Super Mario Philosophy

I'm finally on holidays and will be for quite some time. However, after a term of both working and studying I find it quite hard to relax and yet find meaningful things to do. So, I dug up my old Game Boy and started playing Super Mario Land 2 which lead me to an unexpected insight.

The first thing that struck me was how easy and quick I managed to finish each level. I played for about two consecutive hours and only have the last level left, a feat that I remembered as taking me at least a week!
It could be that I've developed my video gaming skills, but I also think there's a bigger reason; I no longer care to get all the coins, kill all the enemies and explore all the extra levels. Why? Because there's no real reason for it. When I was a kid, I somehow thought I had to do that, but as I've grown older I seem to have developed a more pragmatic approach to video gaming.

That's when it hit me; Super Mario is a philosophy of life.
Think of it, we spend a huge part of our life chasing after money, as if they held a value themselves. We just use them to buy things that we think will make our lives more interesting, instead of using the time we've spent earning them on something that actually would make our lives interesting.

Now, let's have a look more specifically at the monetary system of Super Mario: You collect coins in all the levels, which you can then use to gamble with in a lottery. There you can win different items, anything between a magic carrot that gives you the ability to fly, to 50 extra lives.
This might seem like darn good things to win, but when you think of it they're virtually worthless; all the power-ups are found quite frequently in the levels and you never really get short of lives (I reached the maximum of 99 after about half the game even without trying).

Killing enemies only leads to one thing; after a hundred you get a star which enables you to kill all enemies you touch and turn them into extra lives (yet another crappy deal).

So what we're looking at is actually a criticism of todays mindless hunt for more and more money, instead of enjoying what we have (which in this case would be the gaming itself).
Who would've thought that a silly black and white platform game could have such philosophical depth?