It occurs to me that I’ve almost completely neglected to blog about videogames during the eleven months I’ve been writing this site, yet, aside from writing, they are one of my greatest interests. This was in fact a conscious decision from the start, since I wanted this site to be about writing and literature, but now I’m feeling the need to branch out more for the sake of greater variety, and the Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker is as good a game to start with as any, since I just finished it for the second time last night and enjoyed it more than the first time I played it six years ago.

The Wind Waker is the tenth game in the Legend of Zelda series, a twenty-three-year-old series of games which can be played in any order since each is largely self-contained. As with the Mario series of games, there are three recurring characters in almost every game: a boy named Link who is the hero, a princess named Zelda who generally becomes kidnapped or imprisoned at some point in the game, and a villain who is some sort of evil sorcerer determined on taking over and/or destroying the world, usually called Ganondorf, but occasionally another evil person. While this initially invites comparisons with Lord of the Rings-style high fantasy, the Zelda games have very much their own style and mythology that blends inspirations from both Eastern and Western legends.

In 1998 the fourth game in the series, called The Ocarina of Time, was released. This was the first 3D Zelda game to be released on what was then the most powerful videogame console, the Nintendo 64. The Ocarina of Time went on to become one of, if not the, most critically acclaimed games of all time, and a personal favourite of mine. The unfortunate side-effect of this was that the three 3D Zelda games that followed it were inevitably forced to live in its shadow, endlessly compared to the game with the ultimate conclusion of “it’s good, but not as good as ocarina.” The Wind Waker had it particularly tough because, unlike the realistic Ocarina and the tonally darker Majora’s Mask that followed it, Wind Waker adopted a cartoon-inspired graphical style which was nearly universally disparaged before the game’s release.

I never had a problem with the graphical style; it created an ultimately charming and beautiful game and, rather than enter the uncanny valley that the ‘realistic’ videogames occasionally stray into, it presented a cohesiveness of vision that the hardware of the time would have struggled to match in any other way. The closest thing to Wind Waker would be the animated films of Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli, such as Spirited Away, and in videogame terms, apart from Wind Waker’s two direct sequels on the less powerful Nintendo DS, there are only games such as the relatively obscure ICO on Playstation 2. And this is Wind Waker’s great strength for though I admit, the first time I played through it, my enjoyment was dampened by the constant semi-conscious comparisons to Ocarina and, in Wind Waker, there are a few tediously drawn-out game mechanics, particularly towards the end that hurt the experience, the graphics and the game’s general atmosphere made the game great.

To expound, and this is the real crux of this post on Wind Waker, the whole way the game was created means it does things that few other games, and virtually no works in other mediums, can do or have done. Ultimately, in Wind Waker, a world has been crafted in which it is a nice place to ‘be’. This ties in with a sentiment Randy Smith (Randy Smith being the writer and game designer who introduced me to two of the best books I’ve recently read: Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces and E. Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News) expressed in a recent column in Edge magazine:

“Take a simple, structure-free game about growing a garden. People could become as emotionally invested in this game as they would about tending a real-life garden. There could be no film equivalent that would ever work, as audiences would be bored to death by two hours of footage of weed pruning. For whatever reason, experiences have a different sort of longevity than scenes.”

This is something I’ve thought for a long time, that we do things in games we would never watch or read in a passive medium such as films or books, such as the aforementioned garden-tending, and yet this gives a sense of place lacking in other mediums. That’s not to say films and books don’t come close, like, and I can’t think of any specific examples, in a documentary film about, say, a small fishing village, the viewer would get a sense of place through the lingering shots of fish in crates on the harbour, of the wind whistling through the wires attached to the masts of boats while the sun sets, of the locals in the pub talking and drinking, but all this would be filtered through the mise-en-scene and the presenter’s narration, Similarly, in a film the setting may be important, may provide a context for the characters and may even be a character itself, offsetting the character’s conversations with environmental interference of its own, but there’s still never a sense of the viewer belonging there, only the characters on the screen. Some books have been more successful, like in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, the large cast of supporting characters that inhabit the town of Maycomb, and the frequent descriptions of the town, bring that place to life in a similar way to how James Joyce, through his celebration of pedantic accuracy and the mundane in Ulysses, sought to recreate Dublin, and there is one book which I read an extract of once but cannot remember the name of which, for the first few pages, introduced no characters at all, instead only describing different parts of a city in the same moment, but even these evocations of place exist only in a way pre-determined by the author, who ushers the reader through them at a predetermined pace.

Where the Wind Waker contrasts with these is that you can, and often feel inclined to, pause the story indefinitely and just soak up your surroundings. Perhaps I should have explained already that the game is set in a vast ocean, peppered with forty unique islands, some of which are nothing more than jagged rocks, topped only by some grass and a palm tree, some of which are sprawling communities of human and human-like peoples. Among my favourites of these is Windfall Island, a bustling town of forty or so inhabitants who dance, send unrequited love letters, stare wistfully out to sea, gaze at the moon, run shops and auctions, drink ‘coffee’ in the local tavern, collect photographs, keep pigs, and lament that the lighthouse at the island’s centre has remained unlit for many years. When I first played the game, I used to spend hours just running around Windfall Island, trying to find every secret and reveal every side-story.

What makes this all the more appealing is that not only is every one of the couple of hundred minor characters in the game unique, they each have their own personalities and paragraph-long back-stories. After all, what would be an idyllic community if not for the people and their stories? This is another way Wind Waker brings its world to life in a way that other mediums would struggle to do: there are these little side-stories that really flavour the experience. For example, when you first reach Windfall Island, there are two men whose daughters have been kidnapped. One is the poorest man in town. He wears rags and constantly walks back and forth, stopping any passer-by to beg them to help find his daughter, Maggie. The other man who has lost his daughter, Mila, is the richest man in town. He too attempts to enlist the help of anyone he can in finding her, but rather than begging them, offers them large sums of money in exchange for her safe return.

About halfway through the game you assist in the rescue of the two girls and your friends the pirates return the girls to their respective fathers. When you return to Windfall island a while later, you find that the positions of the two men have been reversed: the rich man spent all his money trying to find his daughter and now has none left. He occupies the same spot the poor man used to under a tree by the jetty and wears the same old rags. Yet he does not mind having lost his house and his fortune for he has only happy to have gotten his daughter back. In contrast, the poor man now lives in the mansion, wearing fine clothes, and has become snobbish. It turns out that while his daughter was locked away in the ‘Forsaken Fortress’ she befriended one of her captors, a monster name Moe, who secretly gave her fine jewelery as a sign of affection. When she was rescued she brought all this jewelery back with her, making a fortune for her and her father. Their story does not end there however, since it goes on that neither daughter’s new life is perfect: Maggie’s father refuses to allow her to receive love letters from Moe, while Mila, trying to earn money for her and her father, has taken to sneaking about at night trying to steal from the safe of the shop she works for during the day. Whether or not Link intervenes is entirely up to the player. That kind of story-within-a-story would be too long to include in a film, along with all the other such tales in the game, and even in any but the most epic of novels. Even then it loses the charm of interactivity, of occurring at the player’s behest and self-determined pace.

I think this kind of narrative ‘experience’ is something a lot of people don’t realise about games, and something a lot of games don’t realise about themselves. For a long time games have been looked-down upon as a lesser medium, in the same way that photographs were considered an inferior novelty to the true art of painting, or films were once just an entertaining diversion rather than a serious narrative vehicle. I think games are finally beginning to be taken more seriously, the mindless shooting games aside, but, ironically perhaps, it is a game with a kiddie-cartoon aesthetic that presents one of the most sterling examples of interactive fiction and as such is most deserving of being taken seriously.

Tags: Article, E. Annie Proulx, essay, Gamecube, Ganondorf, Harper Lee, Hayao Miyazaki, Ico, James Joyce, Joseph Campbell, Legend of Zelda, Link, Lord of the Rings, Majora's Mask, narrative, Narrative Experience, Nintendo 64, Nintendo DS, Ocarina of Time, Pirates, Randy Smith, Spirited Away, Studio Ghibli, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, The Shipping News, The Wind Waker, To Kill a Mockingbird, Ulysses, Videogames, Zelda

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 9th, 2009 at 12:32 pm and is filed under Essays, Opinions, Videogames. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.