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By Nelson Schneider - 11/15/15 at 08:37 PM CT
On September 11, 2015, Nintendo released their answer to the fantastic Indie game, “Super Mario Bros. X.” Their effort, a little WiiU game called “Super Mario Maker” has managed to attract a significant following by demystifying the world of ‘Mario’ ROM-hacks.
Now anyone can easily build and upload their own custom ‘Mario’ stages for all the world to see… except the world generally won’t see them at all. Unfortunately, Nintendo managed to implement the sharing process in their new game in such a way that momentum and viral marketing are the only ways for would-be ‘Mario’ designers to get their ideas in front of eyeballs.
Over at ArsTechnica, Gaming Editor, Kyle Orland did us all a favor and created an array of graphs detailing the way “Super Mario Maker” stages shake out by popularity (with popularity leading directly to Stars, which unlock the ability to upload more stages at once and make existing stages easier for players to find). The disheartening findings reveal that – among other things – only 10% of the Top 50 “Super Mario Maker” stages are even attempts at re-creating that ‘Mario’ magic that made the series such a success in the first place. The rest fall back on annoying gimmicks, copying existing ‘Mario’ stages, or trolling players with un-fun difficulty.
Orland’s research also revealed that the top-rated stage creators in “Super Mario Maker” are by-and-large people who started uploading stages on launch day. When their stages were among the few available, they garnered a lot of attention (via Plays and Stars), and that initial push of attention in the uncrowded sharing space has buoyed them to the tops of the rankings ever since.
With the in-game state of stage sharing in a vicious cycle of popular stages staying popular because they are popular, many “Super Mario Maker” players have turned to social media with their creative efforts in an attempt to go viral. Pathetically, “Going Viral” has become the marketing fad of the day, with even huge “AAA” game publishers falling into the trap of believing that one viral success would be more desirable than the long-haul, reputation building they’ve traditionally maintained (case in point, all of the Japanese publishers abandoning the console market to go mobile). Orland’s article doesn’t really touch on the virulence of “Super Mario Maker” stages, but the comment section managed to fill in the gaps with some theories of their own: Specifically that the only people who will be able to make their stages popular virally are the same people who are already virally popular as YouTube/Twitch personalities.
It’s depressing to see that the cultural phenomenon of “Going Viral” is really just leading us back toward the ancient phenomenon of the Cult of Personality. I find it hard to imagine the gamers of the ‘80s and ‘90s turning into fawning sycophants for a person who played games on TV… but it’s a brave new world, and it looks like we’re going to have to deal with YouTube/Twitch personalities until the phenomenon dries up. Unfortunately, considering the staying power of reality TV and the vast sums of money that flutter around talentless, banal ‘reality stars,’ things are definitely going to get worse before they even have a chance of getting better.
And through it all, people will keep playing terrible/stupid “Super Mario Maker” stages because other people have played them or because they were created by someone with a name, while good, fun, classic-style ‘Mario’ stages will remain difficult – if not impossible – to find. Maybe I’ll go back to “Super Mario Bros. X.”
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