I’ve been watching a lot of Super Mario Maker 2 recently, speedruns and Let’s Play’s and livestreams. It’s a great game, with a great community built around it. It’s mechanics-heavy, but its difficulty curve is only as high as you set it. It’s a nostalgia piece with roots in the 1980’s, but it’s also a modern take on content creation, akin to what YouTube does for video. Collaboration on best strategies is common, and necessary for high-skill levels. Perhaps the most interesting thing to note of this community is its emergent lexicon: with time a language has developed between players to denote the specific problems and challenges the game has to offer. The Shell Jump, The Reclaim, the triumph and dismay of CP1: each of these designate common, recognizable situations in SMM2. This all adds up to a completely gorgeous game, simple enough for an elevator pitch and rich enough for thousands of hours of play, if you’re into this kind of thing.
My favored sub-genre is the Kaizo, originating in the modding community around Super Mario World. These levels tend toward extreme difficulties, completable only with immense platforming skill and careful knowledge of mechanics from the players who dare attempt them. Mischief is a theme here for creators, with hidden Kaizo blocks to stunt a player’s jump, or surprise enemies dashing into the player from off-screen. Altogether the sub-genre makes for a punishing but rewarding challenge, with discovery as a pillar of gameplay. Failure is expected, and in fact integral to finishing a given level.
The rules, or lack thereof, governing this grand repository of custom levels make for a chaotic player experience. Through-lines are non-existent, which might be expected given the Super Mario source material: Nintendo has never been a storyteller’s game company. (Fight me, Zelda fans.) Ultimately all a creator must do to prove his level worthy of Mario canon, is to complete the level himself. Depending on his creation, this task can take quite a few tries, with some claims of trial runs taking many hours. After all, particularly with Kaizo levels, difficulty is a goalpost.
But with this high skill demand, a trend has appeared among certain levels. Some creators, upon crafting an excruciatingly-painful course, find they cannot complete the level themselves. So in pursuit of truly mythic difficulty, they resort to a much-maligned alternative: the Dev Exit. The Dev Exit is a hidden path that allows for finishing a course without traversing its more treacherous straits. Perhaps a secret vine allows the creator to scale a wall and run over the top of the level. Or maybe an arbitrary enemy holds the key to a door that drops you right beside the finish line.
Using a Dev Exit creators can publish truly insane levels, to the consternation of Kaizo players. And indeed players tend to deride these alternative paths as cheatey, or disingenuous in nature. There is a feeling of reciprocity in a creator completing the troublesome level they created, some meritocratic respect from the community. In this way a Dev Exit isolates its creator from Kaizo players, a stranger looking in rather than a paying member. But given the simple requirements for publishing a level, there is no true penalty for using a Dev Exit in your level. Nintendo has no policy against this phenomenon, and the best a player who discovers a Dev Exit can do is downvote the level.
To some, the ramifications for this kind of laissez faire governance is a poisoned player experience. In lieu of difficult-but-possible platforming, players must sometimes attempt levels that simply cannot be finished in the proposed way. This thought devours some players, making them suspicious whenever they cannot make a jump, or dodge a fireball. Justified Difficulty feels more like impossibility when every level might harbor a Dev Exit, and without Justified Difficulty you cannot have Kaizo. But I think these disillusioned Kaizo players are in the minority, and indeed the Dev Exit is one of the more telling components of Super Mario Maker culture. In this community, players have not taken it upon themselves to boycott devs who use Exits. Instead, as when facing the challenge of the Shell Jump, the Reclaim, or the inevitable Kaizo Block, these players carefully learn the mechanics therein. As with any SMM2 problem worth solving, there are telltale signs of a Dev Exit’s presence, conspicuous rooms where hidden blocks should be or difficulty spikes that suggest alternative paths. Community assistance is paramount as with other mechanics. And with practice, strong players and competent creators can spot secret exits as soon as they enter a room. This in turn leads to more obtuse Dev Exits, and eventually new strategies for players spotting them. The cycle of creator-player culture continues.
The common theme of the Kaizo is certainly its dedication to extreme difficulty. But I think it bears repeating that mischief is its sub-theme, as vital to its challenge as humor is to a dramatic film, or salt is to a great dessert. And when dealing with a mischievous creator, the best one can do is learn to recognize the mechanics, and with practice discover how to overcome them. The Dev Exit does not mark the end of the Kaizo: rather it should have been expected from its definition.
--Jingleheimer-- 