Keywords

video game; nintendo; statistics; clustering; regression; statistical learning

Abstract

With their deserts, castles, and ghost houses, the environments of Super Mario games are colorful, whimsical, and charming, but why are they so compelling, and what happens when our analysis of these environments extends beyond individual levels to expansive game worlds? Drawing on Cresswell’s theory of place (2014) and recent work on musical place-building in Mario Kart 8 (Heazlewood-Dale, 2024), I propose a spectrum between localized and globalized scale in games. As game environments become increasingly globalized, the music may be similarly altered to account for this shift in scale. Consequently, players may then encounter a broader, less musically congruent sense of place. These shifts in scale yield different “affective energies” and invite novel gaming interactions (Grasso, 2024). Using Mario Kart World as a case study, I apply a mix of qualitative and quantitative musical analysis to demonstrate that the game’s Free Roam mode produces a uniquely globalized sense of place through its trans-environmental musical “radio.” Employing statistical modeling, musical congruence, and transformational media analysis (Summers and Farmer, 2023), I argue that the affective potential (“sense of play”) in Free Roam becomes more exploratory than that of other modes because of its more globalized sense of place. In doing so, I adopt the developers’ term “interconnected world” to describe games with this globalized structure. By plotting interconnected worlds, open worlds, and level-based video games along a continuous spectrum from localized to globalized senses of place and play, this paper offers a new framework to demonstrate that games produce differing musical-spatial coherence across environments of various scales.

Thesis Completion Year

2026

Thesis Completion Semester

Spring

Thesis Chair

Ayers, William

College

College of Arts and Humanities

Department

Music

Thesis Discipline

Music Theory

Language

English

Access Status

Open Access

Length of Campus Access

None

Campus Location

Orlando (Main) Campus

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