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The poor man has already received some punishment.
Mark Serrels
The day before Mario Kart Live came to my door, my 7 year old broke our living room window with a soccer ball. I didn’t see it happen, but I saw the damage. It costs 200 bones to fix that window.
I am a man insensitive to the carnage that my two young children have brought into my life.
The older one, the window breaker, is the more responsible of the two. I can at least depend on him to feel remorse when he accidentally shoves Nintendo DS cartridges into my PlayStation 4 or clears my 200 hour save from Breath of the Wild.
The 4-year-old is a completely different species. A savage and belligerent agent of chaos. It’s hard to tell at this early stage in his life if he feels a shred of regret for the calamity he brings into my life every hour of every day. But he does a mean version of Let It Go. At full volume. During every waking minute of my life.
But let’s go back to Mario Kart.
Mario Kart Live is an augmented reality version of Mario Kart that transforms your living room into a race track. Thanks to a well-placed camera, players can pilot a real remote control kart at home using a Nintendo switch, and the console will fill in the spaces on the screen. Bam, your living room turns into a race track.
It’s a cool concept and the execution is very Nintendo – slick, accessible, and incredibly tactile. Build your own designs at home using your own furniture and transform that space into a literal Mario Kart track. Amazing!
Except it’s not amazing. Because I know my own children. I knew what was coming my way: anger, pain, destruction. In the best of cases: a living room consumed with plastic garbage and Legos would definitely step on.
At worst: too scary to imagine. At some point, Mario would end up in the bathroom. That is almost guaranteed.
Things were about to get complicated.
Driving around
I was pleasantly surprised by how easy Mario Kart Live was to set up.
After being traumatized by Nintendo Labo, which took me roughly four hours to build and 30 seconds to destroy, I expected Mario Kart Live to be a thankless task at first. Particularly with two small children in tow, sticky paws fighting to see who went first.
Incorrect. We were launching Mario’s remote-controlled car around our living room in minutes.
Creating a track in Mario Kart Live is a relatively simple matter. You put four cardboard “doors” at different points in your house, do a test run to create the race itself, and boom: you’ve got a track. The software fills in the blanks, providing you with opponents to compete and items to collect.
But in the beginning, you don’t even need to do that. In fact, my kids don’t give a shit about creating a track. They just wanted to drive.
They huddled around the screen, giggling like hyenas, captivated by the situation: the house they lived in, the kitchen table that Weet-Bix spilled on, the chocolate-stained couch they lounged on while staring at Bluey zombies, had been transformed into a gigantic playground, and it was … hilarious.
For once, my kids weren’t fighting over the Switch or trying to snatch it from each other. They were playing… harmoniously?
Most augmented reality games, in my experience, are a kind of blergh and nothing convincing. Even Pokemon Go, the most successful augmented reality game ever, succeeds despite the AR features. I, like many players, play Pokemon Go with AR mode off.
Mario Kart Live is different. In Mario Kart Live the suspension of disbelief is palpable. The line between reality and the augmented is blurred, as I have rarely seen in games of this type. It is absolutely captivating.
Mario Kart Live is on Honey I Shrunk the Kids shit. Drastically alter your perspective. Mario Kart Live puts you two inches off the ground and lets you glide like a hyperactive gerbil in your own home. It’s hard to explain how fun it is.
The dissonance is compelling. Your sofa is a skyscraper, the dining room table presides over heavy pillars to navigate at high speed. It sounds like hyperbole, but Mario Kart gives you perspective on the spaces you took for granted, and it’s magical.
Which explains the constant laughter of the children.
Creating tracks
Things got weirder when we started trying to create tracks.
We generously threw the doors at different points in the house, trying to create the skeleton of what seemed like a decent race. The game suggested that we hold the doors in place with a book or something heavy. We used other video game controllers because we couldn’t find any books, which definitely didn’t make me stare into space pondering my parenting priorities.
He had enough controllers to weigh them all. Although there are not enough books. Tragic.
Mark Serrels
But attempts to create a track that would use my entire house were botched with scope issues. The further the kart is moved away from the Switch, the more nervous and slow the race becomes.
The wild card was of course my 4 year old son who absolutely waited until I built the perfect course to start kicking in the gates, confusing the software. My track went crazy, in and out, changing shape.
But, technical issues aside, Mario Kart Live works. And it feels amazing.
It locks you in the “middle world.” Sitting on his couch, staring at the Switch screen, absorbed in this imaginary half-world. You are a tiny being, shrunken to the size of a 2-inch figure, inside a Kart that hurtles at tremendous speeds under your dining room table. Crazy moments are happening around you. Explosions, banana peels, creatures driving floating vehicles.
So you just look up, teary-eyed, awake from the parallel universe the Nintendo Switch has invented, staring at this painfully slow plastic “Mario Kart” across your living room floor like a lobotomized slug.
On the screen it feels like you’re going 200 miles per hour, but these little karts are kind of slow in real life. It certainly doesn’t matter to my children, who are drunk with power and alternate between running and using their own bodies to create gigantic bridges.
Mario Kart Live taught me to see my world through a different, nightmarish lens.
Perhaps it is the first video game that has allowed me to see my 4-year-old son from the perspective of the animals he always fumbles to pet or the lizards he chases around the garden.
In my world, my son is less of a threat. Sure he’ll accidentally hit me in the nuts, kick me in the nuts, or wake me up standing in my eggs, but it’s small. A tiny creature.
But in the world of Mario Kart Live he is a Kaiju, a real life Godzilla with the potential to alter any race in an instant. Sometimes with a misplaced foot. Sometimes more deliberate. A cackle in the hallway, a gigantic, sticky claw descending from on high, lifting the kart like a malevolent god … and locking it in the nearest bathroom.
The path of Labo
Despite the excitement, I’m not 100% sure Mario Kart Live will hold up.
With Labo, for example, my children spent a morning building the cardboard structures and playing with the games. They never mentioned it again. Not even once. To this day, it collects dust in our garage. The most expensive cardboard of all time.
About an hour after setting up Mario Kart Live, my son grabbed our iPad and charged Goat Simulator. Two minutes later, he asked if we could download Kick the Buddy, a horrible free game his friends are obsessed with.
Will Mario Kart Live follow Labo’s path?
It is difficult to say. This very morning my oldest son asked me if he could play Mario Kart Live after school. That’s a sign, to me, that Mario Kart live is more than just a gimmick.
The cycle reminds me of a virtual reality viewer. It makes enough use to justify its existence, but it’s hardly part of my weekly entertainment diet like Netflix or other Nintendo Switch games. I imagine pulling it out when my nieces and nephews visit us, but it’s hard to imagine that interest continuing for the weeks and months to come.
But for now, at least, Mario Kart Live is a welcome distraction. For now, the windows are safe.
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