[fwilliams]

Most researchers in my field make all their publications freely available online after they have been submitted.

In machine learning and computer vision, the default is to put your work on ArXiv immediately upon completion. There is a lot of openly available research depending on the field. I find most fields in computer science are good for this.

In the case of the Mario example, I very much doubt that the author was not able to find other work because of closed journals.

Research can seem non-transparent to non-researchers because when problems are new, they are often poorly understood. Academic papers discuss novel problems and contextualize them based on other cutting edge work. Reading and understanding these papers requires a lot of context and takes time. Research is a skill that takes years to learn.

After some time has passed and we collectively gain a better understanding of a problem, academic papers may seem abstruse and overly complicated, but when these works were first published, this was the best way to understand them. For somebody looking for a recipe solution to a problem, an academic paper is likely not an the ideal place to look, which is why we write books, blog posts, etc... as we come to better understand a problem and its solutions.