A Taxonomy of Design Quality in Super Mario Maker 2

Abstract. 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.