Jolted out of Our Aesthetic Skins

Simon Wu writes on “Mario Kart” and fiction in Las Vegas in an essay from the LARB Quarterly, issue no. 44, “Pressure.”

By Simon WuMarch 29, 2025

• LARB Lit

• Memoir & Essay

This essay is a preview of the LARB Quarterly, no. 44: Pressure. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.

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THE RACE BEGINS with a wait. Engines stalled in an airport terminal filled with sunlight.

It had been five years since my last. I had filled my time with Adult Things: graduate school, remote work, a boyfriend named Ekin. But I had been feeling unmoored lately. I was writing fiction after publishing my debut collection of essays, and I was struggling. My characters felt fake, their woes artificial. I was enforcing an arbitrary rule that it should all be made up. I was getting tired of making everything up. And then Mario Kart 8 Deluxe seemed to fall from the sky, knocking me over the head, rewiring my sense of fiction and reality.

Lakitu, a turtle wearing goggles, descends on a cloud. In the Super Mario games, he throws spiny shells from the sky. Here, freed of his original narrative, he seems to fulfill his true desire: to be a go-kart referee. He counts down to the beginning. Three, two—I remember to press A, to step on the pedal—and one. I pull ahead, taking a sharp turn to the right and then to the left. A ramp launches me into the air. I crash through an iridescent box that gifts me a green shell. I drive. I pass a plane, and then fly into the sky.

My consciousness tunnels. A sense of calm descends. There is no couch, no apartment, no work to do or characters to make up, only forward motion and steering. A track, impossibly suspended in the clouds, renders Yoshi’s kart temporarily weightless. He switches effortlessly between being a dinosaur, a plane, a car. He finishes the first lap in first place, Shy Guy and Tanooki Mario in fourth and fifth.

During the second lap, a collection of misfortunes causes Yoshi to fall behind. Some are of his own doing—an unforgivable maneuver into a banana peel. Others are transcendental, algorithmically divine: a red shell from a Metal Peach, a spiky blue shell from the back ranks of the race. He spins out. I curse. Yoshi waves his paws in distress, and Tanooki Mario and Shy Guy, my boyfriend Ekin and my brother Nick, now in second and third, hurtle by, cackling.

Yoshi makes up time on the third lap. He says to himself: no more fucking around. He concentrates on drifting well through the turns and catching every trick on the ramps, his tongue extending in midair, elated. He enters the last round in third.

The next few seconds pass very slowly. Yoshi hits every jump and avoids every obstacle, crashing through the double box to increase his chances of receiving powerful items. He accumulates enough speed on the final stretch to pass Shy Guy. But before he can finish, a well-aimed Bob-omb appears, thrown from behind him. His eyes widen as the fuse shortens. When the Bob-omb goes off, he catapults into the air. So close to the finish, he spins out. He waves his short dinosaur arms in distress again. Tanooki Mario, then Shy Guy, then a CPU Isabelle fly past him in first, second, and third. He regains his composure, rolling through at a bitter fourth.

A tingling spreads through my body, my heart rate elevated. Light from the atrium in Sunshine Airport falls on my lap. I want to play again—and again, and again.

¤

The next week, I am in Las Vegas for a family vacation. We got a deal on a nice hotel called the Cosmopolitan through Costco Travel. I decide to leave Mario Kart in New York, assuming we will be distracted with other Adult, Real-Life Things to do. This is a mistake. Vegas is not for us, not really. My parents don’t drink or gamble, and they don’t like to spend money.

The first morning, we try to take a walk down the Strip. We learn quickly that this is a bad idea. Vegas is not made for walking. It is made for shuffling around buildings, parking lots, and casinos. It is made for seeing where you want to go, but having to take a tram, skybridge, or escalator to get there. To get to the Walgreens across the street to buy drinking water that is not included with our room, we have to figure out how to leave the hotel. The Cosmopolitan fulfills the promise of its name primarily through the promiscuity of its entrances and exits, which lead variously to other hotels, parking garages, trams, skating rinks, and parking lots. But only one of them—the skybridge on the second floor—will allow you to cross the 12-lane highway over Las Vegas Boulevard and get to the Planet Hollywood Las Vegas Resort & Casino across the street, where there is a Walgreens in the lobby.

The Strip is really made to be experienced from inside a car. It’s winter, so the weather is mild enough for walking. I imagine the summers are unforgiving. I imagine tourists moving from air-conditioned hotels to air-conditioned cars and back again.

Las Vegas is famously one of the United States’ most car-centric cities. “We rode around from casino to casino. Dazed by the desert sun and dazzled by the signs, both loving and hating what we saw,” recalled the architect Denise Scott Brown, co-author of the influential 1972 book Learning from Las Vegas, in a 1981 interview, “we were jolted clear out of our aesthetic skins.”

Before Super Mario Kart was first introduced in 1992, the developers of Nintendo, including Shigeru Miyamoto, Tadashi Sugiyama, and Hideki Konno, had already tried to make a racing game inspired by cars. “That was our first idea, actually: a fun, lighthearted game where you zip around unrealistically in cars,” Miyamoto said in an interview that year. Ultimately, reined in by technical difficulties and inspired by the popularity of go-kart racing in Japan, they opted for shorter, windier tracks. They added items, like coins and shells, to maintain the lighthearted lack of realism and to balance skill with chance. “It wouldn’t be the life-or-death, dangerous world of F1 racing,” he continued, “but more the atmosphere of screeching wheels as you zip around an amusement park. From those ideas, the concept eventually evolved naturally from cars to karts.”

The transition from cars to karts marks Mario Kart’s departure from simulation into fiction. Where F1 car racing simulates driving, Mario Kart is basically a whole new thing: what it might feel like to battle your friends on a racing track. “Games that simulate reality can never actually be reality,” Namuko Kushida, a Japanese game critic, wrote in Famitsu magazine of the original 1992 version of Mario Kart. “And while catching up to reality is very difficult, fiction can draw near to it, or even surpass it in some ways. While Super Mario Kart is absolutely a work of fiction, it’s more faithful to reality than any simulation.”

What makes Mario Kart so fun and lighthearted—and such an effective distraction—is its very lack of an attempt to simulate or “catch up to” reality. It isn’t a car racing simulator. With its shells and bombs and video game characters, it is a kart-racing fiction.

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I bring one book with me to Vegas: Tom McCarthy’s 2005 novel Remainder. I read it while I cannot play Mario Kart in our hotel room. In the book, a man is struck by falling debris from the sky. He receives an enormous financial settlement, but the event leaves him with neurological damage that makes even simple motor functions like walking painstaking and performative. He craves a way to make himself feel less “inauthentic,” for a form of being where the self is merged with his surroundings, where he feels more “real.”

He begins to stage elaborate reenactments. He hires actors, interior designers, architects. He buys an entire apartment building and transforms it into a replica of a flat he used to live in several years ago, agonizing over the shape of the cracks in the wall, the exact smell of the stairwell. He pays a woman to cook liver on the floor below him, a man to practice piano throughout the day, and another to tinker with his car on the ground floor, all drawn from one specific memory.

After months of preparation, the reenactment is ready. He goes up and down the stairs. He smells the liver, listens to the pianist make mistakes. In this repetition, he is overcome with an intense presentness: a “tingling” that makes him forget about the disjunction in his limbs, his general sense of inauthenticity. To sustain this feeling, he stages more reenactments and plays them again—and again, and again. The sets become increasingly elaborate in pursuit of that tingling.

I think of him as we stand on the Cosmopolitan skybridge, 20 feet above the street, looking at the facade of the Planet Hollywood Resort & Casino. My mother wants to take a family picture. The hotel’s concrete face displays signs for Bubba Gump Shrimp Co., Taco Bell, Rainforest Cafe, and Sugar Factory. Above, a swooping LED screen cycles through ads. There is an ad for Swatch, one for Meta VR glasses, and then for a Bruno Mars concert.

Amid the Strip’s chain restaurants and enormous advertisements, I have also begun to feel inauthentic. As if my actions were predetermined, poorly written. Perhaps having Mario Kart would have made me feel more authentic, or at least distracted me from my falseness. I try to write some fiction in the mornings, but nothing feels right. Instead, I procrastinate by documenting the strangeness of my surroundings. So long as it isn’t made up, the writing comes easy.

On the skybridge, I look for someone who can take a family photograph for us. Nearby, a man in a hoodie hands out CDs of his mixtape. On the other end of the bridge, two women in feathered bikinis hand out cards. I wonder what their lives are like, beyond this skybridge. It feels like there might be a “real” Vegas behind this “fake” Vegas. A “real” Vegas of locals and history and immigrants somewhere, perhaps far beyond, or just behind, the Strip. I think that maybe, if I stared long enough at the buildings’ surfaces, they might begin to denature, the LED washing away to reveal raw concrete and history.

A nice couple sees my searching and asks if we’d like our picture taken. We get into formation in front of Planet Hollywood. Afterwards, I take a picture for them. When I look at the picture later, the LED screen behind us is frozen between the Meta VR and Bruno Mars, dark glasses on a smiling face.

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On the way to breakfast our second morning, we get lost. My father has the idea of using the third-floor passageway to bypass the cigarette smoke of the casino floor, but once we are up there, we are not sure how to get back down. We pass a FedEx, a gallery of black-and-white celebrity photos, and a food court with a Juice Generation.

We are almost always being ripped off in the Cosmopolitan. Breakfast—like drinking water—is not included. Everything feels like an advertisement, and we are coerced into spending money just to exist. We resist the urge to find the nearest Costco and buy groceries. But we do have a $150 room credit to spend. So we eat breakfast this morning at The Henry, the closest thing the hotel, with its two full-priced food courts and multitude of large, glassy celebrity chef restaurants, has to a reasonably priced meal.

Staying at the Cosmopolitan is a bit like staying in a mall. Its interiors are made to facilitate one’s basest desires. The hallways are modeled not after architectural reason but rather the neural pathways between gambling, eating, and shopping. It is a long, temperature-controlled corridor, a postmodern “junkspace”: sleek, profit-oriented, and frictionless.

Normally, I love malls. My favorite course in Mario Kart is Coconut Mall, a track based on a fictional shopping center located on Isle Delfino (the sunny, island locale where the game Super Mario Sunshine takes place). The track is a pastiche of hallways, ramps, dash panels, trick fountains, and atriums, combined in a way that defies the laws of physics, architecture, and God. In the game’s signature cartoonish, often absurdist way, Coconut Mall exaggerates the disjointed nature of junkspace in a way that even Vegas cannot rival.

It also proves—or so I conclude, yearning for Mario Kart from the Cosmopolitan—that junkspace is more fun to drive through than to live inside of. Coconut Mall begins at the entrance, in a beach setting near a parking lot. An orange archway marks the starting line. Two escalators, pointing in opposite directions, lead to an upper floor, where Toad, an animate mushroom, waves from a clothing store called “Coco.” Down a second set of escalators, an indoor atrium with palm trees and a large skylight holds a large fountain with curved edges—very good for tricks.

Despite advertisements for Fire Flowers, Bananas, Super Stars, Shy Guy Records, and Kamek Book Store (among others), nothing in Coconut Mall is for sale. Although a player can accumulate up to 10 coins during a race, you cannot buy anything inside the mall or any of the other tracks—like Water Park, Daisy Cruiser, Sunshine Airport—modeled on spaces of commerce. Coins only increase one’s speed, unlock more vehicles.

Coconut Mall thereby delivers the aesthetic, even nostalgic pleasures of retail without the real-life fear of getting ripped off. Sailing through its corridors neuters the unsavory aspects of capitalism and lulls one into a fantasy of plenty, innocence, and autonomy—far removed from the simulated conveniences of the Cosmopolitan.

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What kind of fiction does Mario Kart model? The only other time video games came up in my creative writing circles, they took the form of experimental, narrative text-based games. While I had become obsessed with Mario Kart, my friend Julie had become obsessed with Disco Elysium, a game she described as feeling like reading several novels. Is there such a thing as narrative in Mario Kart? Could the kart-racing game be read like a novel?

If there is any plot in Mario Kart, it is like the disjointed spaces that its tracks stitch together: postmodern. You know where you will begin, you know where you will end—which, with the exception of specific maps, is where you started. The point of the race is about the experience of speed, the pleasure of mastery, the thrill of being subjected to chance, the possibility of upset. It is a postmodern masterpiece that approximates the race better than the race itself.

Of the various modes Mario Kart offers, I think that Time Trials is the most narratively provocative. The focus of Time Trials is to optimize one’s route through a track, finding the best shortcuts, the best angles by which to drift and accrue acceleration. You can also play against your “ghost”—a recorded version of your fastest time that appears as a transparent poltergeist on the track. Because Time Trials are always played alone, ghosts help situate the racer, giving a sense of how well they are doing compared to their best times. As in Remainder, a Mario Kart racer reenacts each track to approximate a feeling of wholeness.

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The road out of Las Vegas is flat. Today, rather than wandering the Strip, we are going to the Grand Canyon. Staring out the window at vast plains, low shrubbery, and unexpected lushness—which, I can’t help but think, resemble the virtual landscapes on Mario Kart tracks such as Choco Mountain and Sweet Sweet Canyon—I realize: I want it to be philosophical, this canyon. I am hoping it will provide a sense of fulfillment more satisfying, more real, than both the simulations of Vegas and the fictions of Mario Kart.

I fall asleep on the bus. When I wake up, our tour guide, Taka, is talking. He has a thick Japanese accent and has been leading Grand Canyon tours for 15 years, about as long as he has been living in the United States. He tells us about the history of Las Vegas, and a bit about the Grand Canyon. He has a habit of punctuating his sentences with a dry, aspirated laugh that makes somewhat serious things sound like jokes.

“I have only two rules for you all,” he says. “One, don’t be late. Two, don’t get too close to the edge. You might fall and we will have to call the helicopter and send you to the hospital and die. Very expensive. Heh!”

Our first stop is not the Grand Canyon but the Grand Canyon IMAX theater. I cannot believe we are spending 30 minutes of our precious two hours at the canyon staring at a screen.

The Grand Canyon IMAX theater only plays one film. It is called Grand Canyon: Rivers of Time. It begins with long aerial shots of the canyon, dizzying helicopter rides over the Colorado River. It feels silly to be watching a movie about the canyon when the actual thing is only miles away. I am grumpy. But then the film dips into reenactment—it becomes really fucking weird, concerningly daring in its visualization of historical emotion. It shows the lives of the Indigenous people who lived in the caves, the Spanish conquistadores who terrorized them, and the expeditions of John Wesley Powell and other frontiersmen of the American West. It shows them traversing the Colorado River rapids, being pummeled by the literal and metaphorical rivers of time. It shows them crying as they lose their cargo, yearning for their loved ones as they are separated along the river.

As I watch, I cannot get over the fact that they are all actors. They are all reenacting. I imagine them scrambling down the bluffs of the canyon. Near the Colorado River, they recite from their scripts, saying things a writer made up. When the cameras turn off, they wipe the makeup off their faces, kart back to Vegas to eat at a buffet and catch a flight.

“In one sense, the actions we’d decided to perform had all happened already,” the narrator of Remainder muses on the eve of one of his largest reenactments. “They’d never stopped happening, intermittently, everywhere.” He describes his reenactment of the scene of his trauma as “an echo of an echo of an echo, like the vague memory of a football being kicked against a wall somewhere by some boy, long after the original has been forgotten, faded, gone, replaced by countless boys kicking footballs against walls in every street of every city.”

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At Mather Point, a famous lookout along the South Rim, my mother takes a lot of pictures. It is difficult to capture the scale of the canyon from our vantage above. No matter how long I stare over the edge, I’m unable to comprehend how deep it falls below me. The rocks around the edge are smooth from the feet of tourists and the aridity of the desert.

The canyon is beautiful. No number of pixels can recreate the experience of standing in front of it, or the jolt of fear that looking over the edge conjures in my spine. Rather than a “tingling,” I feel something else. I feel that I cannot really understand what I am seeing, that I can’t take in enough of it at once. The canyon, like an ocean, or a mountain, feels unknowable, nonlinear, and instantaneous.

My mom processes this by taking pictures. I process it the only way I know how: through the ghosts of the canyon’s simulations and fictions. In Mario Kart, Choco Mountain is a racetrack set in a fictional landscape made out of sugar, baked goods, and icing. When you release a shell, it bounces along the chocolate walls. Spiky Ferrero Rocher boulders roll down the canyon. Shortly after the track begins, once you have acclimated to the vastness of the mountain, an orange ramp launches you into the sky, so you can fly over its contents and see it all at once.

On our way back, we drive through the desert at night, along US Route 93. LED strip lighting inside the bus emits a low blue glow. Duke says the stars are actually very beautiful in the desert, but our eyes cannot really adjust because we use our phones too much. I am looking up something about the Grand Canyon on my phone, but I stop. I am feeling a little nauseous from the movement. I try to look at the stars. Long stretches of black horizon. Mountain shadows in the far distance.

The darkness outside is inscrutable through the reflection of the bus window. Until, suddenly, a gas station. A neon sign—“OPEN”—zoomed past like an abstract animation. Also, “Budweiser” and “Vacancy.” I write this down in my Notes app. It is a beautiful detail. It’s a detail I would want in my novel, even though I had not been writing much of what I would call “fiction.”

I had been taking a lot of Notes like that in Vegas, observing our days. Scrolling through them on the bus now, I feel that they already have a kind of fictional quality. Or, rather, that it might take well to being enhanced through the tools of fiction. Like video games and vacations, I think, most stories are not actually entirely made up. They are sieves of experience, syntheses of the found, the simulated, and the reenacted.

When I go home in a few days, Yoshi will drive through Sunshine Airport, Coconut Mall, Baby Park, and then Choco Mountain. Each time, he will try to catch up to his Time Trial ghost, chasing his fictional specter around and around.

We pass more neon as we near the Strip. A friend had recommended visiting the Neon Museum earlier in the day. He said it was the best thing he did in Las Vegas. He said he’d never really thought about neon lights before but now couldn’t stop thinking about them. We couldn’t fit it into our schedule, but I understood now why neon might have a special significance in the desert. A magical, elemental gas in a glass tube. Dimensionless color bent into a legible form. Every sign an artificial sun, sending real light out across the desert.