Super Mario World for the Super Nintendo may have been the first game to provide the player with a true experience of meaningful play. The game focuses on Mario who is on a rescue mission for Peach, the princess. On the way Mario encounters many bosses and enemies that he must fend off to meet the ultimate boss and captor of Peach, Bowser. However Mario also has help from Yoshi, his lovable dinosaur, several types of power-ups, and Luigi in co-op play. Looking at the article entitled narrative in the video game by Mark J. P. Wolf we can apply its ideas directly to Super Mario world. Super Mario Brothers is a diegetic story, meaning it is a cohesive story with characters and a narrative that has a beginning, middle, and end. Super Mario World is a very interactive game, the game includes many secret levels and to drive the player mad only has a 99 percent completion. Each level is a circle on the main map this circle can tell the player a lot about the level, if the level is yellow on the map it only has one exit, if the level is red it has two exits. For a first time player this takes some time to discover from the map you can also tell if the level is in water or in a cave depending on its circle, obviously blue equals a water level and brown rocks equals a cave level. Looking again at the interactivity of the game and its meaningful play we can define Mario himself, Mario is a “’Player –characters” who are the main, goal-oriented agents in the game, and who are said to “win,” “lose,” or score points. The player-character is the human player’s surrogate character in the games diegetic world; games with multiple human players have multiple player-characters.” This is Mark Wolf’s definition of the Mario and Luigi, they are played by you and they gain points and items and they inevitably save Peach from Bowser through your playing. Peach and the baby dinosaur yoshi’s you gain after each boss on the other hand are “computer-controlled incidental characters which move the game along but are not “players”… they are not goal-oriented in the same way as the player-characters; they cannot win or lose. After each boss level you save a Yoshi egg, this egg introduces you to the next map and gives you hints in the game. Peach being your final goal does nothing but end the game she is the goal and helps keep the game moving along. Mario does not challenge our definition of video game, in every sense that it what the game it, a story with an end which you must play in order to see the “video”. You don’t need to open all the secret levels in Super Mario World to save the princess, the extra levels leave are made to challenge the experienced player to find and complete. These levels only add an extra level to the game, by opening Star Road you can gain short cuts to the main map so commuting from section to section is easier. After completing Star Road you open the Special World which includes levels named Awesome and Radical. All these levels give you are a big headache because of their difficulty and after completely every level with each exit some of the enemies and backgrounds change colors. The bonus worlds are just there to add complexity to the game it does not affect the narrative in any sense, it’s just there for the obsessive compulsive gamer who won’t out down their controller until they have 100 percent or in this case 99 percent. Super Mario World was an original genre it was a totally new type of game, its genre was original and today it is repeated by many games .Mario was the first game to have several sequels made and Mario was remediated into movies, books, and a television show. The narrative in Mario was simple but it was solid, Mario changed the video game industry and its narrative still sparks many creators’ minds with ideas for games today.
