Once, I was playing Mario Kart 8 with my son, and because I am in my twenty-sixth year of regular Mario Kart play, I was leading the game comfortably. But then on the last lap he got Bullet Bill from a question box and proceeded to blow right past me, winning the race and destroying my kart in the process. I ended up finishing fourth.

This sort of thing often happens in Mario Kart, because the question boxes know if you’re in first place. If you are, you’ll usually get a banana peel, or a coin, which are minimally useful. You’ll never get one of those sweet bullets. But if you’re in last place—because, say, you’re an eight-year-old playing a grizzled Mario Kart veteran—you’re much more likely to get lightning or Bullet Bill or an infinite supply of speed-boost mushrooms.

In a Mario Kart game, the best player still usually wins, but luck plays a significant role. Mario Kart is more poker than chess.

Depending on your worldview, the question boxes either make the game fair, because anyone can win, or they make the game unfair, because the person with the most skill doesn’t always win.

In that respect, at least in my experience, real life is the precise opposite of Mario Kart. In real life, when you are ahead, you are given lots of power-ups to get further ahead. After one of my books became commercially successful, for instance, my bank called to inform me that I would no longer be charged ATM fees, even if I used an ATM from a different bank. Why? Because people with money in the bank get all kinds of perks just for having money in the bank. Then there are the much bigger power-ups, like the graduating-from-college-with-no-debt power-up, or the being-white power-up, or the being-male power-up. This doesn’t mean that people with good power-ups will succeed, of course, or that those without them won’t. But I don’t buy the argument that these structural power-ups are irrelevant. The fact that our political, social, and economic systems are biased in favor of the already rich and the already powerful is the single greatest failure of the American democratic ideal. I have benefited from this, directly and profoundly, for my entire life. Almost every time I’ve driven through a question box in my life, I’ve been given at the very least a red turtle shell. It happens so routinely that it’s easy for those of us who benefit from these power-ups to see them as fair. But if I don’t grapple with the reality that I owe much of my success to injustice, I’ll only further the hoarding of wealth and opportunity.

Some might argue that games should reward talent and skill and hard work precisely because real life doesn’t. But to me the real fairness is when everyone has a shot to win, even if their hands are small, even if they haven’t been playing the game since 1992.

In an age of extremes in gaming and elsewhere, Mario Kart is refreshingly nuanced. I give it four stars.