But the violence is only shocking because the bodies look so real. The human weight was translated perfectly. They are in millions of machines. And then soon after they are in millions of living rooms on Super Nintendo's and Sega Genesis's. The game is a phenomenon, and it is making an absolute fortune. But Daniel isn't. Elizabeth isn't. None of them are. They were paid for their afternoons in that hot room in Chicago a flat rate. Just gig work. And they start to see their faces, their literal faces, the shapes of their bodies, their specific martial arts stances, selling millions of copies, plastered on magazine covers and television commercials. So they go to court. They file a lawsuit. They point at the screens and they say to the judge, that's me. You just can't take my body and put it in a machine and send it around the world and not pay me. Daniel doesn't even wait for the verdict. He puts his Spandex shorts back on and puts on his sunglasses and poses in character for a print ad for a rival fighting game. Midway games, the creators of Mortal Kombat, are furious. They fire him. When the next game comes out, Daniel has been erased, replaced by someone else doing the exact same moves. And then the final blow. The court looks at the screen. They look at the pixels. They look at the little squares of color. The court decides that because the video was manipulated, because it was color corrected and isolated and turned into computer source code, it was transformed. It's a new thing, a derivative work. They even cite a survey claiming that only 6% of people could look at the pixelated guy in Spandex shorts and recognize him as Daniel Pisina. So, legally speaking, if you run a human being through a computer thoroughly enough, they cease to belong to themselves. We spend a lot of time today worrying about what happens when the machine takes our face. But this all started long before AI, before the facial recognition software really took hold. It started with a guy in Chicago standing under a light, throwing a kick at the empty air, completely unaware that he was about to disappear into the machine. Thanks for listening to Found in the Margins, and thanks for supporting the Patreon. It makes a world of difference.