• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 355 0

even form “colleges” in ways that have virtually professionalized fan fiction writing. Yu-Gi-Oh players see and use language on cards and websites that is as complex and technical as the language in any academic domain. Players of World of Warcraft “mod” (modify) the game by building and downloading models which track and assess myriad elements of game play in highly statistical terms. Gamers make “machinima” movies from games, involving the scripting, lighting, and direction techniques of professional film production. Pop culture now tends to stress production and not just consumption, as well as expertise certified and earned within digital communities and not only via professional forms of degrees and certification.

One of the most interesting areas in which these everyday people compete with professionals is in the area of intellectual argumentation, the seemingly arid concern of philosophers and scientists. Online discussions around games can be quite complex and involved, so that, like science, they come to belong not so much to just one person but to a group as a whole. Some philosophers and sociologists of science have argued that, despite our “great man” conceptions of science as something that flows from the individual minds of smart individuals, science makes its real progress as a “conversation.” The nature of this conversation is, of course, a matter of dispute, as well as its implications for epistemology , or the nature and construction of knowledge.

We see similarities between the kinds of informal discussions around Zelda and the kinds of argumentation that are often valued in other intellectual pursuits. But what could the point be—and what could arise from, say, discussions by Zelda fans about the chronologies of the multiple Zelda games? Do debates such as this mirror the ways that scientists and academics construct knowledge and, if so, how might thinkers such as Bruno Latour help us to understand them? Before answering these questions, let’s first look and then wonder—wonder what it is all about.

Debating Chronologies: The Hero(es) of Time

Ever since players concluded The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, the role of time within the Zelda games has been a concern for many fans. The end of Ocarina left players with an adult Link, “The Hero of Time,” who had saved the land of Hyrule from the domination of Ganon/Ganondorf. Link was then rewarded with a trip back in time to a point before Hyrule had been conquered. This plot device—the use of multiple timelines—was a way to achieve a happy resolution to the game and reset Hyrule to its pre-Ganon beauty. As more and more Zelda games have been released, the issue of reconciling the games’ timelines has become a popular one to discuss on online forums, which, to the uninitiated, can seem surprisingly complicated, ranging in topic from how to employ game cheats to discussions of fan art. Let’s look at some of the fan debates regarding chronology and potential timelines in the Zelda series, and their central problem—the role of time in these games.

On the Nintendo NSider online forums (http://forums.nintendo.com), this topic has been popular for several years—a series of threads on the topic was started in September of 2004 and has continued through the time of this chapter’s writing. Several dozen different posters (participants) have written over sixteen thousand posts (contributions) to this series of discussion threads (subtopics), proposing intricate theories of overarching storylines for the entire Zelda series, critiquing other posters’ proposals, providing evidence, counter-evidence, and developing new timelines as new games were released. The degree of involvement for some of the posters on these threads was quite high—one poster’s contributions totaled several hundred posts.

The size of these threads and the extent of some posters’ involvement hints at interesting intellectual content in Zelda timelines for debate. With fourteen officially licensed Nintendo Zelda games, a comic book series, and a cartoon series, not to mention