But perhaps our personal experience of controlling Mario does change in some small way. The player may notice the Goomba’s grippy feet, lower jump, and waddling gait, but Mario remains unchanged by the experience once he has returned to his default form. It would be misleading to go as far as to suggest that the experience of contemplating the mushroom kingdom from the perspective of a Goomba is intended to be an exercise in procedural empathy. Or perhaps suggests that organisms can have different Umwelten, even though they share the same environment. With this the game raises the question of what it might be like to experience the Mario universe from the perspective of its multitude of incidental inhabitants. The Cappy mechanism serves the same purpose as those suits - altering or enhancing Mario’s repertoire of abilities and movements so that he can advance successfully through the current puzzle - however it entails a fundamentally different process, whereby Mario is no longer dressing up as someone or something but actually possessing that character or thing. Yet throughout, the player was still always playing as Mario in costume. The Tanooki Suit would transform him both into the eponymous, mythological Japanese raccoon dog and an invincible, unmovable stone statue. A Frog Suit would increases his jump and take the hassle out of swimming. In previous games, he often had access to a variety of suits that would bestow upon him particular abilities. The idea is a twist on an old Mario favorite. The purpose of possessing these otherwise indifferent, or outright hostile, non-player characters (or in certain cases elements of the environment, such as a manhole cover or power line) is to adopt their skills, moves, or very thingness and to make use of those qualities for the task at hand. Cappy can be thrown onto various enemies and objects, enabling Mario to temporarily inhabit the subjects and to dominate and control them from within. Super Mario Odyssey (Nintendo, 2017) prominently features a ghostly sidekick named Cappy, a friendly specter who takes the form of Mario’s iconic red hat. Mario appears to get sucked into the hat, though where that leaves the essences of both Cappy and the frog is an unanswered but philosophically fascinating question.” - Jordan Erica Webber, “ Super Mario Odyssey review: controlling a sentient hat has never been so fun,” The Guardian, October 26, 2017
“Throw Cappy at a frog and Mario will disappear leaving the frog sporting both a red cap and a moustache. Game State is a column by artist Oliver Payne covering the mechanics, aesthetics and ideas of video games.
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