The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy_ I Link Therefore I Am - Luke Cuddy [79]
I already expanded the reach of translucence to apply to the onscreen world of a videogame in addition to the sensuous medium of a painting. Thus, a videogame is translucent if the relevant features of the onscreen world together can bring the entire world of the game to the gamer, if the gamer “looks” in the appropriate way. The less appealing the features of the onscreen world as a whole, the less likely the game is translucent. Although the features individually can be appealing, it’s the features of the onscreen world together that, in Rosenstein’s terminology, make a game translucent, transparent, or opaque.
So Adventure is not transparent just because it’s simple graphically, but because together its backgrounds, music, avatar, and characters do not satisfactorily create a sufficiently distinct world. The world the gamer experiences comes across as little more than information in the form of shapes, sounds, and movements. Of course, a Zelda game, too, is a form of information but the appeal of Hyrule as a whole keeps this fact out of the gamer’s psyche.
All the Nintendo-developed games of the Zelda franchise create an onscreen world that is translucent, a world that is transferred to us by means of its translucency, that is neither opaque (like adventure) nor transparent (like a game that is too real). In the case of games like the original Zelda where the backgrounds and exploratory terrain are less appealing (probably due to simpler graphics) and, therefore, contribute less to the translucence of the onscreen world, there are other features, like music and enemies, that make up for the lack of appeal in terms of backgrounds and exploratory terrain.
Zelda and the Aesthetic Experience
All of which is to say, if you haven’t seen it coming, that playing the games of the Zelda franchise can lead to an aesthetic experience, on par with an excursion through the modern art museum.
Introducing the idea of the aesthetic experience also introduces the problem of defining it; it’s notoriously hard to define. Some might say they had such an experience at the Opera; others might say it happened at a Metallica concert. Some might say they had the experience when they dropped acid; others might say it happened while looking at a Monet painting. Chances are if you try to get any of these people to put their experience in words it’s going to come out like gibberish. “I felt one with the universe,” “My body was a vessel,” “The truth of the world was revealed to me,” are some typical responses.
There are philosophers who will tell you that this experience is simply heightened perception or heightened emotion. Some say it’s nothing but paying very close attention to an object, and that there is no aesthetic experience at all.53
But even if what everyone calls the aesthetic experience is no more than paying attention and can be broken down into emotion and perception, it’s still one hell of an experience (at the level at which we experience it). Anyone who has had one can verify it. Maybe it’s different for everyone. Maybe it can’t—and shouldn’t—be broken down into parts; that is, maybe it’s subjective. But the subjectivity of the experience itself does not entail that what produces it is also subjective. Erwin Panofsky argues that there are objective properties in art objects that demand to be experienced aesthetically.54 Basically Panofsky says that even if the aesthetic experience is subjective, there are objective qualities in certain objects that demand our subjective attention. So maybe we sound like a delirious drunk when we try to put into words our experience at the Metallica concert, but this doesn’t mean there wasn’t something demanding to be experienced aesthetically when Metallica went into the “Orion” solo.
Do any of the games of the Legend of Zelda franchise have objective qualities that demand to be experienced aesthetically?