The many variations of Mario Kart games have been among the most fun I’ve ever had playing video games.

One of the many mechanics that helps make the Mario Kart games great is how the game is designed to narrow the gap between stronger and weaker players. If you’re in first place, you get weaker power-ups. If you’re in last place, you get the best power-ups, including some that will help you catch up to the pack, and some that specifically target the leader.

The strongest example of this in Mario Kart is how racers in last place are often rewarded with the Blue Shell. This Blue Shell is a special power that when launched, skips over everyone until it knocks out the racer currently in the lead. Should that lucky last-placer end up in the lead, they’ll face the same danger.

Levelling the playing field doesn’t just improve the game for weaker players, it makes the game better for everyone. Since the object is to have fun and not just to win, even the best players benefit from the ways the game becomes more challenging for them.

Allow me a sharp change in direction.

Many of our problems stem from the gaps between the strong and weak, rich and poor, privileged and underprivileged. Closing these gap tends to improve things for everyone, including those who were starting at the top.

This isn’t a new concept in governance. This Mario Kart mechanic is used in social programs with tools like progressive taxation.

In Kim Stanley Robinson’s surprisingly hopeful novel about catastrophic climate change, The Ministry for the Future, Robinson imagines a future in which wealth and income is capped at a multiple of the average. If you want to get paid more than ten times the average, you’ll have to drag everyone else up with you.

I would also like to see this gap-closing mechanic applied to social media. Imagine an algorithm that penalizes popularity and rewards obscurity with attention. You wouldn’t silence the popular. Rather, you would make the climb a bit harder for those with established audiences.

Such a system could make networks more welcoming, boosting new voices, while raising the level of difficulty for those with entrenched experience.

Let’s try tuning our systems to work against the seemingly innate gravity of wealth and fame. Perhaps this would help engineer an ecosystem of many moderate voices, rather that constellation of a few hyper-celebrities.

Update (April 15, 2021): Since make this post, I’ve learned that a researcher from Boston University, Andrew Bell, wrote an academic paper about using the Mario-Kart balance principles to help with environmental governance. Bell’s paper is also covered by Boston University’s research magazine.