Play-Centrism and Introspection in Mario Kart

Following Wednesday’s lecture on Mario Kart and multiplayer games, I wanted to synthesize and further explore the points made in the last half of the class by the various teams that presented. Having played several versions of this game on multiple consoles, this class-wide discussion led me to consider a game familiar to me in a different light. While I had previously experienced the emotions, decisions, and competitiveness of playing a multiplayer game like Mario Kart, the readings and discussion this week led me to consider not only what I felt but why I felt that way and what about the play-centric game design led to these feelings.

In Miguel Sicart’s “Against Procedurality,” he argues that the “meaning of a game, its essence, is not determined by the rules, but by the way players engage with those rules, by the way players play. The meaning of games, then, is played, not procedurally generated.” This important distinguishment between approaching game design from a proceduralist mindset—in which the rules and systems of the game determine its meaning, and the player is merely used to activate these intentions—and a play-centric mindset—as Sicart describes in the above quotation—allows us to see where meaning may arise in a game like Mario Kart. Taken at face value, Mario Kart may appear to be designed simply to entertain, with no serious meaning or moral lesson to be learned. However, taking a play-centric approach to this game can lead us to consider what we may have dismissed before and to see a variety of potential takeaway messages that each player may discover for himself or herself. For a game like Mario Kart, multiple meanings may arise from the way in which the player decide to play the game—an important result of play-centric game design that gives power to the player and leaves games open to greater and more individualized interpretations.

While Mario Kart can be played as a single-player game, a larger variety of potential interaction forms, and thus greater combinations of actions for play, arises in the multiplayer version. Considering Sicart’s anti-proceduralist take on game design in combination with the interaction forms outlined in “Interaction Forms and Communicative Actions in Multiplayer Games” by Tony Manninen, we can specifically consider what meaning may arise from the addition of a multiplayer component to this game. Manninen outlines six primary categories of social actions, demonstrating the added level of complexity in a game once you can make actions based on the decisions, actions, and perceptions of other players. He writes that the “richness itself is, at the end of the day achieved by the players, who are able to exploit the available interaction forms in an intuitive and non-deterministic style.” This directly reflects the primary argument of Sicart’s anti-proceduralist take on game design, emphasizing the idea that the players, particularly in this multiplayer setting, are able to “exploit” these social actions as they desire, independent of what the game may determine in advance.

Thus, taking these two arguments in conversation with one another, we can see how Mario Kart players may produce their own meanings. With the introduction of a social aspect, we can see how the new complexities in potential actions adds onto the single player version. Players can now specifically target their friends or opponents using “strategic actions” in the kinesics and spatial behaviour category described by Manninen, such as by purposefully bumping another player off the track or attacking them with an item. Likewise, they can also decide to work together with another player and use “normatively regulated actions” in which they may decide to agree with other players not to target each other and only to target other players or computers. While these actions may be available to a single-player when deciding how to interact with computers, analyzing these actions in the multiplayer setting allows us to see how we engage on another level with this game when playing with other real people. Whereas the incentive before was to attack all of the computers and win the race, there are now other social incentives added to the decision-making process of every player. Perhaps winning the race is now of greater importance to win pride among friends or, oppositely, that winning the race is less important in order to save the feelings of the person you are playing with. Regardless of the specific scenario, multiplayer actions, and the new possibilities afforded to the player, now allow us to see manifestations of human behavior. While Mario Kart may have no deep and ingrained meaning to be uncovered, the act of playing itself leads us to consider social and psychological topics outside of the game itself, perhaps allowing the player to reflect on themselves and how they behave in social settings. Like the discussion of reward mechanisms in Cory Johnson’s “What Games Can Learn from the Engagement Layers of Papers, Please”—in which he discusses that the complex reward structure of Papers, Please fosters a certain level of introspection and self-reflection in the players—the way in which we decide to play Mario Kart and interact with other human players may be a useful insight into our own personalities.

Thus, in a game like Mario Kart, looking for meaning in the procedural components of the game may be fruitless, with the focus on play resulting in more potential for social and self-discovery.