#marioness

(via Miyamoto on World 1-1: How Nintendo made Mario's most iconic level - YouTube)

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0c5Le1vGp4)

A | B | AB | C | AC | BC | ABC

Mark Brown at it again with a close analysis.

(via Super Mario Galaxy 2 Tutorial DVD (SMG2 For Dummies!) - YouTube)

As you may have guessed, I’m currently obsessing over Mario. I’m very almost writing my entire thesis on Mario; his makings of, myths, and mechanics (well, someone has to right?). 

As it happens, by day I’m drafting a piece on the impact Let’s Plays and YouTubers are having on game development practices for an upcoming book on videogames and fan cultures. In particular, I’m interested in mapping some of the ways developers and players have responded to player-created video content—both in its contemporary form and historically—and the multiple roles these videos perform in terms of instigating and maintaining modes of production and consumption.

This video is an upload of the DVD tutorial disc that came packaged with the retail version of Super Mario Galaxy 2 in Japan and PAL regions (Europe and Oceania). Although not fan-produced, its existence is telling, and operates in similar ways to what I am discussing when looking at YouTube recordings of playings and playthroughs.

For starters, the instructional nature of this video operates as nothing more than a moving-image manual; albeit a easily digestible one. Second, it introduces the helping hand mechanisms within the game itself; the Co-Star Mode, Tip Network and Cosmic Guide. Third, this video displays some of the more creative ways to play; dismounting Yoshi in mid-air to triple-jump, skating backwards (for showboating if nothing else) all whilst combining and stringing together a number discreet actions in sequence. I guess the important part is for players to not only replicate these actions, but to discover where best to perform them. Forth, they provide explicit examples of these levels of mastery being performed, presenting explicit challenges for us to complete against.

I can’t help but draw comparisons to much of the gaming content on YouTube – the instructional, inspirational and aspirational nature of these recordings.

But perhaps YouTubers go one step further than this video does in that they also provide us with a complete set of skills – they compliment us and our abilities. They extend our inability to complete, compete or master a game - they fulfil what we lack in skill, time, or will-power.

They simultaneously create a desire for, and remind us of our inability to unless severely committed, perform in this way for ourselves. They complete games for us and provide us with the rewards associated with completion, without the necessary strife involved in playing for ourselves. They simultaneously call us to action and yet, often even with the playable game in hand, ask us to confront our distance from the mastery displayed as it is performed by these others.

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPDPSezEkcY)

“Over the past 30 years, more than a billion people around the world have played a Nintendo game, and most of them have played as gaming’s biggest star; Mario. From the music, to the costumes, to the characters, Super Mario isn’t just Nintendo’s mascot, there’s a little piece of him, and certainly memories of his adventures, inside all of us.” — Reggie Fils-Aimé #E32015

Announcing the 30th Anniversary of the release of Super Mario Bros (jump to 8:32 if the above doesn't work properly).

For me, Mario Maker is an interesting proposition, for many reasons. First, as emblematic of the enduring legacy and tour de force that is Nintendo. Given its relatively short history, celebrating 30 years of anything videogame related is a feat in and of itself.

Second, Mario’s continued presence. However you look at it, the appeal of Mario (and his now sizeable extended family) to gamers across generation after generation—across game genre after game genre—is testament to both Mario’s protean design and Nintendo’s ability to “play” him that way. So powerful is this connection, so totemic is Mario to The Nintendo Company, it is impossible to imagine one without the other. 

Third, and perhaps of most interest to me, how Mario Maker is a game that closes a loop. Where we have seen construction- and creation-kits, instruments and play-things featuring Mario emerge from the canon of Nintendo-ware before (thinking, most prominently Mario Paint and Warioware D.I.Y.), Maker encapsulates and extends what has been recently labelled the “maker mentally” of community-oriented practices, something that is as true for acts of playing (or making) videogames as it is for a myriad of other creative and performative pursuits.

This blurring between player and creator—the co-creativity of videogame play—is something that interests me greatly. As for the loop that is closed? Well Maker provides a moment for us to reflect upon Nintendo’s development philosophy, or, as Miyamoto once put it, the “kyokan” or sharing of feelings between player and designer. Maker makes this point explicit by casting its "users” as the creators, purveyors, curators, and instigators of Mario-esque experiences. We learn to communicate in Mario, use Mario grammar and syntax, and we share in our Mario-ness with others.

In many ways Maker provides us with tools to not only play as Mario, but to define what that Mario-ness is; what it does, how it means, and what it becomes. In this way, we are all the shamans of the many, multiple and ever expanding worlds in which Mario exists as we become the makers of the myths from which Mario is made.