Nintendo hasn’t betrayed the hardcore gamers they created.

There, I said it and I’m glad.

However, it can be hard to reconcile Nintendo’s culture of accessibility with that position. It seems like every game gets a little easier and steals a little more agency from the player. Even the ridiculous fantasy that Nintendo’s games would play themselves has come true in New Super Mario Bros. Wii with the Super Guide. What’s a gamer to think when Nintendo picks up the controller for us and does all the hard stuff? Well, choke on your pride for a minute and listen to why the Super Guide might be a good thing.

Background
Before we get right into it, a little context is appropriate. The Wii has done for middle-aged gamers what the Playstation did for teenaged gamers. It identified an underserved market and focused on their needs. The Playstation served teens by incorporating mature themes and building on an existing gaming background to create a more sophisticated experience. The Wii recognizes that many players don’t share that gaming background, so it created a culture of accessibility that removes barriers to entry.

Both approaches piss off gamers on opposite sides of the fence. The Playstation excludes gamers who can’t or don’t want to learn 16-button controllers and simultaneous multi-button input. The Wii annoys expert gamers by devaluing those very skills. But hey, but you can’t make an omelet without ostracizing a few people, right?

Actually no. Only the Playstation approach excludes potential gamers. The Wii has been a runaway success among gamers who buy one or two games and play those games only infrequently. This is the kind of gamer who doesn’t have time to learn circle-strafing, let alone the niceties between the Kalashnikov and the AK-47. It’s just bad math; why spend a month learning to master something you do six times a year?

By contrast, the only thing keeping hardcore players from enjoying Wii games is pride. If you’ve spent years mastering the button inputs and finely-honed gameplay balance of Street Fighter games, it’s offensive to be confronted by the simpler gameplay and sloppier balance of Super Smash Bros. It’s not that Smash Bros. offers less action, weaker tactical gameplay, or impoverished strategy; it’s just offensively simple and undermines everything the hardcore have learned.

This is the difference between rich tools and rich mechanics. Street Fighter II maps six buttons to six variations on punching and kicking whereas Super Smash Bros. uses an analog stick and one button for the same job. Street Fighter‘s rich tools afford an unambiguous relationship between controller input and gameplay agency, but require much more initial investment to learn. Smash Bros. stacks multiple inputs onto just the stick and one button without reducing the mechanical complexity, so there’s less to learn up front for the same degree of gameplay agency.

This reveals a landmine in the culture of accessibility. Although the controls are much simpler in Smash Bros. than in Street Fighter, the game’s complexity is just the same. Nintendo’s strategy to entice casual gamers doesn’t simplify games, it just shifts the learning load to a more abstract stage. New and casual gamers who make the leap from simple controls to complex mechanics will be just fine, but those who don’t will have the same problem they did before. So how do you fix that?

Super Guide
Shigeru Miyamoto (founding father of Mario and Zelda) proposed a solution to this problem in New Super Mario Bros. Wii that he calls the Super Guide. New SMB Wii is a platformer of the old school. This means bottomless pits, swarming enemies, and low error tolerance. It’s something of an anomaly on the casual-chartered Wii.

After you’ve failed eight times on a single stage, a green Super Guide block will appear. Hitting the block will summon Luigi, and the second-string plumber will take over and show you how it’s done. That’s right, New SMB Wii is the first video game that plays itself while you watch. It’s like the last nail in the coffin for Nintendo’s credibility as game designers. I always thought that Hideo Kojima, or at least someone at Square Enix would be the first to strip interactivity out of video games, but it looks like Nintendo scooped them on that innovation.

Or at least that was my gut reaction when I first heard news of Miyamoto’s patent registration for in-game walkthroughs. However, Miyamoto is no moron, so it’s worth thinking through the Super Guide’s purpose.

If you’re a longtime gamer, you may never think about just how much you’ve learned about games. There’s an unspoken vocabulary of cues and conventions that scaffold you as you explore familiar genres. FPS veterans know that a red flash on the right-hand side of the screen indicates a gunshot from the right. Old hands at platforming immediately identify small rotating objects as useless collectible fobs. RPG experts know that when one path down a fork in the road will obviously advance the game, the other path leads to treasure. You weren’t born with this knowledge, you learned the conventions of video gaming at the same time that you acquired your 1337 controller skillz.

A player who hasn’t already learned the vocabulary of cues and conventions will make some bad guesses while learning to game. For example, when you encounter an alternating series of narrow platforms and gaps in New SMB Wii, you’ll probably know that you can just sprint across them without touching the jump button. However, 2D platforming neophytes often make the mistake of trying to jump from platform to platform, a strategy with a 50/50 shot of landing safely or plunging into the gaps. Worse yet, if you’re new to 2D platforming and playing solo, there’s no feedback to let you know that jumping from platform to platform is the dumbest strategy to pick. If anything, the past thirty minutes you just spent doing the same thing on other platforms reinforces the behavior. The only way to know that you’re incompetent is to be competent enough to recognize incompetence. More simply: you’re screwed and you don’t even know it.

So the inexperienced gamer who falls into the alternating gaps has actually failed twice. Deciding to jump rather than sprint across the gaps was a failure of strategy and missing the jump was a failure of performance. Correcting the performance failure is like learning the piano: you just have to practice until you get it. However, if you can get the player to recognize the alternating gaps as a conventional 2D platforming obstacle, you can get them to select the appropriate strategy and circumvent the performance failure entirely. So how do you frontload a decade of game conventions into a casual player?

A friendly gamer can do this for you. However, if you’re like me, you can’t round up a stable group to play Left 4 Dead, let alone always have someone to hold your hand when you’re playing oldschool platformers. You can also consult FAQs, but that assumes that a budding platforming fan both knows about resources like GameFAQs and is willing to wade through pages of wanton abuse of the English language. Given the alternatives, it’s almost a relief that Shigeru Miyamoto, in his infinite wisdom, can use his servant Luigi to show you the true path. Less reverently, the Super Guide gives you both a context and the correct response to long-established platforming obstacles.

There’s still an argument here about whether the Super Guide constitutes giving a man a fish or teaching him to fish. However, it probably falls closer to giving a man knowledge of how to fish and leaving him to have a crack at it. It may be cruelly insulting when a developer asks if you need a hand, but consider the outcome if the Super Guide achieves its mission. It will fast track inexperienced gamers on their way to acquiring hardcore skills and knowledge. That is, Nintendo is trying to brainwash casual gamers into becoming hardcore. That’s hardly an ignoble goal.

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