posted: 2025-01-13
Super Bernie World and Empowerment
This is a general content warning: against my better judgement, I'm going to talk about United States politics. If that's not your deal for one reason or another and you want to skip this one, I understasnd. Heck, I don't blame you. Politics as we know it today sucks. It probably has always sucked. Unfortunately (or fortunately), I only have about a decade's worth of United States-centric politicking experience. I'm just one guy with one set of opinions. These opinions don't reflect any of the opinions of anyone else, employers, or other affiliations I may have. They're mine and mine alone. And if you have an issue with my political opinions, I encourage you to do what many others often do and cancel me on Twitter dot com. It will not change my political opinions, but it might make you feel self-righteous. But then again I'm just text on a screen. And who really wins when you get mad at text on a screen? That's right. Me.
Okay, alright. Disclaimers out of the way. Let's talk some video games.
Super Bernie World (Kitsune Games, 2020), begins with a splash screen: “This game is designed to get out the vote”. Sure enough, the game is a Super Mario Bros.-esque platformer starring Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders collecting votes and locking up billionaires in an effort to remove the villainous forty-fifth POTUS from the White House. Along the way the player, as Bernie, travels to various swing states, collects votes and confronts foes like the Magamba and the Mitch Troopa. Yes, the Goombas are little MAGA hat wearing cretins, the Koopa Troopas are a riff on the fact that Mitch McConnell looks like a derpy turtle, the hammer bros. are the Charlottesville Nazis, and so on and so forth. The game is about as explicit with its 2020 politics as a Mario-esque itch dot eye oh indie game can get.
Let’s stop here for a moment. Yes, I know I had a content warning and I probably should've included this bit there, but whatever. I need to lay out my biases here before I talk more about something this politically motivated. I am a citizen of the United States of America. I have voted in the 2016, 2020 and 2024 elections.
Not once have I voted for the Republican candidate I shall henceforth refer to as “The Felon” so as to not invoke any search engine optimization bullshit. I am tired of this man. I do not welcome his presence. I would love it if him and his estranged billionaire buddies would fuck off into the stratosphere on some stupid space exploration. Again, I am tired of my entire adult life having been dominated by this pyrite felon.
More generally, I am a supporter of public education, universal health care, reproductive autonomy, transgender rights, and other more left-leaning ideologies when it comes to services that the government theoretically could supply and sustain. And with that, I’m going to leave this discussion here despite the potential twitter waffle-pancake discourse that could ensue 1 .
Okay, back to talking about some video games.
I booted up Super Bernie World because I beat Kitsune Games’s more recent game, Kitsune Tails. “Hey, this here fox girl game is a pretty good one, let’s see what other stuff the devs have made…”. ’
“?!”
With a furrowed, disbelieving brow and a loose jaw, I browsed the steam page for Super Bernie World, saw that it was exactly $0.00, and proceeded to download it. It took about a half hour or so to beat, and it was a well put together platformer.
If Kitsune Tails is a riff on Super Mario Bros. 3, then Super Bernie World is a reimagining of the original Super Mario Bros. There’s four worlds, three swing-state levels each, and at the end of each castle-like level Bernie locks up a billionaire. The game is tightly controlled, the level designs are straightforward, and the game overall is easy to pick up and play.
Yes, Florida is in the final world of the game
If I had to pick a word that I'd associate with Super Bernie World” it would be “empowerment”. The game is decidedly not difficult. In fact, it feels great to blaze through each state collecting as many votes (coins) as possible. I have to assume that it was an intentional level design choice to have many enemies all lined up such that if you jump on them at a full-speed pace you can chain your bounces off of many enemies in a row. I suppose it would’ve been counterintuitive to make a ball-bustingly difficult game about empowering people to go out and vote, after all.
But in that line of thinking, the Kitsune Games and Devs for Bernie teams understand one thing: voting is an empowering action. Super Bernie World full of the rebellious optimism that came with the 2020 election season, the full “the current legislation is a nuisance” and the “GOP are a buncha crooks” type energy, and not as much of the “oh shit, this is actually a legitimate mounting fascist movement” energy we now can see with the power of hindsight. As citizens of the United States during the 2020 election, we believed that our voices would be heard, our actions would have an impact and that, if we truly banded together around a candidate, we could out the felon for good. And for all intents and purposes, we did remove the felon from the Presidency in 2020, despite claims to the contrary. It was an empowering feeling to see this “villainous character”, this looney loser, this caricature of all things rotten with the United States get his just desserts, all because the American populace so desired it to be (or at least, most of the American populace). So let me say it again, empowerment is a way to galvanize folks toward action. Before you can act, you must not only believe you can act, but that your actions will make a difference.
It’s just a pity that this game released less than a week after 2020’s Super Tuesday primary. Bernie Sanders withdrew from the Democratic primary race almost exactly one month after this game was released. Oh well, what can you do?
When it comes to discussing a video game under a critical artistic lens, it would be wrong of me to not consider any political implications whatsoever, especially when it comes to an itch dot eye oh game about a real political figure like Bernie Sanders in SUPER BERNIE WORLD. All art is political in some capacity and if you don’t like it, then tough. Facts don’t care about your feelings, snowflake. Unfortunately a lot of art analysis has to do with feelings and analyzing Super Bernie World is no exception.
While I maintain no contempt for this line of thinking, Super Bernie World perfectly captures the perhaps naïve expectations that “this would all go away” if the Felon was voted out of office. I know I felt this way; I believed that the United States would find a way to “do the right thing”, that all actors would act in good faith and that our neoliberal democracy would continue “as usual”. It is not lost on me that in Stage 2-2 the level design actively promotes focusing on “acquiring votes” by taking the high road, rather than confronting foes by taking the lower path and stooping to their level. It’s a clever way to express a sense of trust in American system.
You ever see political level design before?
At the end of the game, you don’t even fight the Felon, he just gives up, begging and pleading “Please don’t kick me out of the White House! How will me make money if I’m not president??”. If only it were as simple as that. How could have the Super Bernie World devs predicted the outcome of the 2024 election? How could have anyone?
I can only speak about Super Bernie World with a lamenting hindsight. It’s 2025. Rather than sitting in jail for his 34 felony convictions, the Felon’s going to be inaugurated in exactly one week. I do not believe that “we can be better people” works as a rallying cry against fascist rhetoric. I haven’t ever believed this, but I plant my flag in my words here and now. Super Bernie World is a painful reminder that it is not enough to simply take the high road and ignore the enemies and hope everything will turn out alright. Because guess what, it did not turn out alright. It is not enough to simply assume that the bad faith actors will cooperate with the established rules if the rules do not benefit them. I can’t fault left-leaning voters for thinking “things would work out if we just voted the Felon out”, we weren’t ready to admit to ourselves that we were less than a decade away from the end of the post-war neoliberal capitalist society that had slowly been running out of things to consume, so it began to consume itself. I can’t fault the Super Bernie World devs for making the game, I admire them for making it in fact. I just wish that I didn’t have to look back at it today with a sense of cynical pity. Maybe it was enough in 2020, but it didn’t carry into the future.
Does that mean that we should sit down and let the felon’s fascist agenda steamroll us into dust? No! Of course not! We need to find new ways of empowerment. One of the most powerful sedatives to humanity is despair, and the last thing any anti-fascist poster ought to do is make the fascist’s job easier. Being an internet-doomer does NOTHING besides spread the misery of the current times. Don’t spread awareness by coughing on your neighbor, wear a mask and stay home when you’re sick. Don’t poke fun at the zany shit the Felon and his stupid little pissbaby incel best buddy (among others) say. Filter out their bullshit as best you can.
Instead we need to find new means of empowerment, of lifting up our neighbors and demonstrating unyielding support to those who are most targeted by this regimes. We do not live in 2020 anymore; Super Bernie World is a start, but in order to make its message leave a lasting impact we, its players, must find discover what it means to push back against the fascist agendas that plague our societies today. We cannot tolerate it, we must not learn to live with it. I am not afraid to state it clearly: I will not tolerate fascism. I am empowered in my anger and in my rebellion. I am empowered by my love for my family and my friends and my community. I am empowered by my preparation and forethought. I am empowered by the knowledge that I can still make a difference in the world if I keep working hard and stand my ground.
What empowers you?
