Found a post on a forum I frequent bemoaning the presence of a full $60 price tag for the upcoming Super Mario Maker, a game that, funnily enough, involves designing one’s own Mario platforming levels. At first I didn’t think such a complaint was well-founded. I myself am really looking forward to trying it out; it looks to be a full-fledged editing tool that incorporates almost every potential element in the thirty-year history of the franchise. There’s not really anything bad about that, is there? Why gripe about the price?
But I admit, I thought about it a little more, and I can see how one might have (dry) bones to pick with whoever decided to slap the full price on the game. Consider: what we’re going to be paying for with SMM is largely the ability to produce content of our own. Don’t get me wrong, the editor looks fun and well-put together, the stuff of User-Generated Content legend; and there are still going to be pre-designed levels included in the game. But I can’t help but agree at least a little bit with the sentiment that Nintendo is shirking design duty this time around.
I think it’s an easy but fatal mistake to assume that game development is basically just coding and animation, maybe some fitting audio to round it all out. Even with all the aesthetics and technical underpinnings, there’s a very important component to actual interactivity, and that’s design. Here, I’m not referring to the aesthetics of a game, like the character art or texture detail. With games, design can mean something else: the deliberate arranging of all the aforementioned devices according to a certain vision.
Sometimes, especially in a modern context of deep narratives and painstakingly constructed 3D models, roles like playtesting, level layout, mechanical balance, and difficulty tuning seem like an afterthought. It’s easier to excuse their absence now that we have the technology to wrap games up in prettier packaging. Necessity is the mother of invention – or to put it in terminology more apt for games, constraints are the foundation of creativity. When all you really had to sell your game was the design, you had to make doubly sure it worked.
Design, more than any other part of the process, is what determines the player’s assessment of “this is fun!” Design is just as much a determinant of the game’s spirit as the narrative tone or the color scheme (just look at how much the identity of Super Meat Boy is driven by incredibly well-iterated platforming challenges). Design marries Mr. Mechanic to Miss Aesthetic and serves you cake at the reception.
So when you put out a title like Super Mario Maker and charge as much for it as any game that does include design as a cornerstone, you’re implicitly attaching zero value to the process of tuning and assembling the artwork and code. You’re explicitly handing your customer a wrench and some auto parts and saying “build your own car” before charging them the same price as if they had bought a brand new one from a dealer.
And there’s even a way in which the latter is a good thing. For all the aspiring game developers who will be making their own in a few years, it’s hard to imagine a better way than Mario Maker to enter the world of game design (especially in the context of a genre that’s largely faded into obscurity as far as the mainstream is concerned). And it’ll force a lot of people to think about the effort that goes into making a truly great game more than the sum of its parts. Who knows – maybe it’ll cause more value to be ascribed to design rather than less because it can’t be taken for granted this time?
I’m not trying to say that Mario Maker is a bad idea, or even that it’s not necessarily worth the price of admission. The point here is that it’s not really a game so much as an editing tool. If you deceive yourself that you’re essentially just purchasing more of the same as an amusing diversion, then that’s when you’re truly missing out on one of the most important and essentially fun steps in any development cycle.
Gems and Relics 