Matt Bell is the author of How They Were Found as well as three chapbooks, Wolf Parts, The Collectors, and How the Broken Lead the Blind. His fiction has appeared in Conjunctions, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Willow Springs, Unsaid, and American Short Fiction, and has been selected for inclusion in anthologies such as Best American Mystery Stories 2010 and Best American Fantasy 2. His book reviews and critical essays have appeared in The Los Angeles Times, American Book Review, and The Quarterly Conversation. He is also the editor of The Collagist and of Dzanc’s Best of the Web anthology series.
His story “Mario’s Three Lives” was the first story solicited for RE:Telling.
Q:Super Mario Bros. just celebrated its 25th anniversary. Why do you think these game characters have remained so popular for so long? And what was your earliest experience with the game?
A: I think Mario had the good fortune of being tied to the real beginning of home video gaming in America. A lot of people had Atari, but seemingly everyone had a Nintendo or at least had friend who did. Because the game was packed in with the system, it ended up in every home that the system did, and many, many people—and this is always surprising to me, who was and is a fairly obsessive player—never buy very many other games. So everyone played Mario, and lots of it.
It was also very simple to learn, and difficult to master, which is the mark of many great games.
I actually never owned a Nintendo. We played a lot of games, but initially on the computer, first on the Commodore 64, then an Apple IIc, and then a series of progressively more impressive PCs. The first console we owned was a Turbografx-16, a less popular (but in some ways very impressive) contemporary of the SNES and the Genesis, which my dad brought home when the department store chain Hill’s went out of business. Because I didn’t have Mario at home, all of my early experiences with the game were at other people’s homes, which probably helped keep it and all of those other classic NES games more mysterious than they might otherwise have been.
Q: Your story “Mario’s Three Lives” finds Mario pondering God and his own will to play. His deference to the gamer becomes prayerful. Can you talk about the gamer/God dynamic?
A: When I was younger, I was a fairly devout Catholic, and I used to struggle with what I saw as the balance between the need to praise and the need to ask for forgiveness. It seemed that when you did something good, you were supposed to thank God for it, and when you did something wrong, you were supposed to ask forgiveness. Now I’m not saying that’s anybody’s proper theology except mine, but I know I used to find it particularly confusing, and then later off-putting, if it’s possible to be mad at God for something you maybe made up yourself. It seemed unfair for God to be mad at people for making a mess of things, if he’s the one who gave them the qualities that caused them to make the mess, and if he’s the one ultimately pulling the strings. This is all pretty basic “problems with free will,” of course, but it used to frustrate me quite a bit whenever I thought about it.
In the end, I still think my Mario is in the right: an omnipotent, all-knowing, all-seeing God who manages to treat you poorly as “part of God’s plan” shouldn’t be able to get mad when you mess up. In this particular metaphor, sending you to hell for your sins seems a lot like a child throwing a controller because he can’t get his avatar to do what he wants. After all, it’s not Mario’s fault when he falls in the fire, but the gamer’s.
Of course, I didn’t set out to put any of that into the story, but if it hadn’t started to appear maybe there wouldn’t be much there at all. So I suppose I’m lucky it did. Certainly it would have been a lot harder thing to touch on in a more realist story. It’s even a lot harder thing to describe here, in plain talk.
Q: What story elements of the game appeal to you most? Or, in general, what gamer narrative elements appeal to you?
A: I talked about this a little bit at our panel we did on retellings at &NOW in 2009 (it’s amazing that’s already so long ago), and I think my answer is still about the same: One of the reasons video games are ripe for retelling (especially these older games with much simpler stories) is the same reason so many myths and folk tales and legends can be retold. There’s a certain blankness or emptiness in them that creates a container than can hold an awful lot of other things. In games, this is often caused by the why behind the game’s plot rarely being explicit. Mario’s a good example: In the original NES game, all you really need to know to make the whole game go is that Mario wants to save the Princess, and that the Princess is in another castle.
I wonder how many people knew even that much when they first loaded up World 1-1. I’m not sure I did. It might have been even simpler: You could only go to the right, and so you went right, and everything else that happened after followed from that simple constraint.
In certain more contemporary games, you get a lot more motivation and access to the interior life of the character you’re playing, and that prevents the same kind of insertion from happening. There’s less of that kind of imagining you can do yourself, for better or worse. Personally, I like both ways: I’m happy to spend fifty hours in an RPG learning every detail of a character’s backstory and feelings and then watching their growth over the course of an adventure, but I’d be lying if there wasn’t still more than enough in far simpler stories. “The Princess is another castle” goes a long, long way with me.
Q: My kids are really into the late-80s Super Mario Bros. TV show, which streams via their Wii. It’s awful, part cartoon and part live action. Captain Lou Albano plays Mario. He can’t act. And there are lyrics to the Mario Bros. music. My question: Why do you think it’s so bad? The game is so good, but the TV show and the movie (with Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo) are just awful. (I think it might have something to do with dialogue, that the characters are meant to be mute. So when Lou Albano says something like, “holy stromboli,” the character is destroyed. What do you think?)
A: I’ve never seen either the TV show or the movie, although I’m familiar with the basics of both. I think the muteness is part of it, and I think that relates to the simplicity/blankness I mentioned above. It’s somewhat like the simplicity of fairy tales: It’s enough in Little Red Riding Hood that there’s a girl going to see her sick grandmother, and that there’s a wolf with a penchant for disguises who wants to eat them both. You don’t need or want more motivation or backstory than that. Every single thing you explain diminishes the magic. Super Mario Bros. works in a similar way. Do I know why mushrooms make Mario bigger? Nope. Do I know why they’re kept inside glowing bricks, or why if Mario is already big, then the bricks contain a glowing flower instead? No idea. And it’s totally fine not to know! It never even occurs to me to want to. But as soon as you start explaining any of that—as soon as you start giving Bowser political motivations, or explaining how Mario and the Princess were childhood sweethearts—you start filling that beautiful blankness with all kinds of trite, worn-out material, and you also start giving me all kinds of entry points into doubt and disbelief, and then the magic is over. Explanation seems almost always to be the enemy of emotion in fiction, and I don’t see why it’s effect should be any different in video games.
Q: What’s up next for you?
A: My next book will be out in 2012, although it hasn’t officially been announced yet. Soon! Beyond that, I’m working on rewriting what will hopefully be my first novel (my first published one, anyway). It’s all I’ve really done since last January, and I’m reasonably happy with the progress. It’s a slow thing though, and I might be at it quite a while still. Hopefully in between drafts I’ll get the chance to write a shorter piece or two: I’ve been in novel mode a long time, and I’m missing working on stories.
