This Week in Video Game Criticism: From Mario Maker to Sunless Sea

Mario Maker is an example of what Chaim Gingold called a "magic crayon." It's a simplistic tool that abstracts the many and varied layers, toolsets, and skillsets of level design into something that a person without access to those things can still use to produce a tangible outcome. The tradeoff is that, because the tools are abstractions, they are less powerful and often more time-intensive than the alternative, because you are often running up against the limitations of the abstracted toolset, among other things.

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Lest this be read as bad, I think "magic crayon" toolsets are powerful because of their accessibility. Anna Anthropy's work (such as Rise of the Videogame Zinesters) has discussed the power of democratizing game design and its ability to destabilize hegemonic game design norms. Magic crayons are often a necessary part of that because they make people feel like these goals are reachable.

You can share levels with other players, but those levels exist in isolation. Someone plays the level, and finishes it, and that's it. You can't create even a rudimentary world map to string, say, four or eight stages together, which I'd love to do. I want players to be able to design not just stages, but journeys for me to go on; the road to Bowser's castle, the pleasant pathways and underground tunnels and flying fortresses that stand between me and King Koopa. I want to experiment with difficulty curves and figure out when and where to introduce new elements so that the places I create have a sense of identity.

Unlike the original games, where each level was a link in a much longer chain that could build on ideas, teach new skills evolve over time, Super Mario Maker levels are elevator pitches where you have to get in, wow the crowd, and get out. You're not writing a novel with distinct chapters, you're scripting a one-act play that has to say everything it wants to say before the player reaches the flagpole.

[A]nyone can pick up a point-and-shoot or a camcorder and start making things right away. Some schools even teach kids about film and photography tools from an early age.

Game design is pretty esoteric by comparison. For many people, Mario Maker [will] likely be the first step toward achieving the same kind of knowledge proficiency in games. It may be a lot of people's first camcorder, as it were.

Any time a platform goes any distance to democratise modes of production and/or distribution, it then gets mocked or criticised because more of the creations it allows are not very good: Ouya, Steam Greenlight, Twine, blogs, and now Super Mario Maker. But it always seemed weird to me as allowing a whole lot of Not Good creations is the whole point of such tools. If there were only good levels of Super Mario Maker, or if you had no chance of encountering a crap one, then the game would be doing a terrible job of democratising both the production and distribution of content.

Bad games are good. There should be more bad games. People should be encouraged to make bad games, and they should be encouraged to share those bad games with other people. Making bad creations is how you mature as a creator. This is true in any art form and while we have access to a band's early demo tapes or an authors early drafts, we so rarely get to see a game developer's early crap games or prototypes.

What set [Caillebotte] apart, and what made him an object of scorn in the elite French art world was that he took on a completely different subject. The eponymous Floor Scrapers were not Classical gods or heroes, nor emperors, nor a study of an elite family; they were ordinary workingmen who were literally hewing at modern Paris.

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The rage that met Caillebotte's use of anonymous working and middle class subjects in his art is quite analogous to that which still greets games which make people of color, the poor, the mentally ill, into their protagonists. [...] In games we're slowly, grudgingly moving from our own divinity figures -- that of the grizzled (space) marine -- to a variety of other, previously ignored characters.

I've always wanted to play a game that let me love my enemies as Jesus might. MGSV becomes this enemy-converting power fantasy where I get to preserve the lives of my enemies, offer them a job, and promise to fight for them when they come under attack. We become allies.

We, as players, experience along with [a protagonist] the confusion of having everything internal about yourself scream "girl" while body and externally-imposed identity firmly declare "Boy." and nothing concrete, external, or proveable can be latched onto to validate the feeling of "girl." We, as players, eventually experience her apotheosis -- if we work for it.

The 'open world' is a mirror through which we can view, indirectly, the abject emptiness lying beyond our realm of experience. Within its reams upon reams of collectible things, we recognize and find comfort in the absence of any particular thing; we enact the ritual of collecting junk until there is no more junk to collect, at which time we discover triumphantly that we have succeeded in gathering the pure, distilled essence of nothing.