Bonus post: if you're wondering: "how hard can a SMM2 level really be?" here's a short demonstration 🤯
www.youtube.com/watch?v=O58R... 7/6

That's it for this short summary. See the paper's preprint 📜 for many more details! arxiv.org/abs/2507.21078 6/6

A topic sentiment analysis of the comments 💬 left by players indicates that the harder levels are often polarizing, as they rack up comparatively more comments expressing negative 😡 ("mad") or positive 🤩 ("great level") terms, as opposed to more neutral ones. 5/6

A regression analysis suggests that levels using recent game styles ⚡ (e.g.,New Super Mario Bros. U) are associated with lower clear rates (i.e., they're more difficult). In fact, each style adds new game mechanics that may compound the difficulty 🤹. supermariomaker2.fandom.com/wiki/Game_St... 4/6

A few years ago, a huge dump of level data has been made publicly available by a community effort. In this paper, we set out to analyze this data 🔎, focusing on a fundamental question: what characteristics of a level are related to it being easy or hard? 📊 3/6

Mario Maker 2 🍄 is a popular game for the Nintendo Switch where users can design new courses and share them with other users by uploading them on Nintendo's servers. Since 2019, millions of "makers" 🧰 unleashed their creativity producing tens of millions of levels of all kinds and styles. 2/6

Publishing in Mad magazine?