I haven’t knocked the quality of the game’s user-made levels to shame the Mario Maker community or anything. Frankly, I think that so long as other people are having fun, it doesn’t matter how “good” uploaded Mario Maker levels are. Like I said in my review, the spirit of play cannot always be wrangled or parceled for consumption. But there’s a wider issue that Mario Maker highlights, too. Game design literacy is pretty abysmal,and we see the results of that in game-creation platforms like these. People have more practice taking photos and short movies with their phones than they do making games. Art terms for other media are more familiar to the average person. If I approached a stranger on the street and start talking about stuff like THE MAGIC CIRCLE or flow, I would expect to get funny looks. I’d be more confident talking to them about camera pans or good framing, even if they have no plans on making a film or taking up professional photography.

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That’s because there are widely-available tools that make those mediums accessible: anyone can pick up a point-and-shoot or a camcorder and start making things right away. Some schools even teach kids about film and photography tools from an early age.

Game design is pretty esoteric by comparison. For many people, Mario Maker likely be the first step toward achieving the same kind of knowledge proficiency in games. It may be a lot of people’s first camcorder, as it were. But it’ll likely take a while to get there. I do have confidence that we’ll get there, eventually. Perhaps some day we’ll even see big-shot game designers who credit their career to Mario Maker’s existence.

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A few years ago, I would have resigned myself to the idea that this is just how Mario Maker is going to be, forever and ever amen. Not in 2015. Nowadays, Nintendo actually patches their games to have significant tweaks. Splatoon and Smash Bros. are very different games in September 2015 than they were when they were originally released, and they continue to be living, breathing games. Perhaps the same thing will happen to Mario Maker. We might have a ton of levels that other people don’t want to play right now, but a few tweaks to the game’s interface from Nintendo could help with that.


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Contact the author at patricia@kotaku.com.