SMW Central's Questionable Level Design Contest has become a bit of a phenomena. It has exceeded all expectations of those of us who keep putting it together. To date it's been held as a level contest 3 times by SMW Central, the "questionable" concept has been used for a Hack Jam, and notable levels and their play-throughs have escaped the bubble of SMW hackers to reach other places and Mario fans on the internet.

All that has gotten me reflective on what sort of energy we've captured and why it shocks, intrigues, and delights people.

The Bad Times of 2020

There was a lot going on in 2020, but one of the things that happened was rezephae had the idea for a Super Mario World contest that was for bad levels—"bad" as in truly unpleasant, and inspired by notorious ROM hacks like Hyper 6 and Way of the M. (Notably, while this was going on a number of people were doing playthroughs of Hyper 6, so the energy for questionable decision making was afoot in the SMW community.)

Bad Level Design Contest

I wasn't involved in organizing at this point in history but some enablers at Romhack Races were keen to collaborate (especially after a relay race of Hyper 6 happened that same year) and so the Bad Level Design Contest went live.

The contest brief encouraged people to be mean and unethical and disregard the player experience, with bonus points for being bad in unforseen ways. However, what ended up being submitted to the contest was far more interesting than just a series of "bad" levels.

Some of these are good, actually

While many of the submissions were deliberately antagonistic or punishing in their design, what was clear to me was: if you have some players with the stomach and skills to tolerate the unconventional, and open a space for expression that doesn't exist anywhere else, some creators will run with that freedom extremely well.

Letting people with a talent for hacking Super Mario World exercise their skills in an unrestrained context a different sort of creativity emerges. Bad LDC showed, at least to me, that there was potential in the idea of an unconstrained event that let creators go Goblin Mode, the premise just needed some tuning.

What if it wasn't bad?

I had been revisiting some of old judging videos because I was missing the energy that Bad LDC captured and what it managed to get from level creators (even if some submissions ended up being rather controversial). As I was in a group chat with the folks behind it, I discussed what I felt about the Bad LDC and floated the idea of hosting it again.

Folks were open to it—enough time had also passed that the painful memories had faded—but we agreed that in order to not indulge creators' worst tendencies it couldn't be "bad" again. A spiritual successor had to discourage making things borderline unplayable and pull the energy away from being mean-spirited to just being silly and unorthodox, while still letting creators have the freedom to be unhinged; a goal had to be to try and tease out the good from the actual bad.

So off we went. The planning group chat for awhile was just titled "??? LDC" as we needed to figure out what to call it instead of "bad" but it never got beyond that and the question marks led to the name "questionable" to fill in the blank (plus "QLDC" we thought would be a silly acronym).

Conceptually, the term "questionable" served us well as it refers to things yet determined; level creators could be the ones to determine what it means to them.

"What is a questionable level?"

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Partnering with SMW Central

Seeing as we also already had an in at SMW Central, they were receptive to partnering with our ragtag group as host to bring the event to the wider SMW hacking community, and so the Questionable Level Design Contest was born.

In the first iteration of QLDC it was decided that we had to firmly establish the philosophy of the contest to "correct the vibes" from Bad LDC. This was greatly helped along by our initial panel of judges (and SMW sickos): authorblues, kezcade, rezephae, shovda, and ThirdWall who all understood what we were trying to accomplish and could guide level creators with their feedback. All of them being highly skilled players, who remain receptive and open-minded to any sort of level, meant QLDC could take on all sorts of submissions and could work through the growing pains.

Let's Get Questionable

One of the goals for QLDC from the start was to not be prescriptive about what the contest was looking for. Instead of giving clear direction in the contest brief, it was left to level creators to interpret the concept behind the contest. However, we did know what we didn't want, so things that were traditional, safe, or felt familiar were discouraged.

Additionally, the contest did away with any sort of typical rubric or scoring system that evaluates level design, construction, aesthetics, etc. both so makers didn't have to worry about accumulating or losing points, and to focus the task of the judges on evaluating the experience and how well a submission arrives at "questionable".

What does it mean to be "questionable"

In short, it's anything that is against the grain of a typical Super Mario level. It's a rejection of tradition in order to use Super Mario World as a canvas to try new or unusual ideas. If one were to elaborate further on that, "questionable" levels fall on a sort of matrix of the following (non-exhaustive) properties:

• Unorthodoxy
• Humour
• Genre bending
• Shareable experience

How this manifests in a level is up to the creator and it could be balanced in many different ways. For example, a QLDC level doesn't have to have a sense of humour but can lean entirely into unorthodoxy by being a text adventure instead of a platforming level.

Unorthodoxy

Making a "bad" level is freeing, not actually bad but "bad" in a way that thumbs your nose at what people say is supposed to be a "good level". To reject all sorts of preconceptions about level design, that are established by tradition or convention or what people come to expect a level to be, is to embrace unorthodoxy.

The Super Mario World hacking scene has many many avenues in which to express some sort of conventional design style, including the other contests in the SMW Central roster as well as just making a hack. QLDC is meant to provide an outlet for people to play with any ideas and to make whatever they want, since we have people lined up to guarantee a playthrough.

Humour

Making the player laugh is gold. Many QLDC levels haven't had humourous elements, but those that have been "successful" have leant into being funny, silly or otherwise non-serious. The level doesn't have to be outwardly funny or full of memes or references either, it can be funny in a way that makes the player end up laughing at themselves, or at the absurdity of a level's design.

Submissions to level design contests do tend to poke fun at the "meta" of SMW hacking, and QLDC is no exception on that front.

Genre Bending

I'm using "genre" very loosely here, but putting something very much "not Mario" into Super Mario World is very QLDC. Using the engine of the base game to do something else entirely outside of the platforming genre, or showing that the game can be fundamentally changed with custom code.

Over the years this has taken many forms in QLDC, from text adventures and puzzles, de- and remakes of other games, to full-on narratives, quiz shows, level elements controlled by the SNES mouse, induced input latency, and so on.

The hope is that level creators will run with the freedom of the QLDC brief to try and experiment, or even question what a "level" has to be.

Sharable Experience

A really important cornerstone to QLDC that we realized is that people want to be able to share, or share in the experience of, the hacks made, either by playing the levels themselves or watching them be played by the willing.

What some of the really great QLDC levels do is make you go "this is really special/clever/stupid... I gotta get my friend to play it" and that is extremely powerful. When players find themselves feeling that a level is such a unique experience, one that you won't find anywhere else, that it must be shared, then you're doing something right.

Dawn of a Questionable Culture

QLDC is surrounded by my favourite kind of creative energy and I don't think it could have worked as well outside of the premise of a contest because it's a coming together of creators and players and spectators to see what weird and wild stuff the SMW community can come up with.

I think about the levels often, not just in their own right but as part of the culture of SMW hacking. I have already seen how QLDC has encouraged creators to think differently about what they make, and pulled down stuffy attitudes around level making.

I look forward to saying "what the fuck?" for many more years.