Process Piece - Super Mario Bros (NES) Speedrun

HOW TO SPEEDRUN Super Mario Bros (NES) - FIRST TWO STAGES

Process Piece Artist Statement

Like The Smokehouse, the process we depicted is essentially a recipe developed over time through experimentation into a refined form. Our process is speedrunning Super Mario Bros. for the NES (the first two levels of the World Record speed run as of October 20, 2017. The principle quality our work brings out is the tension between play and rules that exists in games. Eric Zimmerman’s essay Narrative, Interactivity, Play, and Games, defines play as, “the free space of movement within a more rigid structure.” Play is whatever you can do when you start up a game of Mario and start running/jumping around. Rules are the rigid structure which restricts play. 

Most importantly, a game is a, “voluntary interactive activity, in which one or more players follow rules that constrain their behavior, enacting an artificial conflict that ends in a quantifiable outcome.” Mario is a voluntary interactive activity in which one player progresses to the right, running and jumping to overcome obstacles within a time limit and without the ability to return to the left after the screen has scrolled forward. The player must complete 8 levels, but they may skip levels if they find secret shortcuts. The player begins with 3 lives, but they may earn extra lives through the accumulation of coins or discovery of 1-Up mushrooms.

A normal player would navigate the structure of rules with any of the following goals: winning, fun, or challenge. Playing to win is then interesting because the free play of how you play within the rigid structure lets the player try new strategies when they fail or when new challenges present themselves. Playing for fun is interesting because the player is engaging heavily in free play, making choices for their own sake, seeing what happens or enjoying the sensations in themselves. Playing for challenge is especially interesting because every option of play is weighed against the structure of rules, testing which options work or which options the player wants to make work. This is where a speedrun of Mario comes in.

Speedrunning Mario takes playing for challenge to its most pragmatic conclusion. It does away with style or goofing off. In the name of speed, it shaves away everything unessential. It hones play until play reveals the rules. Play and rules become just about the same thing.

There are multiple processes at work here. At the highest level, there is the process of us translating a speedrun into a recipe of sound cues. Down one level, a speedrunner executes a series of practiced game inputs more flawlessly than anyone else before him. Before that, he practiced Mario a mind numbing number of times with serious focus. Before that, a bunch of other people practiced Mario figuring out how to finish it as fast as possible through combined effort and experimentation. And finally before that, a team of Nintendo employees designed and built the game through a process of experimentation and technical refinement.

Speedrunning is a process of refining Mario down to a recipe of near perfection, exact inputs that lead to a determined result. The process of building a pioneer style smokehouse is similarly the end result of a process of experimentation and refinement that ended in a set process of smokehouse construction. Likewise, the recipe for fish smoking follows this pattern. Speedrunning Super Mario Bros. might appear at surface level a completely different process from pioneer survival methods, but at its core, it reflects the same larger process of refinement through free play in the face of rigid structures.