I don’t play video games anymore mainly because they interface badly with my addictive and obsessive tendencies, with irl return on the time spent slightly worse than, say, drinking alone… wherein I might in stupefied form at least, idk, realize something. Even so, I’m infected by certain games I’ve played in a way similar to favorite movies, novels, dreams, or trips, “as texts.” Where they differ from e.g. 210 page novels (“the 92-minute feature film of novels”) is in their embedding a subtle physical experience of play as part of their texts, in their taking at least ten times longer to tattoo onto my mind (at least 100 times longer in at least one case), and in the demonic demand for “rereading” I feel they present at least to me.
That said, I feel that Mario (i.e. “the entirety of Mario stuff”) is extremely important. It contains a generationally-significant new pantheon and at least three(!!!!!!) new media urtexts (SMB, SMW, M64). Its world-building is at least as large & lush as its nearest peers in popular fiction (LotR, SW, HP), but somehow without narrative or story being important or figuring in much at all… Mario is largely in the realm of abstraction. The simple presence of the characters, the color & design, the feeling of fun bouncy responsiveness… that’s the whole thing. The shared reading is derived from the characters as projectable/selectable as “myth-forms” (like Looney Tunes) and the individual but commonly-shared interaction with the gameplay’s physical “hand/eye” “UX”. The study(?) of this latter piece has been elevated to (and can be experienced as) worship or ritual magic… like if the tactile experience of reading a book was utterly unique to a given text, and came to supersede the the content of the text itself in importance. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, watch the incredible “SM64 – Watch for Rolling Rocks – 0.5x A Presses” (2016),” “Super Mario World — Credits Warp in 5:59.6 (First Time Ever on Console)” (2015), “The Greatest Super Mario Bros Speedrun Ever Just Happened” (2022), or “FIXING the ENTIRE SM64 Source Code (INSANE N64 performance)”, all on youtube (and all way more worthy viewing), and try to tell me this is different from Hildegaard von Bingen or Agnes Martin or whatever.
Unnnnnfortunately the Mario movie (2023) doesn’t really capture any of this good stuff. Instead it takes the characters, plops in some story and voices, deploys some “References,” and that’s p much it. I watched it totally alone in a theater in Edina with reclining La-Z-Boy style seats, stone sober, and I already don’t really remember it, except for Peach “wielding” a “halberd”, as if in a “Soulslike” “build,” which I saw as juttingly/interestingly not Mariolike. The voice acting situates these iconic characters in the moment in a way that awkwardly flattens their timelessness. The movie itself flattens the active experience of play to a passive one, but worse than watching some sibling or cousin or roommate at the controls, because even tho it may be fine that you’ll never get a turn, it feels terrible to know it’s impossible for anyone to improve, break, explore, perfect, or otherwise make any of it their own by unforeseen strategies, and then in that transformed/reborn way, yours in a new visionary one. Unfortunately instead, it just is what it is… normal-ass preexisting IP setting boring sail for movie franchise money waters, that I paid to see, but probably should have illegally downloaded three years from now.