Tiny-Huge Island

The following essay was written in April of 2012. It was originally part of a series of introductory essays to Solon's undergraduate thesis, "A Methodology to Understanding Video Games", which will be posted in full over the next few weeks because the primary themes of the thesis have become more relevant now than they ever were. Some details may be dated.

There is a small square island floating in the sky. You can explore this island as a giant, crushing the tiny flora and fauna and running across the island very easily, but being a giant also makes it easy to slide off the floating island’s jagged angles and lose control. However, you can also choose to explore this strange island as a tiny, dwarfed version of yourself, making the island much larger and giving you a lot more ability to explore by going into the small nooks and crannies scattered around the island. However the flora, the fauna, and even the terrain itself is much larger than you are accustomed to and threatens to engulf you as you fight to survive and explore as much as possible.

This is a synopsis of Tiny-Huge Island, the thirteenth course in Shigeru Miyamoto’s Super Mario 64. Within it you have the choice between entering the stage as a giant Mario or a tiny Mario. Either choice is disorienting in different ways and challenges the player’s notions of space. Being huge Mario gives one an enormous sense of power but also makes one very aware of the edges and limits of the very small stage. Meanwhile, being a tiny Mario makes everything seem like the world is limitless despite it simply being an adjustment of scale and perspective.

Tiny-Huge Island for me reflects the dichotomy of opposing identities and forces within contemporary video game culture. The AAA video game industry with its Hollywood-esque aspirations and budgets is this huge Mario without a lot of control or style outside of itself, whereas the comparatively smaller Independent development arena becomes engulfed not only by the harsh, unforgiving world of game development but also by the many barriers of entry that the AAA video game industry has created to make it more difficult to create games, usually by way of proprietary game engines, consoles, and other game making tools. The irony is that both parties, Huge Mario and Tiny Mario, are trapped on Tiny-Huge Island, fighting over the same resources and using the same ideas to create games by, competing for the same power stars. It is like if Tiny-Huge Island was being mined for power stars. Huge Mario strip mines the island for everything they can get, in order to power their machines, so that they can keep strip mining. Meanwhile, Tiny Mario sneaks into nooks and crannies trying to find their own power stars, although they are usually crushed by these AAA machines.

So, it is an endless cycle of two different groups that look very similar, competing over similar things, in a small, contained space. The only difference between AAA and indie is scale. They both have the same limitations, sensibilities, and mechanics. And they are all trapped on a tiny island without critically questioning if there is more out there than just Tiny-Huge Island. Is there more to games than what this status quo maintains? Are there other ways we can express ourselves without limiting games to these dichotomies? By writing this, I am not looking to simply escape from oppressive systems that the culture and industry of video games has built up, but to explore new paths for others to follow that will help us all explore new ways to imagine and understand video games.