Super Mario in the Playground

For me, one of the biggest rewards of belonging to The Association for the Study of Play is the discovery of stories like the following, from John Darwin Dorst, author of The Written Suburb: "In this game, he says, "the participants devoted much recess time to moving around the playground and acting out the sort of encounters and events that characterize the video game Super Mario Brothers, then the most popular electronic game among these boys. In their roving play they encountered and surmounted obstacles and barriers, fought a variety of dangerous creatures, acquired 'artifacts' that gave them enhanced powers, entered 'Warp Zones' that allowed them special movement and traversed boundaries from one imagined world to another. Though the ultimate object of the actual Nintendo game is to rescue a princess, the playground game was not particularly goal oriented. The point seems to have been the imaginative, improvisatory elaboration of the videogame structure itself. And that means in their play the boys included such things as putting themselves 'On Pause,' freezing the action as one can do with a button on the electronic control. This allowed for trips to the bathroom and other diversions. Also, they would devise theme melodies for the various 'worlds' they created, humming the appropriate tune as they moved about the imagined space of 'Ice World,' for instance."

Brian Sutton-Smith alerted me to this story. He is a founding member of TASP, long-time friend and mentor, and author of the oft-quoted: "The opposite of play is not work. It is depression."