WarioWare D.I.Y.

I’ve been having enormous fun with WarioWare D.I.Y. for a few weeks now. I suspect that I’m well outside the game’s target market these days, but the title does serve as an excellent introduction to the central concepts of event-based programming and game design. I’ve been disappointed at the lack of edutainment programming software in the mainstream for a while now, so it’s great to see Nintendo taking a shot at this type of software. Of course, Sean Malstrom can only see WarioWare D.I.Y. in the terms of “User Generated Content” and bean-counting sales. From his perspective, the game was clearly a sales disaster, having sold barely 87k units. But the more I play around with the Makermatic 21 and tap through the entertainingly presented tutorials, the more I begin to realize that there is more going on here than meets the eye.

The first thing I noticed was that every game you create gets an icon styled after Famicom cartridges. The Famicom, of course, is the name of the NES in Japan, where the game carts were half as tall as the American counterparts (insert height stereotype joke here). The Famicom/NES references are extended beyond the game icons to the Mario-Paint inspired art and music editors, to the included clipart, to the subject matter of the included games. As I began to make more games and share my experiments with friends through the in-game online distribution system, a realization dawned on me. While sending games to friends, downloading theirs, inspecting how they worked, and building upon their discoveries to show off my ideas, I couldn’t help but feel like I was in another time.

WarioWare D.I.Y. is a loving recreation of the developer atmosphere from the Famicom era. Everybody is trying to come up with unique subject matter for every game, testing the limits of the system, and creating amazing things with a very limited toolset. The limitations of this game creation software is the core of its strength. The persistent sharing network is its power. WWDIY players are participants in an historical reenactment. The game presents the history of the Famicom from a perspective that hasn’t been explored before: the perspective of the developers. Instead of trudging through the franchises that lived or died on the system, we get to look behind the curtains and feel the excitement and discovery felt by the designers who embarked upon the noble quest to explore the new worlds of gameplay and theme.

But there is another force at work in WarioWare D.I.Y. A force with such presence that makes it hard to miss: Wario himself. Wario, in true Wario fashion, doesn’t fit in. His obnoxious personality, his impatience, and his uncouth greed grate against the character of the software’s design and the town’s inhabitants. Watch how Wario is introduced in the opening cinematic:

Wario is not interested in creating games. In all the tutorials he is impatient, frustrated, and bored. He is characterized as slow-witted and unimaginative. So why is he in a game about creativity and personal expression? Wario is the villain of WarioWare D.I.Y. Wario is in it for the money.

As an interactive reenactment of the developer history of the Famicom, there must be an analog to the videogame crash of 1983, and the perpetrators of the unlicensed shovelware that plagued the NES throughout its lifetime. It makes sense then that Wario should represent this dark side, whose only interest is profit. WarioWare D.I.Y. mocks the greedy Entrepreneurati seeking fame and fortune while missing the personal fulfillment of creating games for art! The developers of WWDIY knew from the beginning their historical edutainment game software wouldn’t be a monstrous success, no matter how much advertising NOA threw at it. The demand for pure entertainment will always outweigh the demand for edutainment, simply because it will always be easier to experience entertainment without having to learn anything. (Who reads every historical note in Assassin’s Creed II? Who would buy the game if you HAD to?) But the combination of a small development team and a short development cycle means the software has still been a successful investment. Its cultural achievement outperforms even that, and we are all richer for it. Wario dressed as a sideshow barker was an intentional jab at shallow game designers who seek profit above creating a game from the heart.

But Wario is more than a personification of all the “wrong reasons” to create games. His arrogance, his wild abandon, his dismissive tone when he laughs about not paying you for working at WarioWare Inc: all these are very specific traits that paint a portrait of a man we all know all too well.

Sean Malstrom is Wario!

Wario as seen in WarioWare D.I.Y. is a caricature of Sean Malstrom. The mean-spirited money-chasing skinflint personality is unmistakable! His Machiavellian business perspective and his unrepentant mistreatment of employees all point back to Sean! Malstrom dropped off the map for a while to start work on “his new videogame“, which I doubt we will ever hear about again. What kind of game would Sean Malstrom make? He’d never tell you (out of fear of getting his “ideas” stolen), but it’s most likely something intensely market-researched, family-friendly, and yet somehow “arcade based”. My best guess is “robotron for girls”. And as misguided and foolish a plan as that sounds, it strikes me as exactly the kind of game Wario would make.

Warstrom’s eyes much be spinning into dollar signs as we speak.