One Hour Games Crit: The Mario-Industrial Complex

Mario Maker is a game about learning how to be an effective leader in the traditional military model of the non-commissioned officer. It is about becoming a sergeant in the game development arm of the military-industrial complex. The end-game of the Mario Maker player is to bellow ‘jump’ and for those who were once your friends and peers to answer ‘how high?’

Mario’s jump its a prescribed arc, intrinsic to his being, but you will demand more of him than he is capable of giving, more than any paid game developer ever would, because for you it is pride at stake. The NCO is defined and validated by the soldiers he commands far more than any general ever is.

To be honest, I’ve not played Mario Maker. I’ve watched videos of the levels people produce though, and the whole thing reminds me very much of a similar game I played as a small boy on the Amiga with my best friend at the time. The Shoot-em-up Construction Kit was a set of tools for creating and then sharing vertical scrolling shoot-em-up games. It came with a full set of tiles and sprites and designers and basically sold itself as almost identical to the dev kits used by real game designers. It of course. We created the kinds off games that were impossible to play: unfair and overstuffed. There is plenty of value, both in those games we made and those created in Mario Maker, but it is a different sort of thing to play them. The rules of engagement are all wrong.

Commissioned officers, usually products of a certain schooling system that posits formal and systemic meritocracies as fundamental and intrinsic states of being, tend to think that war is fair. They can create situations in which people die, but that is their right and duty. The charge of the Light Brigade was ordered because it was only a concept. The order was obeyed because it death was preferable to dishonour; because we live in a world where dishonour has been manufactured into a real thing.

Playing Mario Maker will not make you into anything you are not. We are all complicit in the production of conflict. That there are rules do not make things fair. The NCO recognises this. They are harsh and unfair because so is the world that they live in. The machine continues to churn.