The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy_ I Link Therefore I Am - Luke Cuddy [98]
“Ah”, you think to yourself, “this is it.”
The Miyamoto Framework
When you play videogames your mind is split into three. In addition to you, the player, with all the experiences and processes that compose your mind, there is the dynamic system you’re playing in, and there is an agent that you control in order to affect the system. In most games, the agent you control is quite literal: a person or object that you directly control. Independent game designer Paul Eres describes games based around such an avatar as the “Miyamoto Framework,” which he characterizes by five elements:
1. The player controls a character directly, and can move that character around.
2. The player has to get somewhere, find something, or kill some enemy to win … achieved by getting the player-moved-thing to the goal through a long series of obstacles. Once done, it’s the end of the game.
3. The player can die or lose by doing the wrong thing, such as falling into a hole or walking into an enemy or losing a battle. If they do so, they have to try again.
4. Everything in the game exists in space, with coordinates (in either 2D or 3D).
5. There’s a gradual increase in the player’s capabilities over the course of the game. (http://rinku.livejournal.com/1211360.html)
A clean +99 percent of commercially made games since 1982 have worked within the Miyamoto framework; while this tradition may not have originated with Miyamoto, his early work established it as the predominant form of game design. You could say Miyamoto established the game design philosophy of an avatar-based game.
What philosophical system does Miyamoto subscribe to, if any? Can the guy behind Mario, Zelda, Metroid, and Wii Tennis be a philosopher? In interviews, Miyamoto has described games as gardens that one must tend, taking an almost Zen Buddhist perspective on the cultivation of dynamic systems. But if we look deeper, at the fundamental mental process that is involved in Miyamotoframeworked games, we need to go to the West, to the psychological philosophy of a Frenchman named Jacques Lacan. The Triforce is the key.
Egos, Dyads, and the Social Symbolic
Lacan believes that human minds attribute meaning to themselves in relation to other persons or objects. An ego in a vacuum isn’t much of a human mind, and we don’t have any frame of reference to judge such an ego—even the hermit on Death Mountain has his Magic Mirror. So we reach and relate to whatever: a mother, a partner, a friend, a delicious chunk of sharp cheddar, and we connect to it, forming what Lacan calls a “dyad.”
Growing up—coming into being you could say—is, to Lacan, about realizing what dyadic relations you depend on and reaching beyond their infantile comforts, to grasp the larger world of the “social symbolic.” Language, culture, politics, religion, all these things belong to the social symbolic, as do relations beyond a one-on-one dyad, such as a company, family, church or nation. Human interactions, whether with other people, objects, or complex systems like games, follow this process: the mind will connect to an anchor that gives it some kind of positive response; pleasure, security, a feeling of empowerment—through that anchor the mind can explore a wider world of third-party symbols.
You could say that the dyad is the content of a mental process, what it’s preoccupied with, and the social symbolic provides the context of that interaction. In game development, we commonly refer to things like level designs or missions, things that preoccupy the player and give a game “meat” or “volume” as being “content”; good content will keep you content. Therefore, using Lacan’s model, you can analyze minds as being made