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in certain places and not in others. A zola that pops up out of the water, attacks, and then dives can’t live in a tiled dungeon floor because nobody can dive into a tiled floor. The videogame designer has to decide where the characters live and how they behave. The designer has plenty of rules to choose from, but once the decision is made, the videogame must obey them. Otherwise, the gamer won’t be able to play: nothing will make any sense, and no virtual space will be built—there will only be colored things moving on the screen. And Hyrule in The Legend of Zelda is a well built, well designed world.

Link Explores the Overworld (The Legend of Zelda, Nintendo, 1986)

Link Explores the Underworld (The Legend of Zelda, Nintendo, 1986)

Items

Items modify Link’s abilities. We can see this on the score (number of hearts, rupees, bombs, and keys) and the inventory. Both are a measure of the power of Link, because each item allows Link to do certain things he can’t do without them.

• The Key, the Bomb and the Candle are used to open a blocked way. A key opens doors (surprise!), a bomb destroys rocks blocking hidden passages and a candle burns trees blocking hidden stairs (well, now yes: surprise!). But in The Legend of Zelda we find locked doors, and we do know where the keys can be used, whereas we don’t know where candles or bombs can be used (only few rocks and certain trees are correct, not whatever). If keys only were available in Hyrule, Link could open doors, but there couldn’t be hidden places such as passages or stairs, because we couldn’t reach them without bombs or candles. So the Candle and the Bomb allow space to be qualified.44

• The Map and the Compass don’t concern Link movements, but they concern the gamer’s conception of Hyrule. The Map and the Compass give us a representation of Hyrule’s spatiality. The map shows the level layout. The compass points, on the map, to the screen in which the level boss is hidden. This seems like only an aid for the player, but in fact map and compass are also tools for the construction of Hyrulean virtual space. Think about a city map: there are bus stops, museums, schools, the city hall … Well, the bus stop is in the map? Not at all, only its symbol. The representation doesn’t have to be similar in appearance to a school or a town in the city, but it has to give us a diagram, an outline of the spatial relations between the real schools, museums and bus stops. Those relations are what we need to find our way: distances, streets names, symbols. The map of Hyrule in Zelda is representing the virtual space of Hyrule as a real space. And it works. It works because we look up this map in order to be guided through the dungeons, as if those dungeons had the same structure in reality that the map is showing, as if those dungeons in Zelda were there (but, where?) even before we reached them …

• The sword, the shield, and the bow change the way Link faces the enemies. Armed with the bow, Link can attack from a distance remaining in a secure area. The magic sword is more powerful than the wooden sword, and so it takes Link less hits to kill an enemy. Thus he can spend less time in a dangerous area. The shield simply turns a dangerous area into a more secure area. We said that enemies made an area secure or insecure, so modifying the relation between Link and oktoroks, moblins or ghinis is changing the way Link lives in this space.

Three Ways of Building Virtual Space in Zelda

Objects, characters and items are related in a way that makes sense for Link’s movements. Because of them there are dangerous or secure, hidden or obvious, valuable or common, populated or uninhabited, underground or surface places. Objects, characters and items are the bricks that the space we call Hyrule is built with. But in the way that bricks, beams, and tiles cannot be mixed when building a house, objects, characters, and items can’t be mixed either. In the house, foundations come prior to the beams, beams allow walls to be erected—then the roof can be tiled.

If we don