A Fictional World

One of the only video games I know how to play is the game Mario Kart. Mario Kart, I would say, is a gender neutral game, whereas some games like Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty are more drawn to the male gender.

Mario Kart is a series of go-kart style racing video games developed and published by Nintendo as a spin-off from its trademark Super Mario series. This is a game full of different fictional characters as well as fictional race tracks. It started off in its original says with the original 8 characters and than continued to grow and add more fictional characters. The game can take place in a city, in a town square, in a mall, in an ice land, or even on a rainbow. The first article we read says this, "Such fictional game worlds, obviously, do not actually exist, they are worlds that the game presents and the player imagines" (121).

Mario Kart is obviously not reality, it is just a reality created for us by the creator and carried on by imagination. The question is...what kind of worlds we find in games and how games cue players into imagining worlds?

Jesper-Juul comes to a conclusion that there are five main types of video games: Abstract games, Iconic games, Incoherent world games, Coherent world games, and staged games. I believe Mario Kart falls under the category of Incoherent world games and this is why.

An incoherent world game is one with a fictional world but where the game can sometimes contradict itself as not being part of the fictional world. IN Mario Kart, we cannot explain why some players can fall off of the edge, or why there are powers that can help (or hurt) you, or why one person has to win each game rather than just playing for fun, or even why we have to chose different characters or different carts to drive; these are all just rules of the game.

Mario Kart cues a player into imagining a fictional world. "Games can do this in a number of different ways: using graphics, sound, text, cut-scnens, the game title, box, or manual, haptic, and rules" (134). Along with this, players use a game control to control the actions in the game. For example in Mario Kart, you can push the stick to the right, making the character go in that direction, or you can press different buttons to make you "press on the gas" or "press on the break" or even release your special powers. All of these things allow the player to interact as the character in their own fictional world, creating and imagining the game as it plays out.