The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy_ I Link Therefore I Am - Luke Cuddy [95]
The Necessity of Looped Time
In Zelda there’s nothing that indicates a passing of time, only looped time as seen in the reccurring pattern of enemies and obstacles. Zelda was designed to be played many times, and this requires a level of predictability to ensure that the gameplay progresses through interpretation of patterns, yet stays challenging and continues to engage the player.
Timing in videogames is crucial. We only need to think to a normal time-dependent game, like those of the Super Mario Brothers series, to remember how running for a long enough distance and then jumping at precisely the right time is the sole way to master a certain part of a level. In this sense, looped time is the lifeblood of many successful strategies; this form of time allows the player to anticipate the coming challenge. Moreover, the return of the same hurdles enable the player to practice and hone these required skills for future levels of increasingly intricate scenarios.
Repetition is a way of training and experimenting, a way to take on a new perspective for the case at hand. Nietzsche writes, “A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions—as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all” (p. 108). Will the run-and-gun, all out, fast-as-you-can strategy work? Perhaps. Will a cautious and calculated tact yield victory? Maybe. You must take these masks and try, saying yes! to the challenge in the face of possible death and promised struggle.
Saying Yes to life even in its strangest and hardest problems, the will to life rejoicing over its own inexhaustibility … Not in order to be liberated from terror and pity … but in order to be oneself the eternal joy of becoming… . Herewith I again stand on the soil out of which my intention, my ability grows—I, the last disciple of the philosopher Dionysus—I, the teacher of the eternal recurrence. (The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, 2005, p. 109)
One of the features that makes The Legend of Zelda such a popular game is the demand for players to employ creativity in different facets of gameplay. The game is not formulaic, not brainless fodder, but a medium that begs for artistic solutions. Zelda is saturated with logical puzzles that necessitate lucid discernment. In some of the later games that involve the gamer himself playing music (first introduced in Ocarina of Time) it becomes clear that the world of Zelda is intrinsically artistic and aesthetic.
The After-Worldly
Nietzsche despises the philosophy presented by Plato and Christianity for their two-worlds bifurcation, the sensible and the intelligible, heaven and earth. Plato envisioned another world that encased the eternal forms or ideas informing each of the particular things in our everyday sensible world. For example, the reason we can identify different things as belonging to a group—say, how we can tell that a chair is a chair even when there are many different kinds of chairs—is because the particular chair participates in the eternal form of the chair. Because of this relationship with this second world of fixed essences, we can understand the world of continual change. Plato’s theory of the forms is complicated and for our purposes the importance is the basic two-world structure. This can also be seen in other belief systems which posit a world other than the world from which the system itself arose, namely for Nietzsche, Christianity’s heaven.
The eternal return is Nietzsche’s anti-venom to the prophets of the after-worldly. Since this present moment will forever survive, the meaning(s) of life and all our careful concentration is redirected back down to earth, to this life and moment. Imagine living your life as if you were just an alien visitor passing through this terrestrial rock on your way to a super Disney Land. From that perspective, this life has little meaning since it