Part I: The Language of Mario

In 2015, Nintendo released Super Mario Maker for the Nintendo WiiU console, a game designed to allow users to remix the components of four different games in the long running Super Mario series to create custom, new levels that they could share online. In June of this year, Nintendo released a sequel to this game, titled, as you might expect, Super Mario Maker 2, for the far more popular Nintendo Switch console. Video games that are primarily tools for user content creation are by no means new, and have been a staple of almost every video game genre since the 1980s. With Super Mario Maker and it’s sequel, Nintendo created a system by which their users could play with the common and widespread language of Mario platforming, a physical, logical vocabulary and structure that is often taught to children from when they are very young alongside their primary spoken language.

Super Mario Maker’s success is built on this fact: people know what to do with Mario. My first experience with the language of Mario came with the 1985 Nintendo Entertainment System Super Mario Bros., where the player is presented at the outset of the game with the titular hero, Mario, standing on the left side of a screen with a waddling goomba monster threatening him on the right side. Because you’re on the left side of the screen, you can’t help but move right, towards the goomba, and you must learn quickly how to jump, and how to avoid danger, and how to progress to the goal of the level through trial and error. Super Mario Bros. director, Shigeru Miyamoto, gave a full discussion of the first level of Super Mario Bros (in the parlance of the game, it’s “World 1–1", as it’s the first “level” of the first larger themed “world”), and it’s very much worth a watch, because it’s possible to see how he attempted to teach the user the language of Mario through the design of the level itself.

Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Mario, explains how the first level of Super Mario Bros teaches players how to interact with the game

It’s brilliant, right? The starting point of the language of Super Mario Bros. is only move and jump and try to reach a flag pole, and it’s entirely explained in World 1–1.

As people have played the many (many) entries on the Super Mario Bros. series, this language has grown and diversified. There are objects that Mario has learned to interact with, and pick up, and throw. There are new enemies that Mario has to defeat. There is a logic that has been built through the video games. An individual level then becomes a series of challenges (jump across pits, or vanquish enemies) and puzzles (how can you get past an obstacle that seems impossible given Mario’s skill set) that Mario must overcome. Because a profound number of video game fans have grown up speaking this same language, Super Mario Maker finally gave them a chance to play with it in a way that was not possible before, outside of people hacking into the games themselves to increase the challenge. While Nintendo has generally been conservative with their level design in an attempt to appeal to the broadest user base, Super Mario Maker users had no such restrictions, creating levels that played themselves, or levels that told silly stories, or insanely difficult levels that were only possible to finish with hundreds of hours of practice. With the rise of Twitch and online streaming of gaming, Super Mario Maker level sharing and playing became a way to celebrate the weird language of Mario.

Part II: The Troll

In language, humor often arises from an unexpected turn, where our brain expects one thing, only to be delivered something else. When I was five years old, my favorite joke was this one:

A man walks into a bar. Ouch.

Now, nothing is worse than explaining a joke (especially one this stupid), but bear with me. We take a very common joke set up: a “man walks into a bar,” a set-up that has been around since the 50s at least, and we suddenly invert it. The word bar has a double meaning! Aha! The humor comes from this inversion, from upsetting the expectation. Now, notice that if we didn’t have 70 years of human history in telling this same joke, it wouldn’t have the same source of its humor; you might as well say the man walked into a wall, or a closed door.

All language offers us the opportunity to upset expectation for humor. The language of Mario is no different. Before Super Mario Maker, illustrious hackers went and made fan level constructions from within the actual code of levels themselves, often upping the difficulty but more importantly introducing a type of joke at the expense of the player. One of the early popular hacks in this vein was called Kaizo Mario World, and it helped set up the entire genre of “kaizo” Mario levels.

Kaizo Mario World, a hack of the 1990 Super Nintendo Entertainment System title Super Mario World, was developed by T. Takemoto as a prank on his friend. The full name of the title is Jisaku no Kaizō Mario (Super Mario World) o Yūjin ni Play Saseru, which roughly translates into “I am making my friend play my Super Mario World remix.” The hack is quite difficult, but excitingly, it features a series of traps and pranks.

For instance, here’s the very start of the first level:

Before you catch your breath and attempt to figure out what this rom hack is all about, a stack of cannons fires a pile of Bullet Bill enemies right at Mario. Compare this to the start of World 1–1 from Super Mario Bros., or to the start of any Mario level. Mario levels generally start out without any immediate danger, and here was Takemoto asking “why shouldn’t there be danger?” The whole game is filled with tricks like this. There are blocks that the player can’t see until Mario bashes his head into them, sending him hurtling into pits. There are ways in which Mario can die after he reaches the goalpost at the end of the level, upsetting one of the fundamental rules of Mario. Essentially, this hack was designed to enrage Takemoto’s poor friend, to Takemoto’s delight.

Now, you might look at this and frown and shake your head. This is cruelty, you might think. Why would anyone actively want to play something like this? Well, you see, the stakes in a Mario game are low, and the time investment is minimal. If Mario dies, the game or the level can be restarted. With low stakes, the joy then comes from watching the players fight through their growing rage and frustration to conquer the traps. Oftentimes we want our challenges to be fair, and here is one that is distinctly unfair. And overcoming an unfair challenge, or watching someone overcome an unfair challenge, can feel incredible. These types of levels then, are designed to be social, instead of played alone.

The “kaizo” genre has exploded in the last ten years, but with the explosion has come a schism. Today, kaizo games, or for the purposes of this article kaizo Super Mario Maker levels, often refer to ones with heavily increased difficulty, but without the unfair pranks. Modern kaizo levels are first and foremost fair (although even this can be upset from time to time). The unfair prank levels have all crystallized into something commonly called a Troll Level. This usage of troll is different from the usage in the common “internet troll,” or someone who deliberately tries to upset people over twitter, or facebook, or on message boards. This is a level designed to “troll” the player, to build their rage and frustration through upsetting their Mario expectations.

In a Troll Level, as in all Super Mario Maker levels, the goal is to reach the end. But throughout, the designer of the level is working against the player, and trying to outthink them. A good Troll Level sets up and reinforces a player’s confidence only to pull the rug out from under them. The goal of the Troll Level is make a player question their own Mario platforming abilities and eventually their sanity. When I play Troll Levels I’m constantly asking myself out loud: “what am I supposed to do!?” only because I can see the obvious routes to the end, and they are all traps that I’ve likely fallen prey to. I love it.

A Troll Level is giant set of intricately set comic pratfalls. A Troll Level is a Buster Keaton comedy, starring you.

Part III: The Anatomy of the Troll Level

So, how does this work? How does someone design a good troll level in Super Mario Maker? Well, before I get into that, let me introduce CarlSagan42. CarlSagan42 is a popular Twitch streamer of Mario games who has risen to fame on the back of playing Troll Levels live to the delight of his fans and viewers. While he’s certainly quite intelligent (he recently received his PhD), he has a habit of falling prey to every trap (or “troll”) in the levels he plays, which makes him the ultimate mark. He’s a silent movie star, tumbling into every open manhole, while his audience shouts at him from off screen. He is one of many streamers who have found fame by streaming Troll Levels (juz, freakandgeekgames, grandpoobear, DGR, Tanuki Dan, among many, many others), and part of the fun is seeing how these players react to the same levels.

With the rise of marks, there came also the rise of the con artist, the Troll Level designer. These artists delve into the weird intricacies of the Super Mario Maker toolset to create new Troll Levels. Creating troll levels is indeed an art, because the level designer is constantly trying to balance entertainment and frustration in the player. Too easy and entertaining and the level is boring, and nobody plays it or shares it. Too frustrating and people quit.

But wait, Kevin, I hear you ask, isn’t the point to be cruel? What do you mean “too frustrating?” Well, as Troll Levels have become more popular, certain tricks have become passé, like how jokes become less funny the more they’re told. For instance, a popular enemy type in Super Mario Bros. is the Thwomp. Thwomps are enemies that hover above the ground until Mario moves near to them, at which point they swiftly come falling down, crushing what is directly under them. If there’s a Thwomp in Mario’s path, Mario can trigger the Thwomp to fall by edging near to it, staying out of the way, and then while the Thwomp slowly rises to reset its position, Mario can dart underneath. But what if the Thwomp was hiding just offscreen, above the levels perimeter? Well, then Mario wouldn’t be ready for this Thwomp to crash down and kill him out of nowhere. These “offscreen Thwomps” are maybe mildly humorous the first time, but tedious afterwards, and are often considered boring by players and designers alike. Super Mario Maker 2 actually includes a series of in-game lessons on level design complete with an entire section warning against the use of tricks like offscreen Thwomps. Good Troll level designers know that the game is not to hide traps, but to entice players to actively fall for them.

One Troll Level designer, Defender1031, has written up a guide to Trolling in collaboration with a number of other designers. In the first paragraph, he writes:

Your level should be designed to make the player (and their audience, if they’re playing in front of one,) laugh. You need to trick the player while still being fair and still letting the player easily figure out how to progress after having been tricked.

And this is the reason why Troll Levels are delightful, when made well. They’re designed to be eventually beatable, providing the player can overcome the tricks.

So, let’s look at a Troll Level, and examine some of the trolls. I won’t go through every trick in the entire level, but I’ll highlight some of the aspects that I think make it so good. I’ll also spoil what I think is one of the greatest Troll moments I’ve ever played, so go and play the level first if you’re worried about being spoiled.

The Troll Level I’m going to describe is a Super Mario Maker 2 level, SYMPtoms of STUPIDity (1C9-S6H-WQF), by STEVO ZR and Symplectic, veteran Troll Level designers. I should point out that in order to upload a level in Mario Maker, it has to be beaten legitimately by the creators. This gate means that all (well, most, but I won’t get into the various glitches in the game) levels are inherently “fair” in that they can be beaten, somehow. That is what drives the player. They know that this is possible, but they have to figure out how.

SYMPtoms of STUPIDity starts out looking like this:

The innocuous beginning of the level. Notice that there are benign style elements, like the varied wall blocks, that will be important for setting up tricks later in the level.

There’s a pipe, a spring, and a dashed line around an empty space. Mario is on the left of the screen, waiting for instructions. Now, the language of Mario says “Mario should run to the right. He can go in the pipe, or jump off of the spring towards that empty box.” Those are the options. For most players, they will just happily head into the pipe, but many people who play this level will be very curious about that spring, an item designed to propel Mario upwards, and they’ll head up to examine it.

If Mario does jump off of the spring, he finds that he hits an invisible block with his head in that designated area, which produces a 1Up mushroom! Aha! An extra life! While these don’t really matter in the context of Super Mario Maker 2, they’re at least (usually) something Mario can collect without repercussion. Well, before Mario can jump up to get the mushroom, it is swallowed up by the top of the screen as a red bar drops down and yanks it away. It’s delightful and unexpected. While you’re laughing, an enemy is triggered to fall down and kill Mario. Here’s CarlSagan42 discovering this. It’s unexpected! It’s funny! And the resulting death is hardly consequential since it’s right at the beginning of the level.

Where should Mario go?

Later, after some effort, Mario falls out of a pipe, where there is only one obvious path, a pipe with three arrows ominously pointing to it. At this point, the player has become incredibly skeptical of everything they’ve encountered, and here’s the most suspicious looking pipe in the entire level. It can’t be that obvious, can it? Clever players notice that there are four blocks on the right side of the screen that are a different type that can be destroyed by an offscreen bomb, allowing Mario to progress to the right. There’s no harm in exploring that option, since Mario can always walk backwards to the left to get in the pipe if it’s some sort of trap, right? Well, the level designer has built this area such that if you do move to the right, those four blocks do explode! But the screen then is released to start scrolling to the right just enough to show off the word DON’T along with a cannon that fires sneaky ghosts, and to prevent the player from entering the pipe. The pipe was the correct choice. The level designer has out thought the player. Here I am falling for this, like an idiot. Here’s Carl again, who falls for it, and has a more frustrated response.

So you’re seeing that this is a mind game. The player starts to not trust themselves, and the designer can manipulate that as well. The player tries to play cautious, and think out a situation, and the designer puts traps that trigger and kill Mario while he stands in one place for too long (this is colloquially known as “standing in a Carl Box,” after CarlSagan42). The player gets lucky and bypasses a trap in one play through, but dies and has to restart, and then triggers the trap on their second time around. This is Home Alone, and the players are the Wet Bandits, stumbling around getting irons in the face and grabbing onto hot door handles.

One of the ways in which level progress can be rewarded in Super Mario Maker is through a checkpoint, or “CP,” a little flag that allows Mario to return to this part of the level after they’ve died. For the level we’re looking at, the first checkpoint is actually found on the other end of the suspicious pipe with all of the arrows. Checkpoints are a relief to get, because they mean that ideally the player won’t have to return to the part of the level they’ve played from before a given checkpoint. Level designers are allowed to place two checkpoint flags throughout a level to help reward progress. Usually then, you would expect that as you move through a level, you will hit the first checkpoint, and then later hit the second checkpoint, and then you will find the final goal.

But even that can be messed with. Crafty troll level designers can make it so the player can collect the second checkpoint, and right as they are nearing the end of the level, fall for a trap that redirects them back to the first checkpoint, an act known as being “CP1'd”. In this way, progress is lost and frustration mounts.

The area right after the first checkpoint, with a blue snake block leading to a pipe or a large unsurpassable wall.

In SYMPtoms of STUPIDity, right after the checkpoint, there’s a door that hovers over a bar set to fall, requiring a quick jump to a “snake platform” that moves Mario to the right. This platform will eventually lead to another suspicious choice: jump up to a pipe, or continue with the platform. This is very similar to the previous choice, in that the pipe is the correct way to go. If you stay on the moving platform, it will eventually stop over an abyss, ejecting Mario to his death.

Troll designers include areas like this right after checkpoints as a bit of mental calisthenics for the player. After each death, the player returns here, and while they’re trying to remember how they fell victim to a trap, these sections act to snap the attention back to the current play. If Mario doesn’t jump immediately on entering the door, he’ll die. If he doesn’t leap up to the blue pipe, he’ll die. Keep this area in mind, as it will be important later.

After more pranks involving some plants leaping at Mario from nowhere, a clever manipulation of the game’s random number generation, and an unnecessary leap away from an exploding bomb up to an offscreen spring that bounces Mario into a pit, he arrives here:

Now, a quick look at this indicates that Mario should try to go into the door on the right side of the screen hemmed in by blue blocks. These blocks will permit Mario to pass through them if the circled blue block marked OFF is triggered, say, by kicking the shelled enemy wandering around on the bones. If Mario does that, though, an annoyed buzzer sounds, a signal that troll designers use to indicate the player has done something wrong. And indeed, something has gone wrong, as one of the red cannons has moved upwards, preventing Mario from returning to the left side of the screen. And even worse, Mario can’t even go into the door on the right, as there’s a hidden gate preventing him from getting in. A second door has appeared from under a cannon that was destroyed by triggering the OFF block, too, and the game seems to be taunting the player: this is where you should have gone, dummy.

So the player pilots Mario down a pit to his death, only to start back over at the checkpoint. For most players tackling this level, this has happened over and over again, so that the early part of the level past the checkpoint is routine. The player goes on autopilot then, and here is where the level plays its cruelest trick.

Mario leaps from the falling blue platform onto the snake block, and he again jumps up to go into a pipe, only for some music to play — this is new — and the screen keeps scrolling, revealing the goal flag. This is the end of the level, whcih is now inaccessible because the player has leapt up towards the pipe, like they have done so many times before. Here’s FreakandGeek coming to this part of the level. Here’s Tanuki Dan. Here’s DGR. Here’s Carl. Here’s me.

oh ho! Similar yet different.

In every case, the players are shocked at this reveal. Throughout the level they were lulled into complacency about what to expect, about the way the level was built, and then suddenly the entire thing was changed in a way they didn’t even think was possible. How was it possible that, from the same checkpoint they’ve been starting from, the level was somehow different? What was going on? This is a very good troll. This is one of the great twists I’ve ever experienced in Super Mario Maker. The level after the troll is mostly designed to make it difficult for the player to get back to this area, but that’s just icing on the great big troll cake of this one very good moment. It’s a Mario magic trick.

So how was it done? Well, DGR hits the nail on the head in his replay, calling it a “Twice Twice,” a term named after a level created for the original Super Mario Maker by Symplectic, Larl Does Everything Twice Twice. A “Twice Twice” area is one that has been created to look exactly like another area from a level, but with different consequences, to fool a player into becoming confused as to where they are. In the case of SYMPtoms of STUPIDity, the area from the checkpoint to the final goal is copied block by block to be placed at a different section of the game: one with the end goal flag. But how is the player put into this new final section? Well, when Mario was piloted down a pit directly following the penultimate section discussed above, the level designers placed a clever second checkpoint in that same pit, such that Mario would trigger that, and return to that part of the level, instead of the first checkpoint. This part was created to look exactly like the area surrounding the first checkpoint, which causes the autopilot to engage, but in this case it’s not the same area. It’s actually the end of the level. An incredible trap, overall. This is maybe my favorite troll I’ve ever seen.

Part IV: Feed The Trolls

I think a lot of people think it’s ridiculous that anyone would watch someone else play video games. Twitch, and to a lesser extent, Mixer, are huge (and growing) successes, in large part because video games are social. They’re a language, spoken by people and shared by people, and it’s fun to watch people fail (and succeed). It’s also fun to fail (and succeed!), yourself. It’s the most fun to do all of this as part of a community.

Many streamers have such communities of followers (often meeting up on the messaging app Discord) who post and try out different troll levels as a filter for the streamer. I find trolls I want to play by sifting through the levels in CarlSagan42’s Discord channel. You can just find levels that were played by other streamers, and play them, before going back and watching them try out the level themselves. Did they fall for the same trolls that you did? Did they get stuck in the same place you did? How did they react?

So, go and make some Super Mario Maker levels, and share them! And play some levels! And watch people play levels (you can start by following some of the streamers I linked above)! And trust me, try a Troll level. It’s good to get frustrated sometimes.