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Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of “eternal recurrence” or “eternal return” has generated a good deal of discussion on the philosophy of time, even though Nietzsche did not devote much space in his work to explicitly laying out the concept. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche frames the idea of eternal recurrence as a hypothetical construct in which one’s existence in the world, and the world itself, are repeated infinitely under the same conditions. As Nietzsche puts it,

What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence.” (The Gay Science, Vintage, 1974, p. 273)

If you’ve played Majora’s Mask, this should sound eerily familiar. Majora’s Mask presents the player with a three-day cycle in which a number of heroic missions must be completed to save Termina. Why three days? Link is asked to grab Majora’s Mask to give to the Happy Mask Shop owner, but apparently he’s on a tight schedule. To further complicate the matter, these three days are actually not three days; rather, they are three simulated days that take less “real” time to elapse. As Jesper Juul notes, videogames often rely upon two parallel time structures, “play time (the time the player takes to play) and event time (the time taken in the game world).”40 This distinction allows gamers to eat and get a wink of sleep sometimes, rather than having to devote actual years to build a city or raise an army. In the case of Majora’s Mask, one day of event time takes up about eighteen minutes of play time, giving the player roughly fifty-four minutes to finish the entire game.

If that seems too little time to finish a Zelda game, Nietzsche is here to help us out! Assuming that the player goes back in time before the three days are up, this time cycle then repeats itself over and over. Link is sent back to Clock Town, in the same spot in front of the Clock Tower, and the people of Termina go back to whatever business they were up to before. At the beginning of the cycle, the message “Dawn of the First Day—72 Hours Remain” appears. This and subsequent messages every twelve hours of event time not only serve as temporal reminders to the player, but also suggest the entire chronology as repeating itself within the same frame of reference; this is “the” First Day, not “another” or “a different” First Day.

Why Eternal Means You

The intellectual “test” of Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence is one part of the concept. His basic argument is that in a system with a finite number of forces, if we allow for an infinite amount of time, a point will be reached where the same events happen in the same way and the same order, repeated infinitely. However, using this as a thought experiment is not exactly how Nietzsche intended it. As Graham Parkes argues in the introduction to Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra,

the thought of eternal recurrence is not to be taken as something to think about intellectually (Can it be true? Does everything really recur?), but rather as a possibility that can inform and clarify our existential choices: ‘Rather than looking towards distant unknown bliss and blessings and reprieves, simply live in such a way that we would want to live again and want to live that way for eternity!—Our task steps up to us at every moment.’ (Oxford University Press, 2005, p. xxv)

The existentialist spin means that all of us, as individual agents, are responsible for determining what meaning to take out of our own existence, and this meaning is created from individual choices. If we go back to Nietzsche’s demon from The Gay Science, the existentialist choice arrives in how one responds to the demon’s proclamation of eternal recurrence:

Would you not throw yourself down and