Why Super Mario Bros Is Fun

In honor of Ninetendo's upcoming release of Wii U, we are returning to the original reason for Nintendo's success: Super Mario Bros. Before reading further, I suggest you play a few rounds. 


This awesome study offers empirical evidence for what makes SMB fun and perhaps even more awesome shows how this process can be used to optimize the fun-factor of automatically generated game content. The authors show that, using artificial neural networks (ANN), they can predict with up to 88.66% whether a level will be frustrating to a player and with almost 70% accuracy whether it will be fun. (For a familiar example of gameplay that relies upon ANN, click here.) 

Modeling player experience in Super Mario Bros

Author(s): Pedersen, C.;   Togelius, J.;   Yannakakis, G.N

Source: Computational Intelligence and Games. Sept. 2009. 132 – 139. 

Memorable Quotations: “Several statistical features are extracted from playing data which are logged during gameplay and include game completion time, time spent on various tasks (e.g. jumping, running), information on collected items (e.g. type and amount), killed enemies (e.g. type, amount, way of killing) and information on how the player died.” (2)

“Statistically significant correlations are observed between reported fun and seven features: number of times the player kicked a turtle shell, proportion of coin blocks that were “pressed” (jumped at from below), proportion of opponents that were killed, number of times the run button was pressed, proportion of time spent moving left, number of enemies killed minus times died, and proportion of time spent running. All of these were positive correlations.” (5)

“The fun inherent in setting of complex chains of events with simple actions is something many players can relate to and which features prominently in many games, but which is to our knowledge not part of any of the “established” theories of what makes games fun.” (5) Is this an explanation of what makes Portal so addictive? 

“To the authors, cannons are perceived as some of the most difficult elements on a level. However, players reported lower challenge on levels where they ducked many times. We have yet to find an explanation for this.” (5)  

Strange findings: How you perform during your last life is a large determinant in how frustrating you find a particular level. (7)


Here is that frustration in action. It's intense: 

And now you can get even more excited for the upcoming release. 

Download the full, fun article on Ziddu.