Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Super Mario as Quantum Theoretician and 9/11 Conspirator

Here's a video of someone's 134 superimposed playthroughs of a particularly difficult level of Mario World:


You can read (though I didn't) a related 2,400-word essay called "Super Mario World vs. the Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Physics".

And here's a video I acquired from a 25-year-old Japanese girl's cell phone (click on the image to watch 3 seconds of animation):


After I expressed and explained to her my shock at the video's contents, I learned that she was only vaguely familiar with the events of 9/11, not at all familiar with the Arabic expression "Allāhu Akbar", and apparently had made no associations with the video other than that it was an amusing depiction of Mario blowing up what appeared (indicated by the flag) to be an American building. It's been my impression that most Japanese adults aren't as poorly informed about world events.

Some casual internet searching revealed that the video was at one point available at somethingawful.com, but I didn't find any other discussion about it.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

the quantum theory was actually interesting. i know almost nothing about quantum mechanics, but i'm happy that videogames can serve some higher purpose once in a while.

Unknown said...

The video kind of reminds me of that new Nick Cage movie "Next".