Ludic thoughts

I saw this site linked from my bro's blog recently, and decided to take a look at just what "Existential Mario" would look like. Turns out it's real boring.

"Players were invited to sit in front of a television and pick up the controller hooked up to a concealed Apple computer running a ROM of Super Mario Bros. on a small black television. Myfanwy had hacked the ROM to remove all enemies, prize boxes, power-ups and scalable architecture, leaving nothing but the solid floor and the bushes and clouds of the background."

Now, while this is an interesting study in what people will do when confronted with entertainment that isn't entertaining, I'm not sure what purpose it serves in a discussion about creating video games, which seems to be what that blog is devoted to. In fact, if you scroll down and read the discussion in the comments, you'll see it looks like a bunch of different people all studying computer science with a focus in gaming weigh in using fancy words like "ludique" and "paedia". My first reaction to this was, "What the hell are they talking about?" So I stopped to look up the fancy Latin words in the dictionary.

Having expanded my vocabulary (ludic = fun, playful, etc.), my next thought was, "Well, this is a fine discussion for a bunch of college students (who may or may not be stoned) to have, but how does it help in the creation of a good game?" As intellectually stimulating as Existential Mario may be, would you pay $50 for it? I'd rather play Final Fantasy X-2 (barf).