So this week I finally played Super Mario Maker for the Wii U. I haven’t purchased the game for home because I have a ridiculous backlog of games that have come out in the last month and Fallout 4 and Tomb Raider are both looming for release next month. But this week I couldn’t avoid it any longer because we needed it for the graduate students to use in class. Since I had never actually played the game before I decided to take it home the day before and familiarize myself with it a bit so that it wouldn’t be completely foreign to me come class time. And I wanted to see how Nintendo was going about specifically teaching people to make levels? How were they going to scaffold the learning of the myriad architectural pieces and all of the things that they did? How were they going to help people make sure that they weren’t just building levels that could never be completed (or help them do so if that was their goal)? I had so many learning questions buzzing around in my head and it was pretty exciting (I’m a bit of a geek that way).
So I popped the game in Wii U and waited for the update and checked out the book that came in the game box. Yes, physical materials in a non-special edition game box. The book wasn’t quite a manual, but it did give you some fairly simple levels that you could use for inspiration when you were building your own levels. I was excited to play around with Super Mario Maker! And then the game started.
You begin the tutorial by playing through the beginning of a level. The level then abruptly ends and you are charged with finishing the level. And that has got the be one of the coolest ways of getting people engaged and it’s just downright fun! So I clicked the button so that I could finish it and was immediately a little (ok, a lot) jarred by the fact that the there was a huge hand on the screen holding a stylus that was supposed to represent mine. Only problem? It was a fair skinned hand. No way to tell if it was Caucasian, Japanese, or anything else, but what was clear was that it was not mine. And I have to say that it was more than a little discombobulating. Very posthuman even. In this case where this thing was supposed to be a cybernetic extension of myself it really shook me that I could look down at one screen with my brown hand and then up at the other with a white hand (the game is a 2 screen experience using the gamepad).
Oddly, I don’t know if it was so much the fact that there was a white hand on the screen representing mine that made the experience discordant, but rather the fact that they had worked so hard to make it an immersive experience by mimicking my hand on the screen and had failed so miserably by failing to do something that could have been done quickly at the beginning of the game. Choosing a hand. Choose a skin color, size, and overall look of the hand. Boom, done. Easy.
Doing a bit of research for this post I see that this is an issue that people have been writing about since the game was first unveiled (and no one addressed it pre-release), so I’m not writing about my experience with the game because it’s “news” or because I see this as being another case where people of color are intentionally erased from the game, but rather because I see it as simply a poor design and documentation choices. And I say this for two reasons that I want to cover here.
First the hand that you are dealt (get it? hand dealt?) at the beginning of the game seems to be randomized (though I have yet to find anyone who got a non-human hand). When we played the game as a part of a game critical play the student who played the game from the beginning got a brown hand which worked well because she is also Black.
Second, you can change the hand that you use in the game from whatever you get in the beginning from the paler to a darker hues, to animal paws or cartoon hands (and even switch from the default right handed to left handed hand) by pushing in on the left control stick. This is something that is never addressed in the in game tutorial and seems to be so well hidden in the interactive manual that no one can even find it, because I definitely didn’t and there are numerous videos online telling people how to make that change.
In a time when immersion in games is something that is more and more sought after from virtual reality glasses, games that take place in real time, persistent worlds, and games, like Super Mario Maker, that use a second screen experience in an attempt to make the gameplay somehow more realistic for the player.
“See your hand in front of you? Look up, voila there’s your hand on the screen doing the same thing! It’s magic!”
Cue screeching halt. Wait! Nope that is definitely not my hand. Doesn’t look anything like that.
And that really disturbed me. It felt oddly like a physical (and specifically racial) disconnect. My hand in the real world was doing things that were being mimicked on the screen by a small, delicate, and pale hand on my television. It really was a bit too posthuman for me. And not posthuman in the sense of it’s all about the game, the system, and the processes, but posthuman as in here’s a theory that privileges the default over the Other and in that privileging of the default it perpetuates the status quo and under-privileges those who are not of the default.
For this game (and this gamer) by simply removing choice and agency from the gamer in something that might seem as simplistic, to some, as making a choice of hands at the beginning of the game and then burying the necessary information of how to change the hand in the game, Nintendo pulled me so far out of the game that I had to mod my own gameplay experience and work only with the screen on the Wii U gamepad because I couldn’t bear to look at the hand that looked nothing like mine on the television screen that was mirroring my movements. So, for me, this game became a single screen experience. It was anything, but immersive. All of the work that the designers had done to make the game so was instantly lost.
In the end, now that the hand on the screen works better for me, I can see myself playing a lot more of this game and building levels to trade with my daughter and our friends. But word to Nintendo (and other design studios) that inattention to details such as these can make huge differences in the very nature of your game. And these are things that can definitely be teased out and discussed with the assistance of more diverse design teams.
