The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy_ I Link Therefore I Am - Luke Cuddy [76]
In A Link to the Past, once you get the flippers you can begin to swim in the water that you couldn’t otherwise swim in. Without exploring the water with the flippers you could never find the bottle underneath the bridge. You can store potions and fairies in bottles and, though they are useful, missing one is certainly not going to prevent you from progressing in the game.
Link comes across a secret area only found after exploring with the flippers. The character sleeping by the tent has a bottle (A Link to the Past, Nintendo, 1991).
But the experience of inadvertently swimming under the bridge to find a man with a bottle sleeping in a tent is a rewarding experience in itself. Unless you understand the need to explore and experiment with newly acquired items, you’re not going to get this experience. If someone tells you where to go it won’t be the same; if you look it up on a walkthrough it won’t be the same. And if you play the game like a sports game—your primary objective being the stealthy defeat of an opponent—you’re certainly not going to get the full experience of the game.
What my friend didn’t understand in his playing of A Link to the Past is something that most role-playing gamers do understand before playing. In this sense his playing of Zelda is similar to a person’s viewing a Cubist painting with a Realist set of rules. As long as we remember to modify the meaning of “looking,” there is certainly a way that gamers “look” at The Legend of Zelda before they play it, before they enter the onscreen Hyrule.
Most experienced gamers will not play, say, first-person-shooters like the games of the Doom series in the same way they will play a Zelda game. Although exploration is important in Doom (since there are secrets) it doesn’t take precedence the way it does in Zelda. When a gamer plays Doom, she’s mostly concerned with shooting up monsters and not getting killed. And getting an item like the Rocket Launcher in Doom does not demand that the gamer explore its possible uses to the degree it does in Zelda with the hookshot or flippers.
This exploration-factor might be appropriately labeled freeplay. We can tentatively define freeplay as gameplay not directly connected with the goal of beating the game. How far removed from this goal one has to be to achieve freeplay is a good question, one that is probably impossible to answer conclusively. Still, this impossibility doesn’t rule out the fact that there are clear-cut cases of freeplay.49
Sometimes freeplay is even encouraged. In Ocarina of Time the gamer is told by townspeople to “kill some time on Hyrule Field.” The point of this is so that when you come back to the town something is changed, allowing you to progress further in a small series of puzzles. But the gamer doesn’t have to experience it as a means to an end, and perhaps this is, in some way, what the game designers intended. After all, they put all this work into making Hyrule Field visually appealing and, maybe, they don’t want it to go unnoticed.
The Blue Candle Not the Red: Games in a New Light
Leon Rosenstein, like Walton, discusses games and art.50 Rosenstein’s take is a little different. He discusses viewing an art object (for example, a painting) as tantamount to playing by the rules of a game like soccer or baseball. Both the artwork and the game set up a world that is spatio-temporally distinct from the real world. This is like Walton’s game of make-believe. But for Rosenstein, the work has integrity