Len's Blog #1: YouTube videos of video games
Vicariously enjoying Super Mario Maker
Sometime in 2020, in the early days of the global pandemic, I watched enough clips of different people playing the same video game the same way (speedrunning Dark Souls) that the YouTube algorithm sought to improve my mental health by suggesting content related to other types of video games. One game that kept showing up in my recommended videos was Super Mario Maker, which I had never played before. I’ve still never played it, and I don’t really ever plan to. But in the last two years I have watched a lot of YouTube videos of people playing it.
Super Mario Maker lets players do two things: (1) design their own two-dimensional Super Mario levels using the basic building blocks from existing Mario games—objects, environments, power-ups, enemies, Bowser, Bowser’s family members—and (2) play levels online that were designed by other users.
Designing interesting levels seems tedious, and playing the interesting levels looks like it requires too much skill, so I haven’t ever really wanted to play the game myself. But I’ve found that YouTube videos of people playing Mario Maker have the perfect mix of variety (but also sameness), skill, problem-solving, appreciation for creative game design, derision of bad game design, and low-involvement drama to keep me hooked. I see now that I use these videos in pretty much the same way that many people use reality TV shows playing at low volume.
The content creators pushed on me by the algorithm mostly live-stream themselves playing higher-difficulty user-made Mario Maker levels on Twitch, then post 15 to 30-minute summary videos to YouTube with the boring parts edited out. I’ve followed a few of these streamers for varying lengths of time.
The first one I got into ended up losing me due to cringe-related reasons—he was too concerned with self promotion and search engine optimization, he tried really hard to tailor his content to teen viewers (he was not a teen), and he participated in a few embarrassing sponcon monetization schemes.
The YouTuber who I’ve stuck with the longest is much more chill, though he definitely has SEO in mind when he uploads videos.1 They are usually titled something in the vein of “I Got TROLLED By This Awful Level?” But this type of overwrought clickbait is almost a given for any somewhat successful video game streamer on YouTube. I just had to find someone with acceptable levels of cringe and little to no irritating online gamer qualities—behavior such as shouting into the mic, getting too mad at the game, and generally overreacting to stimuli.
I spent a lot of my time in college playing video games, usually on my friends’ game systems. In the years since then, I’ve played a lot less. I’m glad to be done with the mindless repetition and toxic (for me, anyways) competition of Super Smash Bros and online first-person shooters, like Overwatch and Halo. I do sometimes miss playing the Zelda games (especially Breath of the Wild) and Dark Souls, but my sleep schedule has improved now that I don’t give myself the option to get sucked into those endlessly fascinating worlds.2
I’ve only gotten into a few video games since then (ones that don’t require more processing power than my MacBook Air can handle), namely: Enter the Gungeon, a pixelated, top-down perspective shooter where all the enemies are cute little anthropomorphic bullets; Celeste, a 2D platformer with nice music where you jump on moving platforms to gradually climb a mountain, following a sparse storyline about mental health and self acceptance; and Hollow Knight, a 2D platformer where you play as a cute little undead bug and fight other cute little undead bugs while exploring a desolate subterranean bug kingdom. Hollow Knight has been my favorite game since Breath of the Wild, I highly recommend it.
More recently, I’ve replaced playing video games with watching a lot of movies. But I still get my fix of video game stuff by watching Mario Maker videos on YouTube, where I can experience—from a distance—the variety and chaos that comes when game design is handed over to the masses.
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Appendix
There is a specific lexicon used by the Super Mario Maker community on YouTube. Most of it was unintelligible to me at first. If you are interested, here is a basic glossary of terms that show up in an average Mario Maker video:
Hot Garbage (or Hot Trash) - describes levels that are badly or dishonestly designed, especially levels that use too many enemies in an uncreative way, that can be beaten easily by just holding right, or that use unfair level design methods, such as pick-a-path or a dev route (see below).
Clear Check - the fundamental law that governs every one of the millions of published user-made levels on Super Mario Maker is this: in order to upload a level to be played online, a level creator must successfully beat it first themselves as Mario (or Luigi, Toad, or Toadette). This successful attempt, or “clear check,” proves to the game that a level is possible to beat.
Pick-a-Path (or Pick-a-Door/Pipe) - when a level forces a player to decide between multiple exclusive paths with no information pointing to the correct path, where a wrong decision leads to certain death. This type of design artificially inflates the difficulty of a level, meaning the level is difficult for players to beat without sacrificing multiple lives, but easy for the level creator to beat during their clear check. It is frowned upon.
Dev Route (or Dev Exit/Key/Door/Pipe/Star, etc.) - a hidden path or power-up that the level creator, or “developer,” uses to beat their own level during the clear check, presumably because the apparent path for beating the level requires too much effort or skill. Dev routes are universally disliked. They are almost always concealed by the use of an “invisible block,” a little design element available to level creators that encourages so much mischief and subterfuge in the universe of Mario Maker levels that I’m surprised it made it into Super Mario Maker 2. But its existence does make the game more interesting from a casual YouTube viewer’s perspective.
Cheese - beating an entire level or skipping a section of a level using a route or method that the level creator did not intend. For example: “This gap doesn’t look that wide, if I brought a springboard from the other area, I could potentially cheese this level,” or “Getting this cheese is probably harder than beating the level the intended way, but I’m going for it anyway.”
Troll Level - a type of level that is designed around the idea of trolling the player, or tricking them into dying in surprising ways, punishing them for making seemingly common sense decisions, or playing (and especially replaying) annoying parts of a level that don’t necessarily lead to the goal. A troll level can be good or bad—a good one might have particularly clever or funny trolls, or it might somehow show the player the correct next step to take, even as it costs them lives.
PangaeaPanga on YouTube. He is a bit more laid-back than the other Mario Maker streamers I found, even when he lost his Endless Expert no-skips run to a triple shell-jump level with less than a hundred levels to go before hitting 2,000. R.I.P.
Don’t worry, I’ve developed plenty of new ways to damage my sleep cycle and productive output, like watching a ton of movies, YouTube, writing a blog post about watching YouTube, etc.