Kevin Rocha: Abstract for a paper on Smash Bros.

Mario Kart (Wii)

1. Debates have raged since video or computer games became mass market
commodities in the 1970s and 1980s about their social values: can computer games
teach? And if so, do they teach positive or negative values?
2. Janet Murray argues in her classic study of game and narrative, Hamlet on the
Holodeck (1998), that in fact digital games don't teach, say, either violence (from
their often violent imagery) or math or logical skills (from their underlying logical
programs), but rather, that digital games teach "agency": the power of individuals to
take meaningful action in the world around them, or on themselves. Yet simulating
"agency" can be a two-edged sword. Nick Yee more recently argues that adults who
work in offices where digital networks have become an everyday part of the work
world play massively multi-player online games in part because the games simulate
important aspects of the world they live in. But he notes that when the games'
require repetitive activities that are too much like the everyday work they do, these
players become bored, tire of the game, and stop playing.
3. These studies suggest an important question: if learning what agency means in
computer games translates to taking meaningful action in the everyday world
beyond games, why do so many games, even entire franchises, make use of comical,
fanciful, even adorable depictions of the game mechanics by which players score
points and advance to new levels? For instance, in games in the Super Mario
franchises, gamers routinely "curl up" as a racoon and bounce around the screen,
slide down impossible chutes, or engage in other "fantasy" activities that
nevertheless result in "real" advances in the game.
4. In this paper I draw on both Murray's and Yee's essays to argue that fantasy
depictions in games like those in the Mario franchise are crucial. On the one hand,
they are part of the ways in which these games allow complex goals to be reached
through simple tasks. On the other hand, the ways in which these fantasy game
mechanics (curling up as a racoon and bouncing around the screen to win points, for
example) are depicted is utterly unlike the ways in which we would break down
similar kinds of tasks in order to reach similarly complex goals in the worlds of
work or education.
5. The implications are valuable: games risk losing their quality of playfully depicting
agency so that this sense of agency can be translated to sites of work or learning
where mistakes, in fact, might count against us. The Super Mario franchise games in
particular provide game worlds between work and school, yet also definitively
separate from both.