This week, our partnership with game criticism site Critical Distance brings us picks from Kris Ligman on topics ranging from the critical reception of Super Mario Maker to the literary heritage of Failbetter's Sunless Sea.
Making Marios
It's Super Mario Bros's 30th anniversary this month, and the folks at AV Club's Gameological Society got together to share their most surreal experiences with the games.
This special occasion also saw the release of, and critical reception to, Nintendo's descendent of its WarioWare quick-and-dirty game design software, Super Mario Maker. Last week we shared a design chat with Shigeru Miyamoto (video); this week, Michael Thomsen's penned a negative review of the title for the Washington Post, which has drawn criticism from several corners.
At Stay Classy, games scholar Todd Harper argues that to expect professional sophistication from Super Mario Maker is to miss the point:
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.
Elsewhere, Carolyn Petit muses that what is missing from Mario Maker is a sense of continuity or a journey for the player:
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.
This limitation has resulted in what Offworld's Laura Hudson calls a "kitchen sink" approach to level design, frontloading levels with every toolbox asset and gimmick. She encourages designers to "slow your roll" because, as she puts it:
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.
At Kotaku, Patricia Hernandez argues that a main problem with quality control in Mario Maker is not just the weakness of its curation options, but how comparatively new players are to making games of their own:
[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.
This is a thread that games scholar Brendan Keogh has picked up on as well, reminding his readers that producing bad work is part of the process to creating good work:
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.
Lastly, for those interested in improving their
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