Mario is coming to a street near you. His latest outing, Super Mario Odyssey, was unveiled in a Nintendo trailer earlier this month, and shows the moustachioed plumber gleefully sprinting around a facsimile of New York, hopping over taxis and scaling skyscrapers. Elsewhere, he swings through dewy forests and slides through realistically animated streams. The angry, sentient plant pots may be slightly less believable, but that’s besides the point – Mario has been plucked from the multicoloured fantasy of the Mushroom Kingdom and dumped into our much less palatable reality.
Unfortunately for him he appears to have crossed dimensions at the worst possible time. Super Brexit Odyssey doesn’t sound like a very appealing venture, though Boris Johnson’s foppish faux-blustering would probably slot disturbingly easily into a fantasy game. In an ideal world, Donald Trump would remain a harmless parody of the boorish, hard-to-beat final boss in a video game; in the real world he is the newly inaugurated president of the United States, and already having a marked and negative impact on people’s lives.
His picks for cabinet have included a raft of ardent anti-choice climate change deniers, including a vice-president who supports “conversion therapy” for members of the LGBT community, and believes women should have to state in writing whether aborted or miscarried foetuses should be buried or cremated. The real world is currently looking pretty overrated.
And not only that, there will be no predetermined paths for Mario’s coin collection anymore. Unlike previous iterations of the game, which have taken place in set, closed-off levels, players will be able to roam a more open-ended world. Mario can cross roads, climb ladders, scale buildings and hitch a ride on taxis. That might sound like a good idea until you consider some of the political decisions made by the general public over the last year – maybe a lack of choice is good for us after all.
Tortuous analogies aside, there may be some genuine benefits to ignoring the real world in favour of unashamedly escapist entertainment. Games have long been posited to help with anxiety and stress: alongside bucketloads of anecdotal evidence, numerous studies have found positive links between gaming and mental health.
One, from the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, found that Tetris helped reduce stressful intrusive memories in patients with post-traumatic stress disorder. A study due to be published in March’s edition of the journal Computers in Human Behavior also found that games could encourage positive, co-operative, pro-social behaviour.
More evidence came in a 2012 study from Stanford University that found gamers “hyper-stimulating” the brain’s mesolimbic pathways (associated with goals and motivations) and hippocampus (linked to learning and memory).
In 2014, Dutch researchers suggested that gaming can “foster real world psychosocial benefits” – cognitive, motivational, emotional and social. There’s no lack of evidence to suggest the positive impact gaming can have, especially on someone experiencing low-level stress, depression or anxiety.
And while Mario might not have a depression level yet – arch-enemy Bowser approaching asking “Have you tried yoga?” and saying “Cheer up!” – a growing number of games have been designed with mental health in mind. For example Sparx, a game designed to help residents of New Zealand with depression, which builds upon gaming’s mental health benefits to create something therapeutically valuable as well as fun.
Comments about how rightwing authoritarian regimes create the best conditions for creativity are obviously facile, especially now: people rightfully fearing discrimination need more than limp, empty reassurance that they needn’t worry because music, games or books are going to get really good again. When artists such as Amanda Palmer – white, able-bodied, rich, and privileged – say things like “Donald Trump is going to make punk rock great again” it’s a frustrating distraction from the potentially horrifying realities of the situation.
But that’s not to say that escapism isn’t a valuable tool if used correctly. Playing Mario – or any other game – is obviously not going to make you less miserable about the realities of any given political climate. What it can do, though, is provide a small amount of respite when you’re feeling stressed about something or you just want to pretend that the real world doesn’t exist for an hour or two. Perhaps Nintendo should bear this in mind when they design the next set of adventures for Mario – next time, maybe he should spend less time in our world, and we should spend more time in his.
Mario, you crossed into our world at the worst time – it’s no game over here | Emily Reynolds
Hiç yorum yok:
Yorum Gönder