“Broadening one’s horizons” doesn’t always translate into an unequivocally good thing.

When keeping it real goes wrong, yuletide edition.

In grappling with the truth that confronts me, in all of its profanely greasy textures… the one involving the essence of what makes Mario Kart World the kind of racer it really is, I’m finding it difficult to look beyond the immediate differences between the newest iteration from Nintendo’s Switch 2 offering, and Mario Kart Tour, the previously released mobile iteration. Partly because I still haven’t moved on from Tour, and thusly am playing two Mario Karts at the same time, which makes me feel like a million fucking dollars, to have such a wealth of good choices to pick from, but ultimately, there would be no interesting dialogue to be had, nor worthwhile deconstruction that follows, if we merely said both were good enough and moved on with our lives.

While being a hilariously “zenesque dude-like” way to live, I am not feeling particularly self-negating at the moment, so we will have to travel beyond “good enough ” to discern more of what separates World vs Tour, in breaking down the differences involving their pros and cons. In pondering on my first article, I realized I was positing World was “defanged”, and that the wild was willed out of it, much like one sees with the domestication of a species of animal over a long enough time of where breeding is concerned. This kind of “virtualized domestication” is a design trend one sees across most video game series, given a long enough timeline, almost in a naturalistic sense of movement, the design improving with the tech itself over time. Another source of consideration, in this continual domestication of sorts, is a want to reach a larger number of people, meaning the skill ceiling is generally lowered, and entry level capabilities floor heightened, so the entire demographic of those playing the title will be bottle necked into a tighter formation, narrowing the spread of average player skill, helping to “equalize” the meritocracy of the metagame. Adding in a final piece of the puzzle, the quality of life that helps to decrease the lack of frustration involved for more casual players, and you’ve thus completed the circle of “virtual domestication”, making what was once exotic and untameable, and paired it down into a yippie little chihuahua, more bark than bite.

This is of course not necessarily an objective truth, unbending in its assertion to every gaming series ever, as there sometimes remains more of a sanctity of original spirit found in the continual maintenance of the series, in regards to any mindful developer acting as the good shepard would, or even a push and pull of pendulum swinging experimentation that more curious series will contend with, but overall, I see the “virtual domestication” of video games series happen on a fairly frequent basis, and it most certainly has been happening in the world of Mario Kart…arguably for the last twenty years even, since the moment Nintendo realized their profund regret in letting something like “snaking” being left in Mario Kart DS as a possible ability to turn the tide of competition on more skilled players hehalves.

I think one of the most obvious contributions to this virtual domestication of World overall, is the “upsizing” of the games premise, going from the mission statement of hyper-focused dopamine gaming of the most curated sense of possibility (Tour), to the expansive inclusiveness that comes with the broadening of horizons found in both literal and metaphorical ways we see in World. This comes in the way of literal expansion, and a demogrification of values repurposed, through the very reconstructing of the playing field, the dimensionality from Tour to World becoming a broader playing field, once again, in more than one conceivable manner.

Annoyingly, I’m out of time with which to extrapolate further about the differences. Till tomorrow, then.

-Pashford