Frogger

by Berg

Image Text: I understand you and your team worked hard on this, but when we said to make it more realistic, we meant the graphics.

In case you’ve been living under a rock your entire life, Frogger is a classic video game in which you, the frog, are trying to cross a freeway (or a swamp). Your crossing is fraught with danger, so you’ve got to dodge traffic in order to make it across safely. It’s a simple game, and doesn’t deal with the real world consequences of stepping out in front of a truck, as today’s xkcd does.

When the comic starts, everything’s fine. There’s a frog on the side of the freeway, and he’s not bothering anybody. When he hops out to make his crossing, however, the driver of the semi swerves to avoid him, causing the sedan to his right (more on that in a moment) to slam into his cab, causing a pretty severe traffic accident. The frog then retreats back to the side of the freeway, though whether or not he’s fleeing carnage or a guilty conscience is up for debate.

Now then, concerning the truck driver. There’s a large grassy area off to his left, and yet he chooses to swerve to his right, into traffic. Given that we can see the freeway at a resolution fine enough to make out lines on the road and that the frog seemed to have no barrier to hop onto the freeway, we can presume there’s no guard rail preventing the truck driver from swerving left. Even if there was, it would be hard to imagine a scenario in which this truck driver is risking more by going through a guard rail than he is by swerving into traffic. The most plausible explanation is that the grey car was in his blind spot. Our truck driver is in this way redeemed, for rather than making an illogical choice to swerve into traffic when he didn’t need to, he’s made a logical choice to keep his truck on the road by merging into what he thinks is an empty lane. This way, he minimizes damage to his truck and any interruption to traffic flow. Of course, he’s miscalculated, and carnage ensues.

…or does it? The image text adds another layer to the reality here, suggesting that what we’ve been watching isn’t real, but a hyper realistic Frogger game being presented for evaluation. Apparently, the memo to make it “more realistic” was misinterpreted. Konami had wanted better graphics, not a more real simulation of what would happen if a frog jumped out in front of a truck. Of course, that’s not even a real Konami- it’s a fake Konami that exists in the xkcd universe, which is of course a series of scenarios imagined in Randall Munroe’s mind. And even Randall Munroe might not exist as more than a mental illusion, produced by some sort of coordinated data parallax put on the web, but if THAT was the case then he’d be-

You know what? I’m gonna go gargle with Thorazine and call it a night.