Fake Rules, Real Fiction: Professional Wrestling and Videogames

"Fake Rules, Real Fiction" argues that professional wrestling, having shifted from a legitimate contest to a scripted form of "sport entertainment," is best understood through a narrative framework that combines Chatman's story and discourse theory with game studies concepts such as scripted narrative and alterbiography. The work traces this evolution from ancient antecedents through the 1908 to 1911 Hackenschmidt–Gotch matches, when fixing and the kayfabe illusion became established, and onward through television and transmedia storylines such as the 2008 Jeff Hardy case. Its central thesis is that wrestlers act as active producers of meaning within pre-scripted gimmicks, so that match quality depends on their skill in rendering the scripted narrative intelligible to audiences.

The analysis holds that wrestling and videogames both generate alterbiographies, narratives shaped through participants' interaction, with scripted gimmicks and in-ring exchanges producing shared meaning between performers and crowds. Kayfabe is treated as serialized fiction operating at a 1:1 ratio between real and story time, which blurs the boundary between performer and character. Drawing on Jenkins's concept of transmedia storytelling, the work argues that wrestling's fictional world extends across media, deepening audiences' engagement with wrestlers as both characters and real people.

The study also examines wrestling's videogame adaptations, from the licensed WWF Wrestlemania (1989) onward, including the WWE titles such as SmackDown! vs. RAW 2009, which often produce awkward results when attempting to simulate serialized narrative through linear and non-linear modes. Early games like Pro Wrestling (1986) demonstrate how minimal cues, such as physical appearance and heel or face roles, can convey the genre's fictional world. The authors conclude that game studies tools help explain wrestling's fiction, but translating its nuanced narrative into interactive design remains a difficult and underexplored problem.