While we've been covering/talking about multiplayer gaming in class this week, I've been thinking alot about what it means to make it means to make community by playing games such as Mario Kart Deluxe, Super Smash Bros, etc. Particularly, I was very interested in thinking about the ways that playing games like Mario Kart have the potential of sort of becoming "ritualistic," in the sense that playing Mario Kart seems to have a sort of routine/mode of being played unlike other games. Hence, in this blog post I'd like to take a moment to talk about my time playing Mario Kart for class, and about some observations I made this time around that I hadn't really noticed the last times I've played it.
So for starters, I actually didn't go to the MADD lab both because I own Mario Kart, and my best friend and I (who I game with alot) hadn't played in a minute and we were overdue for a Grand Prix. Which is why, when I told him of the assignment he got really excited. On the night that we played, it was really like any other, we got to my place, set up the switch, and sat down to play. Here's the thing though-it was exactly that... it was like any other. I remembered that before Smash came out, MK was really the only competitive game that we had to play, so low key as time went by it got a bit old because MK is pretty much all the same- once you learn the tracks and you get them down.. that's really as far as you can go. Which is why I argue that playing MK now, while yes it may still be "competition," at this point in time (at least for me), MK is meant to be more of an outlet for community building Gand spending time together with someone, even if the competitive element goes away.
Moving along, after we started playing, the rules and karts, and characters, were all the same as when we first ever picked MK up. Which again, is why it felt so familiar and comforting to be playing MK. When thinking about the actual act of playing games in community though, I actually also noticed that something that really Makes the experience unique is that we, like always, ordered food. It might seem silly to focus on this idea of ordering food because yes duh, we were hungry, but seriously- what is it about gaming and doing it over food that seems to be something that always happens when done with other people? What kind of social gathering/space is being created through an experience like Mario Kart? Moreover, I'm also interested in thinking about the different types of space that are created when different folx play MK, because I do think that it is very capable of generating some had hitting competition. Still, I wonder to what extent this competition actually can live, given the nature of MK as a whole and how unlike say Smash, there's not new content/moves/maps to learn.