The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy_ I Link Therefore I Am - Luke Cuddy [38]
It would be considered ridiculous for anyone to brag, in an FAQ or online message board, that they had completed the ludus game. For these players, the path intended by the designers is merely a starting point, too easy and not secretive enough to generate true esteem among elite players. In this sense, paidia-minded players reject the ludus game and play games of their own design. Searching for “Zelda” on YouTube produces a number of fan videos of glitches, machinima, and so on. Comments fill the pages, video responses are issued, and most importantly, the videos circulate virally among fans.
These strange and varied accomplishments have no narrative meaning in the gameworld, nor do they have moral meaning: Link cannot be said to be a good person for achieving them. What is honored, then, is power itself, the abilities of the player and not the actions of the protagonist. Link is “good” as opposed to “evil”; the player is “good” as opposed to “bad.” This dichotomy of ludus and paidia, protagonist and player, gameworld and “real” world, has a parallel in moral philosophy.
Masters of Paidia, Slaves of Ludus
In Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche writes that there exist two fundamental types of morality: master morality and slave morality. 31 Master morality, being first, is created from the tension between rulers and the ruled. “In the first case, when the ruling group determines what is ‘good’, the exalted, proud states of the soul are experienced as conferring distinction and determining the order of rank” (p. 394). To be “good” is here understood—as it is in videogame fan cultures—as belonging to an elite group. “It is obvious,” writes Nietzsche, “that moral designations were everywhere first applied to human beings and only later, derivatively, to actions” (p. 395). This transition is a simple one: a “good action” is whatever a “good person” does. Like the paidia player, this archetypal “good” man needs no outside authority (or author) to determine the morality of his actions: “The noble type of man experiences itself as determining values; it does not need approval; it judges, ‘what is harmful to me is harmful in itself’; it knows itself to be that which first accords honor to things; it is value-creating.” Slave morality follows from master morality, not in the sense that it directly adopts the values created by masters, but attempts to subvert them:
Suppose the violated, oppressed, suffering, unfree, who are uncertain of themselves and weary, moralize: what will their moral valuations have in common? … The slave’s eye is not favorable to the virtues of the powerful: he is skeptical and suspicious, subtly suspicious, of all the ‘”good” that is honored there … The opposition reaches its climax when, as a logical consequence of slave morality, a touch of disdain is associated with the “good’” of this morality. (Beyond Good and Evil, p. 397)
The master’s “good” thus becomes the slave’s “evil.” Indeed, the black-and-white morality exemplified in Link the protagonist is defined in opposition to another: Ganon, a figure of which Nietzsche would likely approve far more readily than Link. When Link is “good,” it generally means he’s undoing or thwarting the actions of Ganon’s “evil.” In each Zelda game, the evil against which Link fights precedes his involvement: Link does not initiate action of his own accord, but merely reacts to the machinations of Ganon. He does not seek to remake Hyrule according to his will, but to restore equilibrium by opposing and neutralizing the will of Ganon.
At the end of the story, Link is quite different than he was when his journey began. Hyrule itself, however, forever returns to the condition in which it existed before the intervention of Ganon. The inhabitants of Hyrule—the ones who talk, anyway