Popular Culture Review 29.2
The heroes of these [ cartoon ] films are humorous avatars for the audience ’ s mimetic embrace , their adventures defined less by continuous plot than by the discontinuity between representation as ‘ a set of lines , and as the image that arises from them ,’ the pulsation of forms gagging across levels of sense and nonsense , the referential and ridiculous . ( 13 )
Such referential qualities are found in cartoons but also in video games in which the player takes on the role of working through these gags and discontinuities through their own embodiment of heroic figures . In video games , the players are the ones who struggle and strive to achieve greatness despite their own limitations .
Struggling , yet striving , is also an unfortunate hallmark of the working class . G . Christopher Williams ties Mario ’ s working-class appeal to this very thing . Williams writes , “ If Mario is heroic as a hard worker [ ... ] it is in a kind of Faulknerian sense�because he ‘ endures ’ through his persistent labor .” It may seem like an afterthought that Mario ’ s appearance happens to mark him as working class . Indeed , Ryan mentions that Mario ’ s appearance was determined more by practical limitations , such as his appearance in the original game being “ limited to three colors ,” and the need to distinguish between his clothing and physical features within that limitation more than anything else ( 25 ). For example , “ Miyamoto gave [ Mario ] a bushy mustache , mostly so players could tell where the nose ended and the mouth began ,” and similar concerns led to him having his hat and overalls . So even though Mario ’ s classic design is more about practicality than a specific desire on the part of his designers to make him working class , the imagery was used to define much of that game ’ s setting
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