The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy_ I Link Therefore I Am - Luke Cuddy [17]
Criticisms aside, warping may ultimately serve as a reasonable compromise between competing design demands. Wind Waker in particular seems full of such compromises. The game’s designers might argue that the Ballad of Gales is only earned after players have had ample time to “soak in” the virtual world. Also, players can only teleport to a pre-selected list of places; they must still sail short distances to their exact destination. By guiding the pace of the game, the Ballad of Gales attempts to balance the open-ended virtual world with goal-oriented dungeon crawling.
These points in mind, I only mean to call attention to the fact that goal-oriented gameplay and environmental presence exist in unavoidable tension. In moderation, sense of purpose can make a place come alive. But when we focus on moves, strategy, puzzles, and other performance-oriented tasks, we’re left with little cognitive room to appreciate the surrounding environment. Any ability—especially an ability as powerful as warping—comes with consequences. So any game designer who aims to create memorable places enjoyable in and of themselves must take this tension into account.
Nor are my concerns simply academic. As Castells warns, the unchecked dominance of spaces of flows—which produces segmented places that are increasingly unrelated to each other—fragments culture and meaning. In a similar spirit, Henry Jenkins suggests that open-ended virtual places provide an important substitute for the backyards, neighborhood forests, and fields that are disappearing in the face of urbanization:
Videogames constitute virtual playing spaces which allow homebound children like my son to extend their reach, to explore, manipulate, and interact with a more diverse range of imaginary places that constitute the often drab, predictable, and overly-familiar spaces of their everyday lives.17
The rewards of open-ended digital places aren’t limited to just children. As Kevin Lynch argues, all urban citizens are in need of environmental stability: “The city environment is itself changing rapidly … These changes are often disturbing to the citizen emotionally, and tend to disorganize his perceptual image.”18 It doesn’t seem far-fetched to believe that environmental presence in virtual space might act as one source of psychologically stabilizing spatial organization.
Virtual worlds that nurture environmental presence offer more than just escapist pleasure or action-based thrills. They give us a way to make sense of ourselves. As de Certeau observes, our experiences of places draw from and feed back into our own personal narratives. “Places are fragmentary and inward-turning histories, pasts that others are not allowed to read, accumulated times that can be unfolded but like stories held in reserve” (Practice, p. 108). For me, hazy memories of my own childhood seaside adventures lent Wind Waker a certain emotional resonance. In turn, these virtual adventures would later color my experience of the ocean in the material world. The game fostered a dialogue between my virtual and real lives, to the enrichment of both.
As commodity, Wind Waker is certainly wise to adopt design principles that optimize entertainment value. But if we fathom videogames as virtual worlds—as an emerging art form in an increasingly placeless world—Wind Waker and its Ballad of Gales leave us only to imagine the depth of experience that might be gained from a more uncompromising vision of digital place. Until then, you can find me in the High Sierras, somewhere on my way to Cloud’s Rest.
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Legend and Logic: Critical Thinking in the Gaming and Real Worlds
ROBERT ARP and DENNIS MILARKER
All gamers are geeks. This is how Rob Arp used