Despite my never-ending love affair with XBox and Gamecube, I went back to the original Nintendo last week after learning about the “Negative World” in “Super Mario Bros.” Apparently it’s possible to jump backwards through brick walls — a tactic which can be used to trigger a warp-zone glitch that sends the player to an infinite underwater level. Alas, the instructions I got weren’t thorough enough, and so I just ended up playing through most of the game in the usual way until I died around World Six (proof that games have become easier over the years, but that’s another column).

After playing “Super Mario Bros.” enough times without using warps, I started to notice how things are put together structurally. The designers did a decent job of keeping things interesting considering that, by today’s standards, they were working with a pretty narrow palette. Think about terrain, for example. You’ve got your basic solid ground, your bricks, pipes, blocks (destructible and solid), springs, bridges and the occasional dense cloud. Sure, things were different in the water and castle levels, but those boards had even fewer options as far as obstacles are concerned.

My point is that the developers weren’t relying on fancy tricks to make a good game; Mario couldn’t even run and swim on the same screen. It’s the way things are arranged that makes the game so good, and there’s an aesthetic to that arrangement that really means a lot for the sake of art and video games. If you look at them just the right way, those spatial arrangements of pipes and bricks become things of beauty that any artist can appreciate.

I’ll admit that calling a bunch of pixilated pipes and bricks art is sort of crazy, but it’s not that different from celebrating the beauty of simple colors and geometric spaces, as many early 20th century artists did.

“Careful,” Music Prof. Steve Rush warned me when I confronted him on this. Comparing something as complex as modern art to a seemingly simple piece of media like “Super Mario Brothers” can be a slippery slope. Why not, though? If there’s an aesthetic to be found in Neo-Plasticist art like Piet Mondrian’s “Broadway Boogie Woogie,” then the aesthetics created by Shigeru Miyamoto and his crew can’t be too far off.

I’m not trying to be facetious by comparing Mario to modern art. Quite the opposite: I want to use that parallel to legitimize the video game as art in the digital age. But in the case of interactive media, it’s more than just creating an aesthetic. The beauty of something like level design has to coexist with entertainment value. That’s why, even as a gamer that favors the “new-school,” I must hail “Super Mario Bros.” for giving us what we now take for granted — the use of space and the calculated arrangement of obstacles as a means of practical game design.

To explain exactly what I mean, I want to point to level 1-1 — a stage filled with examples that almost anyone who has played the game can visualize: The symmetrical sets of treasure-filled blocks, the first set of pipes where players can avoid Goombas with some fancy jumps, the pits that become increasingly dangerous due to the narrow columns of solid blocks that surround them. Not only do these things carry visual beauty through space, color and repetition, but they also have practical use by providing a challenge to the gamer. The developers created something beautiful with “Super Mario Bros.,” even if the technology gave them little to work with.

What I’m ultimately trying to say is this: A video game doesn’t need elaborate scenarios, stunning realism or even complex symbolism to be art. Those things do help to make a great game, but it is the beauty of a game’s design that truly deserves admiration. The Museum of Modern Art in New York describes “Broadway Boogie Woogie” as an “extraordinary balancing act.” After years of trying to jump on a red Koopa shell as it bounces between two strategically placed pipes, how can we see “Super Mario Bros.” as anything different?

— Jared would like to give a shout out to the dog from “Duck Hunt” for its support in researching 8-bit art. E-mail Jared and the dog at jnewman@umich.edu.