Mario Kart World: At the Starting Line

Where was I?


Ah yes…Nintendo having a cow (man).

At least, doing a dressing down of Mario Kart World for the Switch 2 is of a severe interest to me, but I’m sometimes guilty of needing to warm up a bit first before I can get directly to the matter at hand. I’ve had “business down south” as of late, which is more or less my unnecessarily cryptic way in referring to an extended gaming sabbatical, as it were. Not a break away from gaming, mind you, but a break from writing about gaming, which you’d think were not entirely separated modes of being, though I take the time now to reexamine the notion as to why. I think the very essence of play is vital to the grandeur of human endeavor, and has a deep relevancy in filling this abstract void within the self, rejuvenating an individual in ways hard to describe without sounding like a completely pretentious wanker without doing so, but here we are. I think it’s important to display humility and ratify a sense of humor in any matter as much as it is worthwhile to take serious what we often don’t consider thoroughly enough, hence my address of the realities involving the different modes of play and engaging with gaming in a myriad of ways.


Some ways of engaging more compelling than others

To wit; I also think one of the difficulties of writing about games is that it changes the frame of reference of how one plays them, which is a radical notion to me when I really stop to consider the details involved in any in-depth degree. I don’t think it’s a dubious claim to suggest writers need to frame their efforts in scribing the world through some kind of pre-established narrative, at this moment now considering what an authentically “anarchist” way of writing would even look like…if such a thing were even possible. In the case of Mario Kart World, which when boiled down to its finer elements, would be considered a sports related title, it still brings forth the notion that even in competitive sports reporting, or maybe very much so in a credit to competitive sports reporting, one is always attempting to magnify or articulate a narrative when sharing the content through their own perception to the crowd at large. A purely mathematical pretense in describing the events would come off as psychotic, I would speculate, and would rob the players and their spectators of the very humanity that makes the game even function on a basic social level.


Truth is relative: there is no race without the non-racers

Which ties nicely into my trepidation in writing about Mario Kart World, even though my lack of writing about games has really only been a few weeks. For anyone who’s followed me for long enough, thats a pittance to the sometimes months and even years away from the keyboard I’ve taken in terms of just thinking, playing, and being away from the keyboard. I’ve continued to consider both a contextual narrative for gaming and writing about play itself, and discussing the metaphysical realities therein and relationally speaking to things even as silly as a cow grinding on a rail with a kart, or about the notions involved with the humanity at play in something that seems as by the numbers and basic as Mario Kart tends to be. Seeing elements within the gameplay footage of MKW, like the open world geography, brings forth the essence of Nintendo doing the complete opposite of what they pulled off with Mario Kart Tour, in that instead of distilling the MK experience into the smallest idea possible, they wanted to really open the premise up and go as broad as imaginable, continuing to borrow from the hyped zeitgiest that has permeated their brand as a knock on effect from the lingering excitements that the Breath of the Wild strategem has provided for their catalog since the calamity occurred.


Life changing, to say the least

Which may sound quite disjointed to some, referencing events hither and thither that carry referential rapport, and conjuring thematics of possible revelatory status to the subject at hand, one that within its code and most reductionist sense of self, begets the notion of humanity thriving through the essence of a bloviating bovine, and all the anthropomorphizing that goes on there after, but a kart race is more than the sum of its parts, and therefore possesses a deeper dimensionality just as much as a cow is more than simply the context of its moo, transformed by both its surroundings, its observers, its relevancy to the structure of the function of the race, the avatar of the player, the controller of a kart, and the competitor in an event. The cow becomes the conduit through which we experience the simulacrum of Nintendo’s hegemony, all of which we become apart of through the mere spectacle of commerce distilled, the witnessed and the testified all benchmarks of the race won before even the starting line was crossed.

~Pashford