The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy_ I Link Therefore I Am - Luke Cuddy [50]
In other words, for GAMEFAN#1, “legendary” initially meant something about a character in the story: Link was recognized as being a “legendary” hero because there must have been an earlier hero who spawned the legend, implying that there must have been a game (or story) that occurred before it. In Stanza 4, GAMEFAN#1 challenged SGM2’s reading of “legendary” by proposing a hypothetical situation in which GAMEFAN#1 (presumably not a “legendary” person) created a knife that was then “of course” (Stanza 4, line 4) not inherently “legendary.” The intent of GAMEFAN#1 seems to have been to criticize the interpretation of “legendary” as having anything to do with who created it—at this point, GAMEFAN #1 argued that the only interpretation of “legendary” that made sense was one in which “legendary” referred to an earlier character’s reputation being inherited by the sword.
SGM2 replied in Stanza 5 by incorporating aspects of GAMEFAN #1’s original concept of “legendary”—by “doing something famous” (line 1), GAMEFAN#1 could pass on “legendary” qualities to the hypothetical knife. The concept of “legendary” was thus malleable for SGM2, unsurprising given the reactive stance he or she adopted to GAMEFAN#1’s initial proposal. However, this was not a conciliatory move, since SGM2’s point was still to address a flaw in GAMEFAN#1’s reasoning; for SGM2, the adjective “legendary” still referred to a property of the sword, inherited from the “legendary” status of the creator of the sword.
In Stanza 6, GAMEFAN#1 took a different approach, retreating from further discussion of the term “legendary” and addressing why the Master Sword was supposedly created within the text of Ocarina of Time (“sealing the evil away,” line 2). Here, the usefulness of “legendary” in the argument was essentially jettisoned; GAMEFAN#1 switched from relying upon “legendary” to indicate the existence of a previous heroic Link to acknowledging that if “legendary” was the property of the sword, there was still a need for an earlier event in the chronology. In Stanza 7, SGM2 tried to clarify his or her criticism over the entire “legendary” discussion (Stanza 7, line 3).
So, once more, let’s step back and try to figure out what this means. First, we can see that evidence was, again, negotiated—but more than that, theories of the games’ chronology actively hinged upon the negotiated meaning of evidence. If “legendary” referred to a previous Link’s actions, then this implied a Zelda timeline in which Ocarina was placed early. However, if “legendary” referred to the influence of the sages (the creators of the Master Sword), then Ocarina would not necessarily need to be posited as an earlier game in the timeline. The interpretation of a single piece of evidence—in this case, a single word—can have a great deal of impact, driving the theories taken by participants in these discussions.
One can see that the social construction of Zelda timelines matches much of what Latour argued about scientific knowledge. Evidence isn’t simply passive information; knowledge is necessarily situated and constructed. By the 1986 revision of Laboratory Life, the term “social” was so redundant with “construction” as to be unnecessary in the subtitle of Latour and Woolgar’s text.
Putting Together the Triforce
The blurring of distinctions between theory and evidence, between agent and tool, and between individual and group knowledge are seen in fan discussions about Zelda like they are in the practices of science. The philosophical implications of this are considerable—if the kinds of issues that arise in the development of scientific theories are found even in fan discussions around videogames, perhaps new ideas of how knowledge is constructed should be entertained. This is a point that