Tuesday, September 20, 2011

The Super Mario Bros. 3 interpretation of continents

This video about the arbitrary way we divide the globe into continents has been making the rounds. While I don't think there's anything very interesting about this--just an issue of semantics, really--I do think that insofar as cultural considerations enter into it, one thing people of a younger generation have in mind is the video schema of different "worlds", where each one has some recognizably different aesthetic or gimmick. For example, there's always an ice world, a fire/volcano world, maybe a cloud world, etc. And there's usually around 7-10 different worlds.

The upshot of all this is that you HAVE to count Antarctica because that's DEFINITELY the ice world.