Somehow confused interactions discover secret caves. The Legend of Zelda is a jaunt of reasonable proportions. Exploring strange caves and slaying blue and red blobs has strangely never been quite so compelling. Perhaps the spritely nature of the game gives rise to such exploration, as game graphics have improved, the level of abstraction has continually decreased, the universe of possible game creatures quickly homing in on the human as the unique identifier of a character in image. Perhaps the human is alien in appearance, perhaps they are abstracted in some form, but there is a continual jaunt away from the fantastical possibility.
When I walked around, slashing frantically like an idiot at those critters when I was a kid, I always had some weird explanation for how every event in the game was occurring. Part of that had to be the fact that I couldn’t understand what the hell was happening. Ganon may as well have been a mutant ice cream truck, because that was about my conception of his appearance. I think I called the blue and red blobs that spit rocks Goobers, and I have no idea where such an idea came from, maybe just the sound the rock made when it bounced off Link’s shield.
And I can’t really remember myself creating stories for enemies as they became less abstract. For some reason, the abstract has some kind of circumstance, and both the player and the creature are somehow dealt a hand of misfortune, destined to clash as long as they continue to appear in poofy skull clouds. Suddenly there’s a dungeon, or a dock, or a strange tree. The encounter had me thinking about purpose. Not what was his purpose, but what was my purpose? I wasn’t always playing for enjoyment, sometimes I’d just turn it on and wander around. I wasn’t looking for things, I just ran into them.
Game environments don’t do that anymore. They’re too large, typically. Instead we spend all our time worrying about minimaps and HUDs and what the next instruction is. More like rabbits than men to the machine, we follow carrots as a form to escape the boredom of the last space, convincing ourselves that the next space, the next experience is going to be better than the last. But in Zelda, the next space wasn’t better. It was just different. Entirely different.
Maybe games need a break from consistency. The unpredictable too may be a source of discovery, and some modern games seem to understand that, but going back and playing games like these depresses me greatly. Because there’s so little we’ve actually achieved after decades of development. The play is being subsumed by the technology, and our inability to wait for development to discover the technology fully means we’re continually mired in the concept of fun. But we’re missing just being able to explore, particularly as a child explores, with a sense of wonderment at strange abstractions.
Recommended: Yes