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across more easily. When Tetra shoots Link out of a cannon into the Forsaken Fortress, the graphic style makes it easy to appreciate his absurd expression of frightened surprise. On the other hand, the game has faults as well. The sailing is, frankly, kind of boring. At first, it’s cool to sail through the waves and hunt for buried treasure chests. As the game progresses, the minutes between islands start to feel like hours. These sorts of design decisions made by the game’s creators frequently cause emotions such as disdain or admiration.

But there’s one area in which your feelings about Wind Waker are a little harder to explain. In some ways, you respond to the game as if it were real. You care about Link and Zelda as people. You care about their story and the challenges they face. You want them to succeed. Yes, part of the reason you maneuver Link all over Hyrule is because you want to overcome the challenges the game puts your way, but that can’t explain why it’s sad when Link leaves his grandma on Outset Island to search for his sister Aryll, or why you feel slightly touched when Aryll gives Link her telescope on his birthday. Later in the game, there is a plot twist regarding Tetra that is quite surprising. You’re not surprised because the new information changes your strategy; you are surprised that Tetra is not really who you thought she was. It’s character development that surprises you, not gameplay.

You may feel scared by some of the game’s monsters. On Dragon Roost Island, you face the large, flame-spewing scorpion Gohma. When you first walk into the final cavern, there is a cut-scene in which you see Gohma slowly rise to his full height, towering over Link, and you think, “This is not good.” Your eyes widen and your heart rate increases just a little bit as you look at this threatening monster.

You also have some more subtle emotions during the game. There’s a small sense of majesty when you conduct the Wind’s Requiem and you see the wind suddenly change direction and blow past Link with great force. The majesty isn’t because the change allows you to more efficiently sail to the next island, it’s because the animation and music in that small cut-scene captures a sense of wonder and awe at the power of nature.

It makes sense that we’re happy when we win the game or feel admiration for the game design. The game is a real game. The graphics are real graphics. But there is not a real hero named Link or a real princess named Zelda. Gohma is not actually dangerous and there is no actual majestic wind blowing over Hyrule. We rarely think about this disconnect because we’re so used to enjoying fictional entertainment. We care about characters; that’s just a component of our interaction with media. Yet, there is something deeply strange about this. Why do we care about people who don’t exist? We are used to being scared by enemies in videogames. The sight of a Gold Elite in Halo can make you jump back in fear. Why? You know it can’t really hurt you.

Do You Really Believe that Zelda Kills Ganondorf?

Theories about why we respond to fictional characters usually start with some common-sense notions about emotional responses to real events. Consider a potentially intense emotional event in real life. Imagine that you’re at a videogame convention and you’ve bought a raffle ticket. The grand prize is a fifty-thousand-dollar dream home theater with all the latest videogame consoles, a huge television, top-of-the-line stereo equipment, and dozens of games. You’re listening to the winning numbers being announced. Number after number matches, and when the final number, fifteen, matches the last number on your ticket—you’ve won the grand prize. You are thrilled. You can’t believe your good luck. You start imagining how you’ll fit this equipment into your apartment. As the numbers are repeated, you suddenly realize that what you heard as “fifteen” was actually “fifty.” You have won nothing. Your overwhelming positive feelings are quickly replaced with a strong sense of disappointment. Scenarios like this suggest