Planets as small as your house. A review of Super Mario Galaxy

Ruben Aize Meintema

doi:10.7557/23.6121

Authors

Ruben Aize Meintema University of Groningen

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7557/23.6121

Abstract

This article reviews the 2008 Wii game Super Mario Galaxy from a ‘literary,’ cultural, and aesthetic perspective. It will be argued that fictional spaces are able to afford experiences of intimacy and security, in literature as well as in video games. The game will be compared on this point with the children’s book Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and similarities in spatial make-up will be shown. In the end, it will be stated that although the spatial structure is similar to the book, and innovative with regard to the history of spatial representations in video games, the emotional content of the book is substantially deeper than that of the video game.

Author Biography

Ruben Aize Meintema, University of Groningen

Ruben Meintema (1983) is currently finishing the Research Master of Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Groningen, where he has focussed on the study of video games. He has contributed before to De Game-industrie. Een inleiding (2007), and presented the paper “Time/ Space/ Narrative: A Theory and Method of Film-to-Video-Game Adaptation” at the International Conference Science Fiction Across Media: Adaptation/ Novelisation at the University of Leuven in 2009. His article ‘Beneath the Skin of Digital Characters: Race and Body in Japanese Fighting Games’ is forthcoming in Race and Racism in Modern East Asia: Western Constructions and Local Reactions (2010).