The Monitor is a weekly column devoted to everything happening in the WIRED world of culture, from movies to memes, TV to Twitter. The Super Mario Bros. Movie introduces its namesake duo with a commercial. It's Brooklyn, before they get sucked into the Mushroom Kingdom, and they've made a local TV ad to hawk their plumbing skills. As a filmmaking tool, it's a near-perfect piece of exposition, establishing who the Mario brothers are in mere minutes. Most transmedia properties are about milking intellectual property for fun and profit.

In the Guide's weekly Solved! Over the course of almost three decades playing video games and 15 years writing about them, I have seen a few recurrent questions that just refuse to die. Are video games art? (Yes, when they want to be.) Is Sonic better than Mario? Does playing games turn you into a sociopathic murderer?