First of all, an Italian plumber? Why on earth did Shigeru
Miyamoto pick that particular outdated ethnic stereotype?
Robot
Chicken unpacks it in their breathtaking Super
Mario Brothers: Vice City
sketch.
My late stepmother Giovanna was from Florence in Tuscany,
and never let you forget it. She had an understandable hair-trigger
sensitivity towards anti-Italian slurs. Had she lived into
the era of the Sopranos, she would have refused to allow HBO
in her home. But so all of a sudden, there was this mustachioed
presence in her living room, in my stepbro's bedroom, in the
car, etc. You'd think she'd have made more of a fuss. But
Giovanna mostly just shrugged off Mario; my guess is that
his otherworldly Japanese weirdness overwhelmed his offensiveness.
Mario first appeared in Nintendo's 1981 arcade juggernaut
Donkey Kong. Nintendo had been trying to crack the American
video game market with something based on Popeye. When the
licensing deal fell through, the company decided to take the
opportunity to create new characters that could then be marketed
and used in later games. First-time game designer Miyamoto
came up with a gorilla/carpenter/girlfriend love triangle,
based on the rivalry between Bluto and Popeye for Olive Oyl.
Bluto became Donkey Kong the ape, who in Miyamoto's words
was "nothing too evil or repulsive." Miyamoto's
hero, later named Mario, was supposed to be "a funny,
hang-loose kind of guy." Donkey Kong was Mario's pet
(because I guess in Japan, handymen often have pet goriillas.)
As the game begins, Mario mistreats the ape, so Donkey Kong
escapes and kidnaps Mario's girlfriend Pauline. Your goal,
of course, is to save her.
Donkey Kong was actually the first example of a complete
narrative told in video game form. It was also the first game
to employ cinematic cut scenes to advance its plot. The animation
is hilariously primitive by 2007 standards, but animation
it nevertheless is. The narrative 'concludes' when, after
Mario rescues Pauline, the game starts over at a higher level
of difficulty. In addition to presenting the goal of saving
Pauline, the game also gives the player a score. But no one
ever cared about the points; you played Donkey Kong to see
how high you could get without dying. Seeing how high you
can get without dying is also the goal in hard drugs and extreme
sports, of course, but Donkey Kong is a lot safer.
Nintendo was wise to create its own licensable characters.
Donkey Kong is still very much with us, routinely appearing
in new games. The coolest ones are the Donkey Konga series,
music games using a bongo controller. Music and dance based
games are huge in Japan and getting to be more of a thing
here. Keep your eyes on this trend if you're interested in
the future of music. Once hip-hop really comes to grips with
the possibilities suggested by Dance Dance Revolution, it's
going to be off the hook.
After Donkey Kong's runaway success, Nintendo had Miyamoto
do a spinoff in 1983 called Mario Brothers. In the sequel,
Mario supposedly becomes a plumber, but really, he's more
of an exterminator, killing 'pests' as they emerge from pipes.
The 'pests' are turtles and crabs, as I recall; wouldn't it
be cool if your plumbing really had turtles and crabs living
in it? Mario's twin brother Luigi made his debut in this game,
as a palette-swapped version of Mario.
Super Mario Brothers came free with Nintendo Entertainment
Systems in 1985, and much to Disney's chagrin, Mario passed
Mickey Mouse as the world's most recognizable cartoon character
a few years later. Nintendo puts out a new Mario title quite
regularly, and every entry in the series that I've tried shows
the company's inventiveness and dedication to craft. People
with young kids sometimes ask me to recommend non-violent
games, and you can't go wrong with the Mario titles - their
violent content is so cartoonishly abstract as to be no worse
than an episode of Spongebob. Nintendo games are rarely about
the slaughter of digital enemies; Mario games in particular
are usually quite challenging exercises in timing, pattern
recognition, memorization and logic. Mario continues to evolve
as his technological and commercial habitat does. For the
latest iteration, dig the
opulently psychedelic web site for New Super Mario Brothers
on the Nintendo DS.
One morning back in 1985, my grandfather was watching me
play SMB in the living room for probably the forty thousandth
hour. He asked me what it was I was doing in the game exactly;
what events on the screen was I controlling? It was so obvious
to me that Mario was my onscreen avatar, and I was amazed
that Grandpa didn't get it intuitively like I did. How quickly
our civilization changes.
Antonio
Damasio describes your ordinary consciousness as comprising
three distinct imagined beings:
The subject, your awareness of your body's present state.
The object, whatever perturbation to your body's state
is momentarily at the center of your focal attention, whether
it originates inside or outside your skin.
The third-person observer, creating narrative memories
describing the relationship between subject and object.
It's this internal third person narrator that enables us
to 'step outside' of a situation, a crucial tool in our adaptive
toolbox. None of the other animals can do this to the degree
we can, so far as we know. You could debate me on the other
highly-encephalized mammals and birds, but if you've ever
watched an animal try to solve a logistical problem, its lack
of third-person perspective will be conspicuous. For example,
if you tie your dog to a tree, and the dog gets tangled up,
it often has a hard time untangling itself. The dog tries
to just pull against the rope in whatever direction it was
facing when it got stuck. You figure out instantly that it
needs to back up to get its leash unwrapped, but unless you
intervene, the dog will be stuck a long timt. I've seen many
dogs in this situation, and without exception, they just strain
forewards at the leash until they get tired. Watching a dog
struggling with a difficult spatial logic problem like a knot
is like watching a human try to see in the dark or breathe
underwater.
The third person can manifest in the heads of modern humans
as many additional people, a chorus or entire society of voices
in our heads. Gerald
Edelman calls the third person 'higher-order consciousness'
in the sense that it's a meta-consciousness, a consciousness
of being conscious. I don't like the term 'higher-order' because
it suggests greater importance or executive control, and nothing
could be further from Edelman's meaning. He describes your
brain's consciousness of its own consciousness as an emergent
property of your conscious processes, the way your primary
or core consciousness emerges from the interplay of the body's
reporting to the brain on its many states.
When you play Super Mario Brothers, Mario is the subject,
the rest of the game is the object, and you, the player, are
both the primary consciousness and the third person. The difference
is, though, that when you make mistakes, Mario gets hurt,
and you don't. In your ordinary non-gaming life, you are continually
generating temporary internal Marios and running him through
internal scenarios, seeing how they play out before you subject
yourself to the irreversible consequences of your actions.
Your own mind's internal simulations of the world have to
be realistic. Video games don't. Super Mario Brothers is has
a complete, internally consistent set of physical laws, some
of which are lifelike, some of which are wildly counterintuitive.
You need to absorb a substantial body of abstract new concepts
and program them into your fine motor control areas before
this game will make any kind of sense at all. My wife and
I went to Japan on our honeymoon,
and now some of the cultural context of the game is beginning
to make more sense. The anthropomorphic animals and plants
come from Japan's Shinto tradition, which includes a lot of
animal and plant spirits, and the landscape over there is
full of weirdly geometric evenly-spaced shrubbery. But no
amount of context can prepare you the casual surrealism of
SMB's basic internal conventions.
The buttons control the actions of your two-dimensional cartoon
avatar. Your/his mission is to rescue a princess from a group
of turtles and anthropomorphic mushrooms. If you die, you're
instantly reincarnated at the beginning of whichever region
you died in. Death can result from running out of time, touching
enemies from certain angles, touching fire or lava, falling
into pits, or being pushed off the left edge of the screen
by its scrolling. You get three extra lives, extra identical
avatars, and you may earn more throughout the game.
Some bricks, when tapped from below, emit brown and orange
mushrooms as tall as you are. They glide frictionlessly along
the ground, reversing direction if they collide with an obstacle.
If you touch one, you double in size and become Super Mario.
You are now able to smash bricks from below, and when touched
by fire or an enemy, you revert to your normal state instead
of being instantly killed. It is also possible to find bricks
containing glowing flowers, which, when touched, turn you
into Super Mario with the additional ability to emit bouncing
fireballs that can kill enemies. There may only be two of
these bouncing fireballs in existence at any time, which limits
your firing rate.
You can acquire extra lives by absorbing green and white
mushrooms. These mushrooms are concealed in invisible or ordinary-looking
bricks. You can search for these bricks in the hopes of finding
one at random, but it's much faster to consult the maps published
by Nintendo or have your stepbrother show you. If you find
one, it plays a beautiful chime of ascending perfect fourths.
I was born in 1975, which puts me in just about the oldest
age cohort for whom computers were ordinary household appliances.
Nearly all people I've ever met who are five or more years
older than me find computers obtuse, counterintuitive, incessantly
frustrating. Nearly all Americans I've met who are five or
more years younger than me find computers to be variably exciting,
effortless extensions of their consciousness and memory. The
rate of technological change has accelerated to lightning
speed since I was a kid, and my early lifetime experience
with computers has turned out to be a significant advantage
for me - it's the basis for my only marketable skills, for
one thing.
Dig this simple-seeming
3D graphics demonstration by NYU professor Ken Perlin
that I found while idly googling. The instructions, in their
entirety:
As you drag the mouse the platform wobbles.
If you've ever tried to teach computers to a member of the
Greatest Generation, you know that you need to unpack the
phrase "drag the mouse" quite a bit. It has to go
more like this: "Okay, so that thing on the table is
the mouse. When you gently drag it across the table, this
pointer on the screen moves in a corresponding way. Oh, and
so it helps to keep the mouse oriented in an orthogonal way,
because otherwise the pointer's movements will be angled wrong.
And don't be alarmed when the pointer seems to flicker arbitrarily
in and out of existence, it just changes shape depending on
where it is on the screen." It's a while before you can
even get to the clicking, much less the dragging. In no way
do I mean to make light of older people's mental faculties.
This is difficult, abstract stuff. It took my age cohort many
many hours of intense practice and study to be able to master.
The thing is, we enjoyed most of our study time, because we
did it inadvertantly while we thought we were playing. It
doesn't feel so difficult for kids to learn new skills, because
everything they experience seems equally weird and difficult,
and figuring out the computer is just part of their overall
project of getting the hang of their environment.
Most of the computer software you interact with on a day-to-day
basis was written by Americans: Windows and Office, OS X and
iTunes, Internet Explorer and Safari. There's a major exception,
though: games, where the Japanese (and that one Russian cat
who wrote Tetris) are producing a lot of the best stuff. Japanese
games have a bottomless appeal in America, because our two
societies have an enormous amount in common once you get past
Jesus and raw fish. For all its cutesiness, SMB is demanding
and competitive. It requires concentration, effort, and countless
hours of practice. The clock is always running. If you make
mistakes, you have to start over, and you have a limited number
of tries before you have to start over at the very beginning.
You don't get to save your progress; you have to slog your
way through the first few levels every single goddamn time
out. The more modern Mario games all enable you to save your
game, which is a good thing, because they're vastly larger
and more complex and are impossible to play through in a sitting.
People frequently accuse video games of making people antisocial
and emotionless. My experience has been different. I spent
a lot of my childhood playing video games alone, but I also
spent a lot of it playing them in social settings, especially
with my sister and stepbrother, but also with friends or total
strangers. Actually, SMB is the setting for some of the high
points of my relationship with my stepbro, and indirectly
with my dad. Like all Nintendo-owning families, we developed
our own rituals around the game - for some reason, we nicknamed
world 2-2 "Clark Gable Street" and whenever someone
got there, we all had to say "you're on Clark Gable Street"
in a silly voice.
Most of my dreams take the form of 3D first-person video
games, in that I'm constantly on the move through an endless
succession of different physical locales and dealing with
an endless succession of people, some familiar, some exotic,
most a combination of the two. I frequently dream of being
in a familiar room and discovering a new door or extension
that I'd somehow never noticed before. I think this dream
models the experience of your consciousness discovering within
the confines of its familiar neural surroundings a hitherto
undiscovered aspect of itself. One theory dreaming's purpose
observes that people deprived of REM sleep eventualy lose
their ability to form new long-term memories, so presumably
dreaming is a stage of the brain's process for creating those
memories. While you're sleeping, your brain becomes active
in a state closely resembling consciousness, except with your
eyes closed and motor areas disengaged.
Like the internal landscape of the mind, the world of SMB
is topologically complex, with strange and unexpected interconnections.
The pipes that transport Mario from one place to another are
basically stable wormholes in SMB's 2D spacetime. Advanced
players (or those tipped off by Nintendo's viral marketing
division) know that hidden pipes in the "Warp zones"
let you skip big swaths of the game. One warp zone is in level
1-2 and is reached by walking on the blocks at the top of
the level passing the exit pipe. This zone allows jumping
to worlds 2, 3 and 4. The other two are in 4-2. One is past
the end of the level, like the one in 1-2, which only allows
access to world 5. The other is at the top of a beanstalk
that grows from a hidden block and takes the player into a
surface area, from where you can hop to worlds 6, 7 and 8.
Somewhere in the game is a solid-looking wall that one can
pass through into "World negative 1". This stage
is identical to world 2-2 but upon entering the warp pipe
at the end, the player is taken back to the start of the level.
The "minus world" attained legendary status among
my childhood circle. It was probably an unintentional programming
glitch, but Nintendo has since made getting stuck in a recursive
loop something of a frequent trope in their games. There's
a recursive puzzle in the graveyards of several different
Zelda games, including the original. There's also an infinite
spiral staircase in a later Mario title. These puzzles are
extremely strange places to get stuck; it's a real window
into computer consciousness. Are
you having a Douglas Hofstadter tingle?
By the way, mad props to Koji Kondo, who wrote SMB's infectious
theme song and the
even more infectious 'underground' theme from 1-2. Take
a listen to my hip-hop remix of these tunes. And if you
want to put a boost in your step for the rest of the day,
here
are three gentlemen in tuxedos playing the main theme on trombones.
Also, here's
a fun deconstruction of SMB's inner workings by computer artist
Ben Fry. And
here's Line Rider's breathtakingly simple visual remix of
world 1-1.
Like any major cultural icon, SMB has inspired endless variants
and clones. One of the most original is Gish
- it's well worth downloading and ponying up the modest shareware
fee. Gish is the first platformer I've seen with a non-rigid
protagonist - you control a big squishy blob, like an amoeba.
An even more liquid and curvilinear SMB variant is the highly-recommended,
sublimely trippy Loco Roco
for PSP. In Loco Roco, not just your avatar but parts of the
environment are soft and squishy. There's a strong biological
feel to the whole thing, especially in the levels that take
place in an enormous penguin's digestive tract. Fun!
