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Watching lots of Super Mario Maker YouTubers, I'm struck by the way levels are designed, and how they demonstrate "constrained creativity." Examples:
So in SMM1, all checkpoints automatically give the player a mushroom when the player touches them. Problem is, most kaizo stages don't want this. Thus, there needs to be some kind of mechanism that removes the mushroom, but not when the player respawns.
As it turns out, there are a lot of different ways to do this, and different creators do different things depending on the design and constraint of their stage.
Speaking of checkpoints, here's another one: if you're playing a friend's stage, you essentially get infinite tries. So how do you punish a player for making mistakes? Send them back to checkpoint 1 after already having gotten checkpoint 2! 😹
Another checkpoint constraint: Nintendo doesn't have a "restart from checkpoint" button, just a "completely start over" button. Because of this, if you've hit a checkpoint, getting "softlocked" (i.e. getting completely stuck with nowhere to go) is a huge hassle.
Nice designers won't put you into this situation. Dastardly designers, on the other hand, will put you in a position that looks like a softlock, save for an extremely annoying and inconvenient way to kill your character. 😡
This and speedrunning are the perfect examples of taking the mechanisms provided by a system and remixing them in unique and unusual ways. Look at a really good kaizo level, and you'll see a game that barely resembles Super Mario, full of shell jumps, bomb ladders, and whatnot.
The fundamental idea here is, "Given the tools at my disposal, what can I do beyond simply following the rules as expected?"
You can see similar shades of this in tabletop RPGs, with concepts like the Diplomancer, the peasant railgun, or Deep Rot. Silly concepts, but at their core is the assumption that rules can be bent or played with to create wildly unusual results.
As designers, if you want to encourage this kind of play, I think your best bet is to create simple, elegant rules that organically combine in ways you might not expect. Mario's gravity + shell pathing +collision rules = shell jump. What else might be lurking in there?
(...Huh. And if you do the same thing with writing, you get fanfiction. Characters, plots, and settings combined in ways distinct from how the original creator intended it.)
