There are two approaches to understanding the creative process that I want to discuss. The first is one that psychologist Tamaki Saito discusses in his book/study Otaku Sexuality. In considering why media aimed at otaku is so sexually charged, Saito notes how, romantically/sexually speaking, otaku lead far more normal lives than this media might suggest. The sexuality we see on display there is completely limited to the world of fiction. In addition, he mentions how otaku’s affection of their object of desire almost always manifests through an attempt to possess it (IE by creating works based on that object).

From here, Saito posits a theory of art that sees the creative process as one of sexual creation. For him, it’s the means by which one fulfills desires that can never be truly sated (if at all) within a person’s real life. More than that; art allows one to explore those desires in a purer form precisely because they have no grounding in what we recognize as being real. If those desires were grounded in reality or capable of being fulfilled by it, then that’s where we’d pursue those desires. There’s a lot I’m leaving out – psychoanalytic nuances, more refined positions where gender is concerned (IE different means of fulfilling that central desire) – but what I’ve described here will suffice for our purposes.

Of course, this approach has its limits when applied to the player’s experience of that media. Or to be more precise, it encounters those limits when we look at what happens when the player’s expectations/experiences collide with what the author has supplied them. To address these shortcomings, we turn to game critic Taekwan Kim. Where Saito portrays the creative process as a soliloquy, Kim portrays it as a dialectic. No action a player can ever take in a video game exists in isolation, because the player alone is incapable of supplying meaning to their own experiences. For this, they require a much larger context in which their actions are made sense of – rules and narrative and goals and a logic that will hold the player’s world together.

This is exactly what the game provides. By limiting and defining how the player exists within this virtual space, the game allows the player to know themselves and the nature of their relationship with the game world. Under such a view, complete freedom over the game becomes undesirable because such freedom would deconstruct its own purpose. Or as Kim puts it, “absolute player agency is the same as having no agency at all, because it renders the game meaningless and inconsequential.” Granted, the dialectic can fail for a number of reasons – the terms don’t serve the purposes of either party, one party is given complete control over those terms – but this doesn’t change the fact that play can only occur under these conditions.

Now why have I mentioned all this in a blog that’s supposed to be about Nintendo’s latest entry in the Paper Mario franchise? Because the tension between these two explanatory models is exactly the tension that Color Splash forces itself to struggle with over the course of the game. Its starting point is the same fundamental question posed to all Paper Mario games from the outset: “How can this game use its paper motif to facilitate play?”

What makes Color Splash unique is the extent to which it crafts its entire identity around play. The game is defined by these subtle, “for their own sake” diversions that litter its virtual spaces. It’s an explosion of creative energy; a game that interprets every moment as one in which it can perform, test its limits, and see how far its creative abilities reach. One moment may see Mario crumpled up and then ask him to uncrumple himself by jumping a few times. Another may let you crumple up the scenery with your hammer. One early moment even has a Shy Guy hide from Mario by posing as the wanted sign for that same Shy Guy. Most of these diversions are presented as non-necessary, IE as existing for no other sake than their own, yet this is precisely what gives them their charm. Through that superfluity, Color Splash both arrives at a more purely distilled jouissance and encourages the player to participate alongside it.

Be that as it may, I’ve only been speaking about the game in a very general manner. It would help to step back for a second and consider the specific strategies Color Splash uses toward this end. There are several worth examining. Narrative is definitely one of them, but I won’t give it too much thought here. Beyond Mario’s search for the Paint Stars (little more than MacGuffins), the story is a series of episodes with the barest of justifications tying them together. Color Splash prefers revelling in the chaos to lending that chaos form. So instead let’s take a look at:

Nostalgia

The game’s appeals to nostalgia are obvious, numerous, and multifaceted. In fact, I wouldn’t describe Color Splash as relying on a single nostalgia as much as it does several unique nostalgias bouncing off one another to evoke a more general nostalgic mood. An easy one to overlook is the 20s/30s ethos infused throughout so much of the game. It’s the first thing you see: the sepia tone splash screen (which soon fades into a more vibrantly colored version of itself) and the old-timey music that accompany it instantly bring to mind rubber hose animated shorts. It’s also a motif that the game regularly commits to with its battle music. Between the jazzy tempo, the big band melody, and the muted or muffled horns, Color Splash combines early 20th century nostalgia with retro video game nostalgia. And on that topic, the game also makes heavy use of the latter nostalgia. The Koopalings, the world map, the mini-games, some of the battle cards, several of the tracks – they each reference an older era of games in one way or another.

One could regard this as pragmatic design on Nintendo’s part, the company making their game more appealing to a wide audience by relying on a safe and easy trend. Yet I see something more complicated going on here. The game doesn’t make general appeals to nostalgia, like 8-bit music or visuals, but very specific references to Super Mario Bros. 3. This was a game well known not only for its board game aesthetic, but also the smaller moments that evoke play in different ways: the matching mini-games or the Kuribo’s Shoe. And while the non-game nostalgia reminds us of simpler times, it also reminds us of a scene associated with freeform play. After all, rubber hose was a time when animators were (in some ways forced to be) free to experiment with the medium and see what it was capable of. Theirs was a time before the 12 principles of animation more clearly spelled out what animation could do.

By appealing to these forms of nostalgia in the way it does, Color Splash further solidifies its own play-oriented, physical effect oriented approach to games. Granted, this is still a very general sort of playfulness; the kind that fits well with conventional game design and thus suggests nothing beyond that. At this point, at least, this strain will suffice for Color Splash’s purposes.

Paper craft aesthetic

That a Paper Mario game would be so quick and so willing to use a paper craft aesthetic shouldn’t surprise anyone. However, where the nostalgic approach suggests a general play motif, the craft aesthetic focuses that motif into something more definite. The irony here is that the method by which Color Splash makes itself more definite is itself very ambiguous. On the one hand, the visuals are rendered through the sort of hyperrealism that blockbuster games have come to be known for. Often the level of detail put into a surface is so high that one can almost feel the texture on a cardboard floor or a field of felt grass.

I would usually dismiss such an aesthetic approach as runaway literalism, but that assumes I’m meant to see the images on screen as literal embodiments of the things they’re meant to represent. That’s not the case here. Rather than suggesting anything as straightforward as that, the game instead suggests that the objects on screen are both the things they represent and the means by which they come to represent them. A pile of boxes isn’t just a pile of boxes; it’s also a rocky mountain Mario has to climb. Likewise, blue construction paper exists both as itself and as an ocean that stretches endlessly toward the horizon (which is itself a lighter shade of blue construction paper).

What Color Splash does is render the player’s imagination central to their experience with the game. By asking them to pretend and play along with what the game lightly suggests, it forces them to acknowledge their role in constructing how they perceive the game. Once again, we should understand this both directly and indirectly. While the game is certainly interested in what an imagination-conducive style can do, it also expresses interest in that style’s association with childhood and a carefree, creative spirit. In other words, the paper aesthetic represents a more direct route by which the game can access the subtle “for their own sake” diversions I mentioned earlier. Moreover, this route opens up several minor opportunities for the player to indulge in these diversions, too. Some, like how the player is openly forced to interpret the visuals, I’ve already discussed. Others, like how the paint mechanic allows one to splat across the stage to see what happens, I’ll examine in more depth later.

Card battle system

By far one of the most important elements in Color Splash’s design (at least within the terms I’ve assigned it) is the card battle system. The premise behind it is simple: rather than fight enemies with discrete, inexhaustible actions, Mario instead uses cards representing those actions to do battle with his enemy. Color Splash is by no means unique for devising such a system. In fact, card-based battle systems are surprisingly common among major franchises, with properties like Kingdom Hearts, Metal Gear Solid, and Sonic the Hedgehog implementing similar systems in their games at one point or another.

What sets Paper Mario: Color Splash apart is the ends toward which it’s aimed its own systems. Given how heavily I’ve already discussed those ends, it would make more sense to look at how the game pursues them here; specifically through deck building. This feature serves as the backbone for a lot of trading card games (Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, Magic: The Gathering, Hearthstone, etc.), and for good reason. Deck building fosters improvisational freeform play through rigidly defined mechanics and long term strategy.

Yet somehow, Color Splash arrives at that same end by eschewing these two things altogether. Only a few moments throughout the game require a specific deck; the rest will accept a deck you’d assembled on the fly. While there are problems with this system, for now, I want to focus on how such a system fixes our attention on the moment*. It’s a motif the game strongly commits to. We see it in the broad mechanics of play: any strategy the game expects of us, we’re expected to create on the spot. We also see it in minor presentational aspects, like removing numbers wherever possible and forcing players to rely on intuition and feel to know what cards to play, or flicking cards up when the game already knows that you want to use them. At the heart of the card system, then, is an air of non-necessity and performance. Because all options are valid and none are mandatory, the game reasons, the burden of choosing the right option is lifted from our shoulders, and we’re free to poke and prod and explore these systems to our heart’s content.

*(There are exceptions to this rule, and several of them are used to great effect. Specific enemy formations demand strategic thought by asking the player to play cards in a specific order, and the Kamek fights impose strict limitations that force the player to understand how the game’s mechanics interconnect. While moments like these foster a deeper understanding of Color Splash’s intricacies, the game’s interests generally lie elsewhere.)

I want to emphasize that this is what the game reasons. What I’ve spent the past 1500 words describing is how the game relates to itself and how, based on that self relation, it expects the player will relate to what it offers them. In other words, the game implicitly imagines its player as an extension of itself. At the same time, however, the ends to which it imagines such imply a certain dialectic the game has framed itself within. What would such a dialectic require? How does it come to be a true exchange between two parties rather than the actions of just one?

To answer these questions, let’s consider what freeform play is and what exactly it requires. At its heart, this kind of play is a process of discovery regarding the object in question, whether that’s breaking away from what comes in the box to see what you can build with Legos or thumbing through a pop-up book to see what new wonders each page has in store. Often that discovery comes to us through the object’s novelty. It may not last very long, but given how we experience this play in the moment, it doesn’t have to.

The dialectic between toy and user, then, asks certain things from both parties. From the former it requires an intentionality where the self isn’t attached to an particular thing; where it opens itself up to opportunities in and of themselves and has no motive beyond the present. As for the toy, beyond simply providing the terms for such intentionality to exist, it cannot impose conditions or apply judgment to the person using it. This doesn’t mean it has to be completely receptive to all the user’s actions; it can present limits, but it can’t dictate what the user does, if that makes any sense.

And indeed, several moments in Paper Mario: Color Splash appear to meet these criteria. The Dark Bloo Inn chapter best epitomizes that. It’s presented as a series of ghost-related mysteries to solve in a haunted hotel, and each one challenges your conception of the world and forces you to see it in a new light. One mystery has you cut out a part of the background to reveal a room that was previously thought missing. Another has you find a patron’s missing glasses by hitting them back onto their head with a hammer. Yet another mystery makes use of the time system (exclusive to Dark Bloo Inn) to change one ghost’s bedsheets, which, in dollhouse fashion, are one solid sheet of cardboard.

Unfortunately, Color Splash can’t maintain this aura for as long as it needs to, and the dialectic begins to weaken. In fact, on closer examination, the game’s view of the player/game relationship is far more conservative than it initially appears. The player isn’t a mere performer acting on a stage, but a semi-divine entity, and the world is given to them and them alone as raw material to be worked with. As Kim previously detailed, it’s an untenable position for a game to hold, and Color Splash’s battle system demonstrates one reason why. When all options in a given situation are valid, no one option becomes particularly appealing, so the impetus to perform vanishes. Battles reduce to a series of rote actions I perform. My attention may be locked on the present, true, but because these actions code for nothing more than the action itself, play becomes dull and lifeless.

Or consider a parallel problem: although the player is told they’re a god, the game can’t possibly accommodate all the power that comes with that role. It will have to present some limits, but because it’s implied that the player has the power to determine what and where those limits are, what the game does present may feel arbitrary, nonsensical. Why can the hair dryer melt this ice where the magnifying glass or charcoal grill or fire flowers couldn’t? Why wasn’t the ice pick an option? Why does a Thwomp fall from the sky and onto a train, causing it to spit out a Paint Star nobody was aware was lodged in the engine? In fact, progress through the game often lacks direction as you poke around the world hoping that something will lead you through the rest of the story. While dialectical failures like these – the designer’s logic not matching up with the player’s (or vice versa) – are incredibly common in games, the way Color Splash presents itself means the consequences of that failure will differ slightly from the norm.

Alternatively, we might consider whether that presentation is accurate as the game contends. Construing the player as godlike is an odd way for the game to frame them, considering how the player’s abilities don’t manifest as divine creation, but as restoring a status quo the player has no real relationship with. Put more bluntly, Color Splash is designed as nothing more than a series of well-defined, clearly laid out challenges where specific responses are required from the player.

Were this all there was to the game, then there would be no tension to speak of. In fact, I suspect previous Paper Mario games avoided the problems I’m discussing by more clearly framing themselves along these dialectical lines. (Given the many years between my writing this and the last time I played a Paper Mario game, I wouldn’t put too much stock in this interpretation.) But for Paper Mario: Color Splash, such a format contradicts the appeal it was theoretically built on. If objects are made to be discovered and played with, then actual moments of play and discovery feel absent from the game. It’s like the game has already discovered these objects and the potential they hold for me but pretends otherwise. Combine this with other contradictions, like requiring specific actions from the player despite suggesting only general actions were necessary, and negative feelings toward the game start to build up. All of this feels like a violation of the terms the game itself originally devised, or like a denial of what it said it was capable of and interested in providing the player.

The battle system suffers from this time to time – brief moments of strategy become not an impetus to perform, but a barrier I create (through abstraction) between myself and my own experiences – but the phenomenon I’ve described is best seen with the one feature Nintendo was proud enough to name the game after: painting colorless spots. The driving force behind the story is that Shy Guys are sucking all the color out of the land, so it’s up to Mario to restore these areas to what they once were. Besides collecting the Paint Stars, he achieves this by coloring in blank spots in the environment. Some are necessary for the game to continue (an NPC needs to be revived, or a pipe won’t function because it isn’t colored in etc.).

Any expression, any performance, any sort of creative spirit this system might suggest immediately withers into nothing once the player begins interacting with it. Not only does each spot only accept one color of paint, but that color is decided well in advance of your playing the game. This sends several messages to the player: the world has a fixed nature, and your sole job is to see that nature brought to fruition. Dwindle your time away by filling in the empty gaps we’ve left for you to clean up. Meaningless busywork is the epitome of play. Cutouts face a very similar issue: playing with perspective and cutting paths in the background loses much of its appeal the moment it becomes apparent these paths are fixed in place rather than spontaneously generated with a fixed logic.

How might Color Splash have avoided these problems? Fortunately, there are a variety of games available to demonstrate alternate paths the game could have followed. For example, the game could have followed the example set by Crayon Physics Deluxe, Perspective, and to a lesser extent Phantom Brave. The content of these games is exploring the rules to create novel solutions, thus allowing them to sustain what Color Splash fails to. Alternatively, Epic Yarn shows us that even with a clearly framed set of fixed challenges, aesthetic and (the erasure of) difficulty are more than enough to foster the boundless performative play that Color Splash seeks. And then we have And Yet it Moves, a game made to test how much potential a single play mechanic holds, but suggests absolutely no pretense otherwise.

Ultimately, Color Splash’s problem is one of clarity. A game made primarily for the people making it doesn’t have to preclude that game from being an enjoyable experience for other people. Many of Square’s games throughout the 90s can attest to that, as can PlatinumGames’ creative output. What allows these games to be enjoyable for others is that they more clearly align themselves with Saito’s model. Whatever emotions the creative team felt during production – ecstasy, intellectual curiosity – directly transfer into our experience with the game. Yet the way Color Splash is designed, that transference isn’t so clean. It goes through different channels that present those emotions to us very differently, and the game is unable to work with that final result.