Every day I wake up and turn on my Nintendo 64 gaming console to play Mario 64. I am a speedrunner for this game, and I compete in the category for “0 Stars”. The point of this speed run is to reach the final screen of the game, the one after the credits, without collecting any of the game’s one hundred and twenty power stars.

The game’s instruction manual (probably, I just know it’s written somewhere) tells you that the owner of the castle, Princess “Peach” Toadstool has been sealed within the castle’s walls by the fearsome King “Bowser” Koopa. He used the power of the one hundred and twenty power stars that I guess were just locked away somewhere to do this. Despite this, you can complete the game and save her with just 70, the amount needed to remove the magic of the Infinite Staircase. Actually, you can do it with 16 too, which is the amount needed to get the first key to go to the upper floors of the castle. But as you already know, you can also do it with zero. Sometimes you end up doing it with one, though. I want to do it with zero. I want to collect nothing, and fast.

It is easy for me to spend time doing this. I don’t have to think. The process for reaching the final boss is short. Collecting none of the stars means not entering most of the 16 (?) “courses” laid around the castle. You don’t even go to the first one, Bib Bomb Bob’s BattleField (?). You don’t go to Little Big Planet. You don’t go to Jolly Roger Bay. You fight bowser once, then a second time, and then you kill him at the end, finally, and collect the giant power star that he turns into that is not ACTUALLY a power star (it does not increment your star count) and then you see Peach. And you get a kiss from her!

It is also easy in the sense that I do not have a job. I do not go to school. I would not say this is training for anything, which makes me a NEET. You could almost say, as a college graduate in computer science with these accomplishments, I have already achieved “zero stars”. In real life. You could say that if you wanted to be really mean to me. But it’s ok, you don’t have to, I already brought it up as an example here to show you that yes, I have realized the irony of it, it is not lost on me, and no, I do not like it.

If I were to take that thinking a little bit further, I could maybe say that I’m on maybe a 4 star run right now. I got through elementary school. I survived middle school. I got through high school. I got through college. There’s at least one or two official-ish documents in there that prove I did those things too. But thinking about like that isn’t going to do me any favors at all. There are no 4 star runs in Super Mario 64. If you have 4 stars and nothing else, you’re possibly very early into a 120 star run, a 70 star run, or a 16 star run (and for the casual player, anything in between a 70 and 120 star run, for the record). Facing Bowser, the final bowser fight, with just 4 stars means that you failed the 0 star run. There’s nothing really saying you can’t have 4 stars at the end of a 0 star run, despite the difference in names a 0 star run and 1 star run are the same route, just sometimes you get the 1 star on accident along the way, but you spent 4 stars’ worth of time when you really should have just been hauling ass to the end instead. So it doesn’t do me any favors to say I’m on a 4 star run, but it does make me think I wasted some time back there getting those stars.

Getting nothing actually takes more effort than it seems, doesn’t it? Maybe today I won’t turn on my Nintendo 64, and I won’t play Mario 64. I won’t get any stars then. And then I can sit here and think about how many I would have gotten if I tried. I can do that tomorrow too. And I won’t think I’ve done nothing, but I finally will have.