We tend to look down on people who make excessive amounts of money. Our reasons vary, but it usually boils down to the jaded belief that runaway success can’t come without selling a piece of your soul or taking some big risks. Wall Street has illustrated this point to us clearly during their fiscal mismanagement which has left some of you available during the weekday to read this post. But none of us should be surprised by the brash behavior of an elite few. Most of us spent years playing Mario Brothers, and that’s really the only life lesson we need.

Super Mario Brothers has always been an incredibly accurate barometer for greed. People of all ages have spent a disheartening amount of time going after that last big coin in the upper right portion of the screen. Don’t act all indignant about it now, because you know exactly what the hell I’m talking about. How many lives did you waste, trying to climb some fucking beanstalk, just so you could recover that last coin. Did you need that coin? Not at all! You already had 98 coins, two more and you get another life. But you’ve already got 47 lives and you’ll NEVER burn through them all.

So why take the risk? Is it for the high? Or just the satisfaction of knowing you could do it. It’s a challenge, dangled in front of your face. That prick Yoshi was just egging you on, telling you how HE could have gotten it if he really wanted to. Your next door neighbor is bragging about how his high score has gotten to the point where it’s flipping back to zeros because 8 sorry ass bits weren’t enough to accurately track his awesome. Challenges, by their nature, are made to be answered.

I don’t know about you, but there was no room for “safety” in my Mario Bros game play. Go big or go home, those were the only rules to live by. I didn’t have time for things like “risk analysis”. I saw some shit and I went after it, that’s how the fat stay fat with coins and mushrooms. Whatever your reasons were, I’m not hear to judge you. I was right there with you, struggling for that last piece of digital gold. I’m just saying that even at a young age, characters like Sonic and Mario are feeding into our desire to want more, no matter the cost.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 19th, 2010 at 1:54 pm and is filed under Games, Video Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.