I was pretty excited to see we had a Mario Maker video assigned for Wednesday. I haven’t played the game much myself, but watching youtubers spend hours taking on stupid difficult levels is a nice, passive activity I enjoy. The creativity that goes into levels that push the limits not just of what human players can do, but what’s possible with the mechanics of Mario at all is kind of beautiful to watch. So I was excited to see what innovative design would earn the level in the video the title of ‘Hardest’ Mario Maker Level and a spot in the reading assignment for our class.
Well, I watched very closely, but, like the creator of the video said, it didn’t really seem all that hard or that creative, at least compared to everything else out there. Once I read the youtube comments everything made sense. The level’s designer just hacked the attempt number to make a very funny joke, and the clear rate was not at all accurate. Fine.
But it is kind of fascinating. You take a game like Mario Maker. The whole purpose of a game like this is to respond to a modding/speedrunning/metagaming culture in gaming. If people like breaking a game to make it their own so much, why not just give them the bare bones of a game and let them build it themselves. It’s really a cool development from Nintendo because it gives players the tools and space to express their creativity however they want all within the intended framework of the game.
But apparently, it’s not enough. It’s not enough, because even with the infinity of options for creative and expressive modding within the game, this Jaku guy comes along and finds like the literal only element in the entire game that Nintendo did not intend to give the player control over, and modifies it. It seems that regardless of how much freedom players have within a game, there’s somehow always this drive to push the boundaries even farther, alter the game in ways that are unexpected and unintended.
I think there’s just something really rebellious about modding and metagaming. Sure, people modify a game because they want to add or alter something about the way the game is played. But I think there’s also this desire to break the rules and see just how far you can push a game beyond the way it may have been intended or expected to be played. If one of the reasons we play games is to achieve a sort of escape from reality, maybe part of how we achieve that is by seeking out ways to break the rules and do things the “wrong” way. Maybe it’s only when our modifications to a game are truly unsanctioned by the developers that we can feel they are completely our own.
Or maybe Jaku just really wanted to write “8008135.”
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