Jean Baudrillard defined the hyperreal as a sign with no referent. Wikipedia gives Santa Clause as an example of the hyperreal; an idea that many people know and cherish and respect but that is actually completely falsefied and representative of nothing in particular. Mortal Kombat is an amazing franchise in its ability to capture hyperreality. Particularly Mortal Kombat 11, a game whose story mode I am getting the chance to play through now for the first time.

I have played several Mortal Kombat titles, but haven’t really sat down and focussed on their story’s or the assumptions and implications of their gameplay before now. I have always liked fighting games- though I suck at them- and have, like many, considered Mortal Kombat to be the cream of the proverbial fighting game crop. I actually don’t know if this is true game-mechanics-wise. I even have a sneaking suspicion that this is patently untrue and that games like Tekken and Street Fighter, and Dragon Ball FighterZ are superior, though I haven’t really played them and certainly haven’t considered their impact as media objects in the same way (oops). I want to talk about the impact of Mortal Kombat in particular because I think that it has done really well at this hyperreality thing I’m trying to get at.

Before we get started I’d like to have everyone’s attention and announce that the claims in this post are evidently wrong. However, I would like you to read on anyhow, because Mortal Kombat is awesome.

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Let’s talk first about the game’s kombat (I feel like it would be antithetical to spell it with a c). Characters engaging in kombat comes pretty close to comprising the “gameplay” of Mortal Kombat. If you go on YouTube and search ‘Mortal Kombat 11 gameplay’, kombat is pretty much what you’re looking for. As the main focus of the gameplay and the franchise’s namesake, kombat is the star of the show- and for good reason. The fighting in Mortal Kombat is famously bloody. It’s to the point that when I haven’t played Mortal Kombat in a while, I get pretty uncomfortable when I fire it back up again.

But wait- I’m supposed to tell you why it’s hyperreal. There are two reasons here as far as I can tell.

Reason one: characters survive mortal kombat. Mortal Kombat‘s characters are constantly getting their heads ripped off, their brains eaten, drawn and quartered, eaten by dragons, etc.- but are also a-okay after the fact. I’m not even talking about arcade mode or ladders in particular here. This is true of the story mode as well. I was playing as a character earlier today in the story mode of Mortal Kombat 11 who had an attack where she shot her opponent in the face with two pistols at the same time- it wasn’t even a finisher. My opponent received a minimal amount of damage and continued to beat my ass. It is useful to note here that the story mode doesn’t allow the use of fatalities. However, as is the case with my earlier example, fatal techniques are being constantly used by the characters engaging in kombat in story mode. The characters are then usually able to exchange dialogue or run away or do whatever after the fight. They’re fine.

This gruesome and would-be lethal fighting causes cognitive dissonance for me as a player. Why are the characters able to survive? Are they gods? Some of them are. What about the characters who are literally actually just cops or movie stars? More on the characters later though- we’re starting to see some hyperreality!

Kombat is hyperreal in that, as a sign, it signifies a kind of conflict that doesn’t exist. There is no way that somebody could survive mortal kombat, and it doesn’t even make sense that some of the characters who survive it should. The gut-ripping, head-exploding, face-shooting hostilities depicted in Mortal Kombat are hyperreal. They depict something that doesn’t actually exist.

Reason two for the violence in question being hyperreal lies in the unusual nature of the violence itself. When the characters are split open, there is really only a 50-50 chance that organs will be present. Sometimes they’re omitted. Sometimes they’re depicted in the most spectacular ways possible. Sometimes they wouldn’t make sense to be shown- as is the case with Sektor and Cyrax, cyborgs who “bleed” what appears to be motoroil. Even this detail is hyperreal in that it is unclear (to me) on which kind of energy source Cyrax and Sektor run- and thus whether or not they would need motor oil to run (although I feel like they are largely electric devices and thus are free of need for things like oil, fuel, and filtration which are more suited to the combustion-engine persuasion). Mortal Kombat isn’t a depiction of violence- it’s using the idea of fighting tactics to totally make shit up. It’s hyperreal!

But wait! Isn’t Mortal Kombat just showing us exaggerated versions of violence for comedic effect and thus in a way that makes it palatable? This might be true, and certainly makes sense from a marketing standpoint, but it also kind of points to a hyperreal experience within itself. The player is supposed to experience this intense, mystifying violence and then laugh? Someone who laughs at legitimate violence or even the depiction of legitimate violence can very easily be considered unwell. With Mortal Kombat, though, it’s okay because the violence available to the player isn’t depicting something dangerous- it isn’t depicting anything at all. It’s hyperreal.

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The characters committing this violence through kombat are just as hyperreal as the blood they spill. This has kind of been examined in the example of the cyborgs, Sektor and Cyrax, but runs very deep in the game.

If you had asked me what the game was about before I started playing it, I probably would have told you it was about ninjas or martial arts. This really isn’t the case at all. The characters available in Mortal Kombat 11 include movie stars, cowboys, policemen, multiple contemporary generals, and interdemensional emperors. It is clear that the game is inspired heavily by asian martial arts and the popular culture surrounding them. But even characters who appear to represent this inspiration have inexplicable origins. Raiden, for example, is a character based on a Japanese god but holds very little shared lore with him besides “lightning”. Even more, characters who are originally dubbed ninjas in earlier games have since developed into special Mortal Kombat themed versions of themselves- as is the case with Sub-Zero and Noob Saibot. Even Kung Lao who seems to be holding on to some shred of martial artists in pop culture is recognized most famously by his razor-rimmed hat. Razor-rimmed hats are signifiers for… being brutal and cool?

This game isn’t about ninjas or martial arts. It’s about a bunch of random characters created purely out of coolness (and, more pesimistically, what’s marketable). These characters are so hellbent on being cool (and marketable) that they include pre-established characters from other realms of pop culture. Ridley Scott’s Alien, the Terminator, and most of the DC superheroes you can name, to rattle off a few. While these individuals just listed represent different ethos and thus a possibly different degree of hyperrealism, they can also enhance the hyperrealism of Mortal Kombat‘s characters. What space are these characters existing in that they have to deal with all of these random (Warner Brothers licensed) characters? What actually are the motivations of Mortal Kombat characters? The cast of Mortal Kombat is so hyperreal that all of their names might fit nicely on the hyperrealism wikipedia page next to Santa Claus.

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Speaking of the characters’ motivations, what are they? To really dig into the hyperreal sensibilities of the hyperreal beings involved in Mortal Kombat, it’s going to be helpful to examine the locations and general temporal action of the characters. This section is going to focus more pointedly on Mortal Kombat 11 because that’s the one that I’m in the middle of playing right now and because it is also the à la mode figurehead of the series.

My understanding is that the “main” characters that have been with the series since its inception are representative of their own realm. A realm appears to be close to a dimension, but can also sometimes be approximated more as a planet- which is the case with Earthrealm. There are six of them now, but some others have been deleted or “merged” for canonical reasons. I don’t want to get super into the lore here, but I do want to point out how bizarre these loosely defined realms are. They are like empires in a Game of Thrones style world but are also like planets in a Marvel style universe. They also contain some monotheistic influence in their structure as they include both Heaven and the Netherrealm. Generally speaking, the other realms are constantly steadfast in enslaving or destroying Earthrealm- which makes me feel like I’m watching an Avengers film and reading the Bible at then same time.

The realms in which Mortal Kombat is set share very similar qualities to the cast that inhabits them. They’re influenced by the most historic stories and conflicts available as much as they are influenced by the most epic blockbuster movies and comic book series (they include these sometimes!). But these realms, again, are not representative of anything except the idea of “really cool” and “marketable”.

The setting and characters of Mortal Kombat get so tangled up in the story mode that it becomes necessary in Mortal Kombat 11 to implement time travel systems so that characters are dealing with their younger selves (presumably from older versions of the game). This detail makes for some actually heart wrenching storytelling in the case of some characters and also pushes hyperrealism to the max- time travel doesn’t actually happen but has created narrative possibilities and issues we are all painfully familiar with.

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So far we have a game about hyperreal individuals living in hyperreal realms. But this kind of isn’t that surprising for a video game, I guess. Video games are crazy! Oh wait- I’m afraid I’m begging a question now. Isn’t Mortal Kombat hyperreal simply in its insistence to be a crazy video game?

Mortal Kombat is a crazy video game in its content but also in its presentation. The story mode is comprised mostly of long cutscenes with short first-to-two fights in between which the player engages in. The cutscenes are so extravagant that they’re consistently uploaded to YouTube an viewed by millions as movies. So is the story mode a movie? I saw the Warner Brothers logo when I fired up the game- my consumerist sensibilities tell me that that means movie, and it really does feel like a movie a lot of the time. The cutscenes are displayed in widescreen! Widescreen! That’s the movie one, folks.

This movie/game dynamic is complicated by Johnny Cage, a character I’ve mentioned several times. Cage is a movie star turned US Military agent in Mortal Kombat 11. As a character, he represents Hollywood incarnate in the game. This plays nicely off of the Bruce Lee image invoked by other characters in the game, but also works to remind the player that they *might* be watching a movie more than they’re playing a game.

After Johnny Cage wins a match, he has an animation where he complains that ‘that wasn’t in my contract’. Through this breakage of the fourth wall, Cage leads the player to wonder about the legitimacy of the “cast” of characters as characters in the video game at all. Is this video game about the characters depicted, or is it actually about a movie made by people in the video game that the player get’s to watch in a highly mediated way? This all stems from a throwaway line by Johnny Cage, so a grain of salt is in order I suppose.

We’re bordering on fan-theories here, although an uncertain nature of movie-ness allows for a lot of things, like the gratuitous violence, to be explained well. How could a hyperreal representation of movies and pop culture not include some idea of movie magic?

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This uncertainty in media consumption leads the player to a hyperreal experience in general. Unused to this kind of media consumption, there is as much dissonance in wondering what you’re doing during the Mortal Kombat 11 story mode as there is surrounding the violence committed by the characters and the players themselves. Mortal Kombat is hyperreal media for media’s sake.