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By Root 347 0

’t pay attention to this order, erecting the walls first, or using beams as bricks, the house will fall. A house requires a certain structural order. In Zelda, objects, characters, and items must be regulated in a similar way—that is, if we want the space created to support itself and make sense. In terms of the player the space has to be playable—it has to understand our actions and it has to be able to respond to them in a coherent way. Space must follow some meaningful rules, so that our actions can be meaningful. But these rules build a functional space aimed at our actions, more than a representational space aimed at the appearance, at the resemblance to reality. There are some videogames, maybe graphically not very appealing, but creating a complex world inside of them, much more absorbing, fun and immersive than other 3D games, plenty of cinematics but deadly boring because they can’t recreate successfully an interactive world. We all know some of those infamous remakes …

So objects, characters and items are organized in different ways in Zelda. Each organization, each structure, is a screen. There are screens for mountains, woods, desserts, caves, and dungeons. Each screen is different from the others. And all these screens aren’t mixed anyhow, but are connected following a concrete order, a logical order. Other kinds of order, of course, respecting the order of objects, characters, and items follow inside a screen. In the English language, words are combined with an order (not just any order) to build phrases. Those built phrases can be combined into paragraphs, and the paragraphs into a whole discourse. Usually, words are a grammar topic; phrases, the subject of syntax; paragraph and discourse, rhetoric. Grammatical order, syntactic order, and rhetorical order follow different rules. But note how syntactic order uses words from grammatical order, and how rhetorical order uses phrases (like bricks) from syntactic order. In the English language three levels can be recognized (word, phrase, and discourse) that work together.

What has this to do with Hyrule? Think about objects, characters, and items working like words. When properly combined, a screen results—something similar to a phrase. Screens are connected in levels in a similar way that phrases are linked in paragraphs. Finally, all the levels, sequentially ordered, are the map of Hyrule as a whole, as discourse is composed of paragraphs.

But this is only an analogy. Language is used to say something, and space in Hyrule, although constructed according to rules, doesn’t say anything. We can’t properly align language with these rules used by the designer for articulating objects, characters, and items in a screen, screens in levels, and levels in a map. But they are rules, so the designer can’t be arbitrary or chaotic in his construction of space. On the contrary, these rules make the Hyrule space coherent and sensible. We understand this space.

Regarding the rules, we can’t call them a language, but there is a similar principle in operation. Maybe we should call it, in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s words, a “language game.” This term is “meant to bring into prominence the fact that the ‘speaking’ of language is part of an activity, or form of life.” Wittgenstein used “languagegame” to designate simple forms of language,” consisting of language and the actions into which it is woven”, and unified by family resemblance. Some examples given by Wittgestein are: “reporting an event; giving orders, and obeying them; describing the appearance of an object, or giving its measurements; constructing an object from a description (a drawing); presenting the results of an experiment in tables and diagrams; making a joke; telling it; solving a problem in practical arithmetic.”

The point is that using a language is seen as a sort of action, and therefore actions (not only words) could be meaningful. How many kinds of language games are there? “There are ‘countless’ kinds”, says Wittgenstein, “countless different kinds of use of what we call ‘symbols’, ‘words’, ‘sentence