The Patreon Letters - 04th November 2017

Hey there, friends!

It's Jackson here with another Patreon letter! After this week we'll be all back to normal and me and M will be alternating weeks once more, just like it was written in ancient times, by the precursor race. You know, video games.

This past week I've been primarily doing two things. One: playing the brand new Mario Video Game, in stores now for the Nintendo Switch, and two: feeling my brain collapse into tiny little pieces. These two things are not causally related but they are connected somewhat, so this is going to be a letter in two parts. And I'm sorry it's up a little later than usual, writing about Brain Shit takes it out of me, it's why I do it very rarely these days. Let's go. 

1`. The Video Game

Super Mario Odyssey is, by any reasonable measure, an incredibly well made video game. Barring some motion control weirdness, Mario is a joy to control, the act of pressing buttons to jump is second to none. It feels good to jump, it feels even better to chain a butt-stomp into a cappy throw into a wall jump into a cappy throw into a dive into- and so on, you get the idea. Perhaps more than even Mario 64, Odyssey is defined by the joy of movement for movement's sake, with extremely few obstacle courses, challenge levels, and tests of increasing mechanical complexity, which have come to define the design of 3D Marios in recent years.

To progress in 64 and Sunshine, the games Nintendo is positioning as prior entries in the "exploration based Mario" series , you select a Star or a Shine, and must route through the level a certain way in order to complete the objective and collect your reward. The levels were open, but the goals themselves were substantial and directed. In Mario 64, you could even break sequence and collect stars other than the one you had selected, leading to these fantastic moments where you really feel like your understanding of the space, your body, and your abilities gave you a leg up on the game. One of my favourite moments in 64 was launching myself off the side of Tall Tall Mountain and landing directly on to the Star on the Lonely Mushroom. 

In Odyssey, each kingdom usually has a semi-directed path through one main objective, which leads to the level's boss. You are presented with very simple platforming obstacles, and asked to become familiar with that level's main capture in order to traverse the environment. You fight a boss, you win, you get the moon. However, this main path will never get you enough moons to progress, and you must explore the Kingdom for more, and there are a seemingly infinite amount. Odyssey understands how powerful that moment of getting the Star off the mushroom is, and so the game is built around small moments of "oh, is this possible?" and then "yes! hell yes!"

Moons are hidden in places which seem impossible to reach, every platforming course has a bonus moon off the beaten path, you get moons for inventive uses of the mechanics. A lady goomba waits on a raised platform, there are regular goombas further back in the level. You capture the goombas, build them into a tower (you can build goombas into a tower), and when you bring this tower face to face with the lady goomba, she bursts with hearts and lets out a Moon. The first time this happened, it felt amazing. The second time I saw a lady goomba, I thought "oh time to make a tower." 

All this builds up to a game which feels incredible to control, rewards expressive, inventive and curious play, and that I walked away from feeling somewhat... hollow. To play Odyssey is to experience the rush of discovery for a few hours, and then to actively feel that joy slip away as what began as something warm and delightful becomes a a checklist of objective types as you make your way through collecting all the moons. I was complaining a little about this to M over skype, and they laughed and said "you just described video games."

2: The Part Where I Talk About My Brain

And they're totally right! It's a new Mario game, it has a different approach to level design, and completing objectives feels more like a metered release of trinkets than "beating" levels, but those are - in the scheme of things - minor changes. You do the jumps to make the number go up to do more jumps. It's a him, Mario.

While there's a lot to talk about in the way that the design of the game itself affects the player - and I do have a lot more thoughts on that, for another time - I think far more detrimental is the way we play games as people in Games Culture, capital G capital C. I got to the final boss in four days, mostly in a mad rush to avoid as many spoilers as possible (unsuccessfully). This is not how to play the game. Mario Odyssey is designed to be poked at, these diorama worlds with Moons you'll discover and collect over time. The bitesized feedback loop of collecting Moons can feel like this perfectly tuned dopamine drip feed, but it's also reflective of the fact that this is also a handheld game, to be played a little before bed, on the train, etc. etc. You load it up, you get a moon, you get on with your life.

None of these approaches are compatible with logging onto games twitter every day, which exhausts new games within weeks if not days of their release. This is basically a follow up to last week's letter, where I used spoilers as a lens to look at how our social spaces are designed to encourage us to engage with media in a certain way. But in doing that this week, it had a very real mental toll on me. It genuinely got to the point where I was having panic attacks just thinking about playing Mario Odyssey because I had built it up into something I had to get through, something I had to avoid the big surprises on, something which I had to have a cohesive Take to contribute to the conversation. I was so physically anxious about this stuff that I knew didn't matter that I was basically unable to enjoy playing the game itself.

Obviously, this doesn't happen to everyone! I have autism, severe anxiety and OCD. I have a brain hard-wired to fuck my entire shit up over nothing, and the UK Government cut the budget for my mental health support over a year ago. Please don't read this as me saying "video games are making me crazy," they're not. I was born crazy, baby. But I feel the online spaces I spend my time in having an adverse affect on my mental health and I know I'm not alone in this. If anyone reading this feels anything similar, please send me an @ and let me know, because it sucks!

Mario's fine, it's just a video game. These are all just video games. We're trying to stay afloat in a world that feels increasingly harsh and uncaring, and it's fucking terrifying. There's no reason that the shit we do to unwind has to become a part of that mental cycle too. I love you all, and I'll see you in a couple of weeks.

Jackson <3