CJ Eller

Just as I was learning about state in IaaC, I came across a video about how to add state to Super Mario Maker 2. State in this context means that a player can make “changes” in a level persist after losing a life. It'd be quixotic to explain how it works in game, so here's the video instead.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0ufuT63G5Y

Incredible to see how state is achieved through hacking the game's fundamentals, stretching them as far as they can go. It's also interesting to think of state, or lack thereof, as something taken for granted in certain contexts. For a Super Mario Maker level, you play the level and that's it. State doesn't enter the picture except in the context of checkpoints. Everything in the level more or less stays the same. But once state enters the picture, what kind of levels could be created?

And what possibilities occur when you remove state from certain processes? I've been writing this blog through editing a single draft, not creating a new draft each time. A Lambda function just grabs the contents of the same draft at 5:00pm Monday through Friday and publishes it. It turns my editor into more of a palimpsest. That transformation helps me write more consistently here, which makes me feel better on the whole.

What else could be done with state?