So I was watching a video today that talked about the disturbingly colonialist underpinnings of many sandbox games. I just recently started playing Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess for the first time, so that was fresh in my mind as I watched the video. At the end of the video the narrator posed a question: is it possible to make a sandbox game about exploration and building that doesn't have these colonialist underpinnings? Well, let's think about what characteristics such a game would need to have.
1) the player character would be a local inhabitant of the world the game takes place in. In most games of the genre, the player character is a foreigner. Changing this element immediately eliminates the problem of the player's goals clashing with the goals of the local inhabitants. If the player is a local, his or her goals presumably match up with at least some subset of the other local inhabitants. Any conflicts with the other local sentient beings are re-contextualized as tribalism rather than colonialism.
2) the game is not framed as a struggle between the player and the natural world. Rather, another force could be present in the world which the player is struggling against alongside the denizens of the natural world. Conquest or taming of the world is not framed as the reason for building and crafting. That is not to say that the natural world can't and shouldn't be hostile in some respects. Wild animals after all, are indeed dangerous. But they shouldn't be the most common enemies in the game.
3) the incentive structure of the game promotes sustainable practices. It shouldn't ask the player to harvest an ever-increasing amount of resources from the environment, and should provide a reason why the player would invest resources in the environment. In general it should encourage the player to invest in future gains, rather than try to gain as much power as possible in the short term. The player should be able to trade power now, for more power later on.
Now, not only do the Legend of Zelda games (with the exception of Majora's Mask and Link's Awakening) do all these things: they actually invert the convention entirely. Gannon, the villain, is the protagonist of any survival game: someone from another world who has come with dreams of conquering Hyrule and uses environmentally destructive technology in order to do that. It's Link's job to make the game Gannon is playing into an unwinnable survival horror game. Of course, Link is a Hylian and there are other species in Hyrule. However, Link has a choice about how he wants to deal with these other species. The Garudo in particular have been hoodwinked by Gannon: they think he's one of them, and he's promised to lead them to a glorious future and blah blah blah. But the games usually give you a choice about how to deal with the Garudo: do you kill them because they are hostile towards you, or do you find a way to reveal Gannon's deception to them? Twilight Princess takes the anti-colonialist themes even further, because the invaders are not just Gannon and his armies. The Twilight realm as a whole is invading Hyrule: led of course, by Gannon. You have to work with Midna, the eponymous Twilight Princess, to stop the invasion.
The characteristics normally ascribed to heroic male characters in video games are given to Gannon here. Gannon is physically strong and tough, and emotionally aggressive. Link on the other hand is physically weak, and emotionally gentle. Link makes up for his physical weakness with agility and cleverness. However, his gentleness is not cast as something he needs to make up for. Link does not need to be aggressive because HE is not under threat. Link is the immortal Hero of Time. Gannon is not a personal threat to his life. If Link dies this time, he will be back to try to stop Gannon again. This also incentivizes Link to think about the long term, and to invest in the world. Link will be there when the seed he just planted is old: whatever he does now, he will deal with the consequences of those actions in the future.
The infamous death by cuckoes mechanic reinforces the idea that Link should strive to live in harmony with nature as much as possible. And it underscores that Link's apparent weakness is not really a weakness at all. A single cuckoe after all, is not a threat. But a swarm of them is. Link won't win against Gannon through personal heroics. Link's job is to be a focus for all of Hyrule's power. He's a silent protagonist not simply because it's easier for the player to project themselves onto him that way, the game's narrative actively requires the erasure of Link's personality. Each game is the story of Link becoming the Hero of Time, an archetype rather than a person. He makes this choice again, and again and again: trading his own autonomy for the continued freedom of Hyrule and choosing to live multiple lives even though he knows he will not have freedom in any of them.
Link's sacrifice of his personality occurs as he gains more and more power. This is a highly unusual setup in a game. Normally we would expect that the hero's personal attributes would start to take on more and more significance as he gains power: as happens in games like The Witcher and Assassin's Creed. As you go on in the games, the personality that you give to Geralt through the games starts to have bigger and bigger effects. He has a network of friends and enemies, allies and rivals. In The Witcher 3, Geralt must guide another character on her path to mastering magical powers and in this scenario the characterization the player chooses to give Geralt actually determines the ending of the game. But Legend of Zelda does the opposite. As Link becomes more powerful, he also becomes more and more the archetypal Hero of Time. In other words, his legend begins to eclipse him.
At the end of the day, all stories are about real life: and The Legend of Zelda is no exception. Sure, it wears the masque of an ancient mythology: an Edda from a long-lost civilization. However, only a little investigation reveals that it is very much a product of it's time: whether this was the intention of it's makers or not.
This is not a story that could have been created anywhere except 1980s Japan. It was created as the last survivors of WWII were retiring from the workforce, the last people who remembered Japan's Empire. It was also at a time when Japan's industry was plateauing, having reached the point where it could no longer grow unchecked. Japanese auto makers were now facing stiff competition from western companies like Ford, Chevrolet, Volkwagon and Fiat. Japanese computer makers now had Microsoft and Apple to contend with: and ultimately most chose to flee the market rather than deal with those two. The liberalization of China was also a problem for Japan. It was time for Japan to confront their history: but it was still too painful to talk about openly. The Legend of Zelda was not originally made for a western audience, although the newer games including Twilight Princess were very aware that western gamers would be playing them. It was originally made for Japan's domestic market: an attempt to satisfy the insatiable appetite that Japanese youth had for hard games. The original Legend of Zelda was hard. It was so hard that few westerners played it, it was simply beyond what they were willing to invest in a video game. Asian gamers dominate in gaming competitions not because Asians are somehow better at gaming: but because Asian cultures value games more. Video games in Japan are not simply entertainment.
Much ink has been spilled about why video games are so often violent. However, there is a reason that is not often discussed. Video games offer an outlet for warrior cultures to find expression: without the devastating loss of human life and destruction of resources that real warfare brings. The world is too economically interconnected to make warfare a good idea in most cases, and prosecuting a war has become increasingly difficult for both economic and social reasons. The tide of popular opinion too has turned against warfare: traumatized by the World Wars, Vietnam and Afghanistan. But, it would be a mistake to leave the martial traditions of the past behind. Discipline, bravery, persistence, strategic thinking, and managerial skills are all as important for us today as for anyone in the past. Our grandfathers weren't wrong when they said the army builds character: nothing turns a teenager into an adult quite like military training. But, we can get this training without needing to join the real military. From the point of view of our brains, what happens in the game is the same as what happens in real life. But the fact that you can turn off a game allows for your brain to process what happens to you in the game better. It's hard to process what is happening when you're actually at a protest, in a potentially life-threatening situation. You can train yourself to do the right thing in that situation by playing games which you can pause or turn off. That is the reason we have games in the first place: they are training for real life. People talk about putting games into education as if games weren't inherently educational: when in fact, a well designed game is one of the best educational tools humans have ever developed (you know, for actually mastering skills and concepts: which is not the goal of most educational systems irl but that's another conversation).
Now, the world is sometimes violent: and very often violence occurs when we least expect it. You can be walking down the street and get mugged, or you can be having an argument with your mom and she hits you. Knowing how to act in these situations can mean the difference between getting hurt more, and resolving the situation. We need violent games in order to train ourselves for those moments when we encounter violence, as we all inevitably do. Of course, having peaceful games is hardly a bad thing. What games should be critiqued for is not how much violence they contain, but how they teach the player to deal with that violence. Here again, The Legend of Zelda stands out from other games. Sure, there are times when Link must simply kill creatures with a weapon. There are many more times however where Link must solve a puzzle instead: i.e. he must think strategically in order to avoid getting hurt more. Now when I was a kid playing these games on a neighbor's console, this made me put down the controller and think. This was something I could do in my everyday life: when I saw people getting mad at me, I could think strategically to solve the problem. I didn't have to just take whatever they dished out to me, I could avoid getting hurt by taking actions of my own free will. I didn't have to let anyone hurt me.
I know, a grand revelation. In my defense, I was ten years old. It had not yet occurred to me that emotions had internal rather than external causes. I have a learning disorder. It causes me not to express my emotions in ways that others can understand, and to not understand how others express themselves. I have trouble reading body language: gestures, tone of voice, etc. This is of course a major problem when you grow up as a woman in our society, because our society assumes that women have a preternatural gift for social situations (they don't, they just have more practice). So, you know, I was bullied as a child. I also saw my parents struggle through their own emotional issues: partially caused by my Grandmother's vain attempts to properly raise three extraordinarily intelligent and creative boys. In her defense, her own mother's parenting skills were absolutely atrocious. My mother and I also clashed frequently, our personalities are in some ways too similar. This idea that I could control how I felt, that I could act to control what happened to me, this was a powerful revelation.
Make no mistake, The Legend of Zelda is a Japanese game: even though the titular Princess is given a very western name ("Zelda" is from German, originally a nickname for "Griselda"). A western game would certainly never feature the name of a character who isn't the player character in the title: but that's exactly what happens here. The player character is Link, but it's called the Legend of Zelda. Link is the one who does everything, but it's called the Legend of Zelda. Why? What could possibly possess them to create a game with the name of the female lead in the title, but have you play as the male lead? This again drives home the erasure of Link's personality and identity. He doesn't get his name on the story that he is the hero of. This is a mirror of Japanese stories, specifically stories about samurai. The stories are often named after Daimyos, even when the Daimyo in question barely makes an appearance in the story. Why? because samurai were extensions of their Daimyo. They swore oaths of loyalty binding their family to the service of a particular Daimyo. They traded independence for status, protection, and clarity of purpose. This is what Link does too. However, the story is updated for a modern audience.
Link pledges himself not to a mortal lord, but to the Goddess Hylia. This recasts Link's actions as something acceptable in the modern age. The game is, after all, questioning Japanese imperialism: and the samurai-daimyo relationship was the foundation of that imperialism. But the game cautions us not to leave behind the virtues of the samurai even as we acknowledge that the relationship was fundamentally flawed. The total commitment that samurai gave to their lord did genuinely make them better people: unafraid of death or hardship, able to cooperate without jealousy, discreet with information, and focused on spiritual rather than material advancement. It probably was genuinely fulfilling for many of them to have such a clear purpose for their lives, to have such a clear explanation for their existence. A samurai existed to help his lord succeed. Questions of morality were besides the point for him. He wasn't going to be rewarded in the afterlife based on whether he was a good person or not. He was going to be rewarded in the afterlife if he served his lord well. Of course, this amorality is exactly what was so horrific about this system.
The Sengoku Jidai was marked by the sorts of atrocities you normally hear about in connection with colonial regimes: but committed by members of the same ethnic group as the victims. The combination of amoral samurai, self-indulgent daimyos, and primitive rocketry was a peculiarly bad one from the perspective of preserving human life. It was like the Reign of Terror in France, spawned from a populist revolution and concerns for ideological purity: but instead of lasting for a decade, it lasted for centuries. That is not however to say that the traditions which originated in this period should be rejected out of hand. They should be updated, taking into account modern values and understandings of the world. This period after all, marked the beginning of what we now call Japanese culture.
The Princess Zelda of the title in the Legend of Zelda is an avatar of the Goddess Hylia: as is Midna, the Twilight Princess. Unlike the samurai of old, Link's submission is a personal choice rather than something he is forced into by his heritage: and it is an act of worship. Link does not need to ask whether what he is doing is right, because Hylia would never ask him to do something that was wrong. Not because he doesn't care about being a good person. Not only does the game incentivize playing Link as a good person, it outright disallows many bad actions. No one is more aware of how cruel children can be than Nintendo after all. Many players have noted the seeming romantic undertones in adult Link's interactions with Zelda: but also that Link has canonical love-interests (who are not Zelda) in many of the games. This seeming mistake is resolved when we realize that Zelda is a Goddess' Avatar. Although we often don't like to admit it in the West there is quite a bit of overlap between romance and worship: indeed, from the brain's perspective there is likely little difference.
The interactions with Midna are even more clearly BDSM-esque, they only get away with it because Link is in wolf form when he interacts with her. Midna is both annoyingly bossy, and at the same time genuinely trustworthy. Far from selling us a power fantasy like most games do: Twilight Princess goes out of it's way to humiliate the player. In most games, cool mounts like a wolf are a sign of success in the game. In this game, you are the cool wolf mount. Midna riding you serves to drive home the overall message: you are here to serve, not to be served. But, like any good dominatrix, Midna does not simply humiliate you. She gives you a clear sense of purpose. She lays out for you exactly what you need to do and, if you trust her, you can easily do everything she asks of you. She's always there when you need to be reminded of what you're doing. This genuinely helps when the game starts throwing things at you that are panic-inducing: like an attack on your home village. Having Midna in your ear then doesn't seem so annoying. Letting go and trusting Midna allows you to move through the game's complicated levels quickly and gracefully: so quickly that your conscious mind gets left behind in the dust. That feels genuinely good. This game may not be selling you a power fantasy, but it is giving you a sense of empowerment all the same.
Like I said, these games could only have been made in the 1980s in Japan. They are unavoidably products of their place and time. They are also auteur games: the product of one man's vision even though many many people worked on them. The credit for their daring should go to Shigeru Miyamoto. Japan, unlike any other country, can support auteur game developers: it's domestic market for games is just that big. While not every game needs to be an auteur game, the industry needs auteur games just like the film industry needs auteur films. Why? because auteur films turn film geeks into filmmakers. Studying them teaches you how to make films. Likewise with auteur games: studying them teaches you how to make games. Playing Fortnite for thousands of hours won't teach you how to make a good Battle Royale: but playing Smash Brothers will. Why, because Smash Brothers is the carefully constructed and curated product of Masahiro Sakurai's vision. Masahiro Sakurai, who was one of those teenage Japanese boys that bought the original Legend of Zelda in 1986. It's not an accident that people like work at Nintendo: the company has obviously set itself up to be a haven for them, significant in an industry where auteurs generally have a hard time. There is no equivalent to the Oscars to reward individual artistic achievement in video games.
Unlike auteur films however, auteur games can be accessible to regular people. Indeed they can often be more inclusive and accessible than the "generic" junk that pours out of big studios. So-called "generic" games are not really generic: there's a definite slant to them, a definite ideology they have. And that ideology is not harmless. When the Islamic State parodied Call of Duty in a recruitment video, the many people who saw this video on youtube had a wake up call. Now, this video was reaching for low-hanging fruit. It wasn't about to recruit me into a weird death cult. It was aimed at the incels; the lonely, disaffected and immature Gen Xers who hang out in the darkest recesses of 4chan. There's a whole host of reasons why these men feel the way they do: from the personal (undiagnosed learning disorders), to the social (the lingering stigma around BDSM), to the political (the loss of male privilege in the era of Roe vs Wade). But regardless of what their problems might have been, the Islamic State knew what fantasy to sell them: the same one that Call of Duty and other AAA games like it sell. Come to us, they said, and you too can be a warrior chosen by God to dominate both armies and women. Sure, it's the same fantasy that militaries have used for centuries: starting with Cyrus the Great back in the first millennium BCE. But for precisely that reason, it is something that modern media needs to question: not blindly repeat. Why do we default to this fantasy? Why is this the central fantasy in nearly every RPG or exploration game from GTA to CoD to the original Assassin's Creed? are there other ones that people will find just as compelling? The Legend of Zelda's stunning success proves that there is.
