Mario il performer. Il teatro e la performance in "Paper Mario 2"

In recent decades, new medias and theater revealed numerous elements of contact and divergence analyzed at a general level on several occasions, including some studies on the theatrical elements in videogames. The article examines the performative presence in the field of gaming focusing on a single case study: Paper Mario 2: The Thousand-Year Door (Nintendo, 2004). For its explicit performative and metatheatrical elements the analyzed game breaks, in a sense, the fiction, allowing you to effectively reflect on similarities and differences most often not immediately obvious. In a semiotic perspective, but not without descriptive traits, the analysis of Paper Mario 2 touches different insights about the value of the interaction, the reproducibility, the relationship between spectator and performer and performative gestures, as well as the paper element of the game and its affinity with the toy theaters.