Kirby’s Adventures with Consumerism:
Kirby’s Adventure was developed by HAL Laboratory, a Japanese video game company, and published by Nintendo. Kirby’s Adventure is the second Kirby game and the first developed for the Nintendo Entertainment Consul. Like its predecessor, Kirby’s Dream Land, Kirby’s Adventure is a 2-D scrolling platformer starring Kirby, an anthropomorphic pink sphere with two feet and white oval shaped eyes. However, Kirby’s Adventure is the first Kirby game to include Kirby’s iconic copy ability.
Like most 2-D platformers, in Kirby’s Adventure you complete levels by moving from left to right across the screen, avoiding obstacles. Unlike most platformers, Kirby can suck in air and float, thus allowing it to avoid most of the obstacles just by flying over them. Additionally, instead of simply jumping on his enemies like in most platformers, such as Mario, Kirby eats them. Once he eats them he has the ability to spit them out as projectiles or absorb them. If the player decides to have Kirby absorb an enemy, he can copy their abilities such as swords, lasers, or fire. However, in order to use this ability, Kirby must be very close to the bad guys you could otherwise glide right over.
This game functions in part as an analogy for Japan’s economy after World War Two. Additionally, the post-World War Two era plunged the world into the Cold War. All around Japan countries were embroiled in wars over whether they would become communist or capitalist. Japan became a capitalist country, and embraced consumerism. Soon after the war, Japan started their micro-electric revolution, which eventually helped lead to their role in the growing video game industry. Kirby itself can represent Japan post-WW2 consuming video games and micro-electronic industry and absorbing the capitalistic side effects to its economy.
More interestingly, the game is incentivizing the player not only to consume the enemies to absorb their powers, but to imbue you with a consumerist attitude. Avoiding the large majority of enemies in Kirby is very easy, and so this repetitive eating and absorbing power ups action is the true core of the game. Additionally, when you eat someone to absorb their power not only do you get a new power, but you also get a shiny new card in the bar at the bottom of your screen showing off the new power up. This drives a player to strive to collect all the power ups, such as consumerism makes people strive to collect as many things as possible. The game wants you to get more power ups by giving you mini games and special rooms that are just for eating new people to gain their abilities. This whole game is made to condition you to consume as much as possible.
In Kirby, you can only obtain one power at a time, so normally when playing you keep one you like, and then only ditch it when you find a more interesting one. Of course, if you get hit by an opponent you lose the power up, but if you run after it fast enough, you can eat it again and reabsorb the power. Even if you do lose it, there are always enough enemies around that you can eat them and absorb their powers. However, because you can only keep one power at a time, this is where the consumerist perspective of Kirby intensifies. Consumerism is all about taking one thing and tossing it away for something shiny and new. This is exactly what happens in Kirby when you have to expel a previous power, which comes out as a glowing star that bounces off screen, never to be seen or cared about again.
In that way Kirby's Adventure is also an analogy for gamers. People who play games en masse often play one game, finish it or get bored, and then move on to the next game. In this case, once you get bored of a power you can just get rid of it. All in all, Kirby is not only a representation of how consumerism functions, but is teaching its players to become consumers themselves.
Bibliography:
Kirby's Adventure, Nintendo, (1993).
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