Code, Nintendo’s Super Mario and Digital Legality

Abstract

The rise of technology in controlling and performing legal processes has created a new digital legality, signalling a transformation of law from an analog paper-based interpretative activity to an autonomous system governed by the rigidity and speed of code. This emerging digital legality converts life and living to data to be processed and catalogued. This process is exemplified and normalised within video games making them important cultural artefacts through which to identify the features and anxieties of digital legality. While video games have so far gone unrepresented in cultural legal theory, this article uses the iconic video game franchise of Super Mario to unlock the emerging features and anxieties of digital legality as involving rigidity, speed and the normalisation of self as data.