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Even though Majora’s Mask uses the concept of an infinitely repeating time cycle, there’s not just one but two endpoints that the player must negotiate. The first endpoint is that of the cycle: Link must return to the beginning of the cycle before seventy-two hours have passed, or the moon hanging over Termina wins the game, and no one wants that to happen (well, maybe the Skull Kid). The other endpoint is that determined by progress in the game, including items collected and dungeons cleared of evil forces. The player plays with the understanding that the game events are not really infinite and will not allow for unending repetition. This establishes a hierarchy of values, for both the economy of in-game items and for the treatment of time as negotiated by the player.

Let’s face it: some items are just more fantastic than others. Would you rather face Ganon equipped with the Master Sword or the Slingshot? In Majora’s Mask, the value of items is determined not only by their various functions and affordances, but by the amount of time the player has to invest to get them and whether they will be erased by the jump in time cycles. What’s the point in spending two days digging around and stockpiling extra Deku Nuts if they’re going to disappear anyway? Thus, time functions in the game to create a system of values whereby some items are privileged just because of their “permanent” materiality, but removing the limitations in play would fundamentally change the relationship between time and value. Rupees act as a special case, because they do not themselves aid Link in any way and are lost at the end of each cycle. However, Link can store them in the bank and later withdraw them to buy shop items. Given this unique position, rupees act as a kind of deferral where the player can alter the normal relationship between time and value—rupees can be deposited over time until the player might decide to cash them in, either intermittently or all in one moment.

Event time in the game is also given value, although certain moments in the narrative take on more value than others. As part of the time cycle, people in Termina go about a routine that is repeated over the course of three days. Characters will arrive in specific places at specific times, and this becomes predictable after observing characters and their interactions with the environment. Link also has a Bomber’s Notebook, which serves as a kind of schedule to plan out where and when to meet people and accomplish game objectives. The result is that the player needs to keep an eye on the clock for time-sensitive game events, because if they are missed, Link needs to somehow get back to that point in the cycle.

Although there’s quite a bit to do in Termina, there are often cases where the player is simply “killing time” while waiting for a specific part in the cycle to come up. Time is entirely devalued in these intervals despite the urgency of the seventy-two-hour clock; there is the sense that time is of the essence yet not worth much more than trimming the bushes or occupying it in some other menial way. What we have here is an existential alienation, opposite from the desire that Nietzsche proclaimed one could affirm for eternal recurrence—this is more a subjugation to time and the ways in which it controls life.

Although repetition seems at work here, it’s not repetition itself that creates such boredom, but rather having to kill time to get to the “important” moments. Juul points out, about the experience of time in videogames, “repetition or triviality of choice will make time be experienced as unimportant, dead time (time will drag)” (p. 139). In either case, time is experienced as death, which is represented not by a temporal endpoint suggesting a final loss of life but by the loss of the meaning we assign to time as a form of value.

An Uncanny Sense of Time

As I have suggested so far, temporality in Majora’s Mask is characterized by a series of tensions, if not outright contradictions, that challenge familiar notions of time. The same