Game Design & Quality

Thanks to its popularity, Super Mario Maker 2 (SMM2) features myriad user-designed platforming levels that span a broad range of styles, genres, difficulty, and quality. This paper is a first attempt at charting out this vast landscape of levels, with the goal of exploring the main concepts that characterize design quality. To this end, we first selected 500 videos by popular YouTube streamers that play SMM2 levels. With the help of an LLM, we extracted and clustered by topic segments where the streamer comments about the design of the level they are playing. Then, we applied a grounded theory coding process to extract the concepts emerging in these segments, and we combined and organized them hierarchically. The resulting taxonomy identifies the main abstract concepts that pertain to the design of a level in SMM2 and its resulting quality, as well as several concrete elements of the game that belong to each abstract category. Besides illustrating the underlying dimensions that characterize design quality in SMM2, our results also illuminate the diverse landscape of player-designed levels in the game.

Boris Bezzola · Master of Science in Software & Data Engineering

Federico Lagrasta · Master of Science in Informatics

Games like Super Mario Maker 2 (SMM2) lower the barrier for casual users to become level designers. In this paper, we set out to analyze a vast amount of data about SMM2 user-written levels, in order to understand what factors affect a level's difficulty as experienced by other users. To this end, we perform two kinds of analyses: one based on regression models and one using natural language processing techniques. The main results shed light on which level characteristics (e.g., its style, popularity, timing) and which topics and sentiments have a consistent association with easier or harder levels. While none of our findings are startling, they help distill some key differences between easy and hard SMM2 levels, which, in turn, can pave the way for a better understanding of end-user level design.