Going nowhere and everywhere in The Legend of Zelda
What getting blissfully lost in Hyrule taught me about place and productivity
In the summer of 2019, I had just gotten my PhD, and was feeling mighty good about myself. My previous five years of grad school had taught me, for better or worse, to be a completionist. No fate in grad school could be worse, the powers that be had implied, than "not finishing": not finishing your initial coursework; not getting your first paper published lest hiring committees find you unproductive; and most crucially, not finishing your dissertation. The best dissertation is a done dissertation, the saying goes.
Well, mine was done. Doner than done. Five years of tasks had been laid before me, and now they all sat behind me, a sprawling carnage of to-do lists, advisor meetings, and tracked changes on Microsoft Word. I got my diploma and ate my cake. My parents, my grad school mentor, and probably Barack Obama were all very proud of me.
Perhaps as a result of all this Accomplishing, I had also landed what turned out to be the job of a lifetime teaching at Boise State. At this time in June 2019, however, I hadn’t started just yet. This meant that I was very much not taking in a paycheck; not even the paltry one I had received as a grad student. And yet, in the lavender haze of funemployment, I impulsively bought a Switch, Nintendo's most recent video game console, for the sole purpose of playing its flagship game, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I reasoned that if ever I was to spare myself 100 hours to get lost in a video game, then this rare interlude of my life was the time to do it.
I am not a “gamer” by any serious definition. Rather, there are a few games and franchises that I happen to love, mainly based on childhood attachments, and The Legend of Zelda is one of them. Having grown up in a relatively video game-free household, Zelda—a sprawling adventure series that follows an unlikely hero named Link continually trying to rescue Princess Zelda from an evil demon king in the fictional (but real-feeling) land of Hyrule—was one of the few sets of games I was able to stumble across as a kid. Most notable among these was the now-legendary Ocarina of Time (1998) offering for Nintendo 64. As a very-grown-up 30-year-old kid in 2019, I was ready for the next big adventure. I had also read review after glowing review of Breath of the Wild, which included (ironically enough) breathless descriptions of vast landscapes, rich characters, and perfectly puzzling side-quests.
As with most who have had the pleasure of playing it, Breath of the Wild turned out to overshoot even these high expectations. I quickly spent my 100 hours, and then some. I spent them, however, in a very particular way. In the interest of Really Going For It with this game, I had purchased Breath of the Wild's official companion guide, a thick volume with every last detail about the game one could possibly want. This included detailed instructions on how to beat every boss, solve every Shrine puzzle, and track down every last weapon upgrade in Hyrule. It also crucially featured a giant fold-out map with the exact locations of every useful item in the game.
It was too tempting. The various and sundry dissertation-related tasks sat languishing in my rear view mirror; the daunting Mega-task of "being a college professor" lay ahead, just out of reach. In this strange, silent threshold of my life, during which I'm sure I was supposed to be relaxing, I craved a way to be productive and Accomplish Something™️, even if that something was conquering an entirely virtual world. My capitalism-infused and grad school-addled lizard brain kicked in, and soon I was poring through the guidebook as much as the game itself. Before long, every move I made in the game was utilitarian, part of a single-minded pursuit to check more boxes on the to-do list. I not so much traversed as teleported across Hyrule, activating "warp-point" shortcuts so that I could get from one place to the other as quickly as possible.
Needless to say, I was not taking in the magnificent sights and sounds the reviews had blathered on about. I had shit to do. Wandering was out of the question—a needless distraction on the logically-ordered, pre-portioned road of tasks ahead of me. When finally I imagined with terror that I had done everything there was to do in the game, I breathed an immense sigh of relief after learning there was an expansion pack I hadn't yet downloaded. Thank Christ I wouldn't have to be alone with my own thoughts/mortality/etc.
It worked. I beat the game, un-puzzled every shrine, accumulated the most powerful version of every weapon, upgraded all my armor, and yes—I swear to God—collected all 900 Korok seeds from across Hyrule (any Breath of the Wild veteran will understand how deranged this behavior is).
I did it, Mom. I did it, Barack Obama. Where's my diploma?
One irony of my college and postgraduate education is that I had to spend quite a bit of time in the library. Libraries are cool, and not just because they’re constantly under attack from fundamentalists.
They’re cool partly because, unlike the paralyzing open-endedness and no-holds-barred character of the Internet, libraries impose structure and limitation that can be really useful. For one thing, you don’t have finger-tip immediate access to every book at once. You have to go find it in one, specific place. In her sensational book How to Do Nothing, artist and writer Jenny Odell describes the beautiful inefficiency of the library. “The very structure of [it],” Odell writes, crucially “allows for browsing and close attention” because it is a real, physical space. You walk up and down the aisles, the organization of which you have no control over, and browse at the whims of the librarian. In doing this, your eyes and heart are drawn to one book or another based largely on your intuition. You take one book out, inspect it, and skim a few pages. Maybe you skim through a dozen or more titles before finding one that tickles your fancy. In this way, trial and error is the hallmark of a real experience at the library.
The process is slow, but it can be serendipitous. Rather than locating a tiny piece of information tailored exactly to your needs, you can stumble upon entire works of art you might never have come across. Rather than immediately getting what you want (or what some corporation or algorithm predicts you to want), you discover things you didn’t know you needed. The library is not designed to be productive; on the contrary, Odell write, it is a purposely “non-commercial and non-productive space.” It requires sustained attention to get something meaningful into your hands.
This model of discovery is, of course, the exact opposite of what we get on the Internet. The question you want answered occurs to you, and here’s the specific answer, immediately. Need to know precisely which bass player Metallica had on board for which of their albums? You’re in luck, right away. The best breakfast burrito in the city, and the second-best can go straight to Hell? Thanks, Google Maps! A citation that (what a surprise!) confirms exactly the academic finding to back up your argument? Thanks, Google Scholar! The Internet can, of course, be a tool for genuine discovery if we make it that way, but that’s never the way it’s been marketed to us. See, for example, this deeply turn-of-the-millennium commercial for Lycos, a premier internet search engine of the late 90s:
It’s this latter way of approaching information (minus the creepy but telling search for risqué pictures of Claudia Schiffer) that is most akin to the efficiency-maximizing way I approached Breath of the Wild. Free from the shackles of Not Knowing Everything, I was able to take the shortest, most efficient path to the next task, even if it meant using my paraglider to coast through the Hyrulian sky over (and thus completely ignoring) the rich, unfamiliar environment on the ground. Having been told by my special guide exactly what treasure I needed to find, I zeroed in on it like a heat-seeking missile, and was immediately gratified. The experience was ruthless, free of enriching context. Like Lycos, I zoomed across space with no attention paid to the beautiful green landscapes around me, single-mindedly retrieving things like the Very Good Boy that I was.
Maybe most importantly, there was no risk of failure—in fighting a boss, or navigating a new dungeon, say—because I was given the exact roadmap for how to succeed. Lycos knows exactly where to go, and so did I. The playing experience was scrubbed clean of the rough edges and inefficiencies you might find in a library, where you might risk (horror of horrors) checking out a book that isn’t exactly what you were looking for. What worse fate—what more profound, unproductive waste of precious time—could there be?
I don’t mean to sound like a luddite here. I'm a firm believer that, much like the consumption of a Reese's cup, there's no wrong way to watch television, or read books, or play video games. Yes, I had fallen into my learned habits of hyper-productivity, but I sincerely and deeply enjoyed the game. There was also immense personal satisfaction that came with finishing different aspects of the game that I would never want to take away from anyone, including myself. And regardless of how you decide to go about playing it, Breath of the Wild is a monumental artistic achievement. Personally, it was also a balm for me at a difficult and transitional time in my life; a beautifully-made bridge that got me all the way across the country to Boise, Idaho where I've now worked (and tried to check all manner of boxes) for four years.
In 2022 and early 2023, I began to check a whole bunch of new and exciting boxes—and better yet, they all existed in, you know, real life. I had finally hit my journal-publishing stride; I married the best person in the history of the world and released my first book in the same week; I put out a (very adoptable and available now!) Congress textbook with one of my closest friends a couple months later; I bought my first home with my partner. Pandemic was over(ish). Check, check, check. Now what?
Ah, yes! Right on time! Nintendo had clearly recognized that I was running out of Things To Accomplish™️, and decided to tailor the release of a Breath of the Wild sequel around my psychological needs. The rollout of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom was coordinated perfectly with the end of the Spring 2023 semester. Papers I’d been working on all winter were headed out the door. Family vacations were serendipitously planned for later in the summer. It was time again to blissfully embark on a breathtaking gaming experience perform a masterclass of crossing tasks off a shiny new to-do list.
The morning of May 12, 2023, I watched fitfully as the game downloaded at a glacially slow pace. I had in hand my trusty companion guide, this one even thicker than the one for Breath of the Wild. This is because, as I soon learned, the open-world kingdom of Hyrule in Tears of the Kingdom is nearly three times the size of its predecessor, adding new dimensions of places to explore, collect, and defeat. Thank God, there was more to do; a veritable factory of boxes to check.
The gameplay began, and I was thrown off immediately. The hero you’re in control of, Link, begins the game with all of his health; the most protective pieces of armor; the powerful Master Sword (which took eons to collect in the previous game); and Princess Zelda by his side. What gives? I can’t improve on this, and isn’t that the point?
Soon, though, the game’s story throws everything into chaos. Without spoiling things for those who haven’t played, Link is cast into a completely new and unfamiliar place, with next to no health, clothing, or weapons to speak of. The Princess is lost in space and time. The story forces you to slow down, look around, and pay attention. No, player, you may not go activate all the warp-points just yet. Mastering new abilities immediately is out of the question. Reaching the farthest points on the map (which you don’t have yet) is literally impossible. You aren’t even allowed to tread on the solid, familiar grounds of Hyrule until hours into the game. Slow down, look around, and pay attention.
It’s a masterstroke in gameplay and storytelling, if not exactly new in video games. Even Breath of the Wild had some similar features that I promptly decided to blow right through the first time around. But at this slightly later point in my life, the thirst for tangible achievement having slightly diminished, it was a welcome predicament. The game had used the tools at its disposal to make me have an experience, rather than letting me force my own merciless efficiency onto the game.
I began to play more slowly; less methodically; less productively; with fewer tangible goals in mind. Unlike the last time around, my play was geared not (exclusively) towards completing the game and fulfilling an agenda handed to me by a game guide, but rather towards true exploration. I quickly noticed my interactions with places, people, and even enemies began to define themselves not so much by their functions and what usefulness I could mine from them, but rather by their multidimensional stories as they unfolded. By slowing things down, this approach helped me find joy in these encounters even when (more often than not) they did little to help me get ahead on fulfilling the main tasks of the game.
In terms of place exploration—the hallmark of the Zelda franchise—this mindset is the antithesis of one laser-focused on productive accomplishment. When I played Breath of the Wild, my biblical loyalty to the game guide made it so that nothing on the map was ever truly discovered. Because I had instructions, detailed pictures, and locations in front of me, I nearly always knew what I was going to find before I found it. This is the absolute right way to play the game if your goal is to beat it as quickly and efficiently as possible. Why waste time trying and failing to defeat a particular boss? Why spend an hour trying to solve a Shrine puzzle when I can have the pieces put into place for me? If I do that, I can get the Spirit Orb the shrine offers; if I get three of those, I can get another piece of health; if I get enough pieces of health, I’ll be able to get the Master Sword. If I get the Mast—you get the idea. Instead of carefully observing the world around you in new ways, you’re strip-mining the place (and the broader experience of it) for everything you need. You quickly move on, pushing the place from your mind once it’s outlived its usefulness to make room for other places that can be means to achieve your ends.
Here, instead, I wandered. I came upon things unexpectedly. I met new characters, and had new encounters with old ones. I experienced literal weather patterns that demanded adaptation to that particular place, rather than just moving (or worse, teleporting) to safer ground. The Tears of the Kingdom game guide I had pre-ordered sat unopened at my side, then moved after a few days (still unopened) to the bookshelf. It sits collecting dust next to the well-worn, torn-paged guide for Breath of the Wild that I thumbed through endlessly four years ago. Instead I discovered, genuinely, a feast of new places in the sky, below the earth, and everywhere in between, that forced me to confront what I didn’t know.
This can, of course, be a frustrating experience sometimes. I look behind some trees: Sometimes something cool was there. Sometimes there was, sometimes there wasn’t. Sometimes there was a bear that promptly mauled me. I got lost, many times. I didn’t always find what I was looking for precisely. But I only rarely felt as though I had wasted my time as a result.
It felt, in other words, like browsing a library with no agenda in mind. There were still more and more diverse places to explore than I could ever hope to see. But the inefficiency of it brought with it a richness that becomes much clearer when one’s attention is purposely, mindfully directed, rather than dictated from the outside (say, by a highly-detailed game guide). And this richness of experience happens regardless of how instrumentally “useful” it is, as if it were a resource to be exploited. Again, Jenny Odell describes this distinction beautifully:
Practices of attention and curiosity are inherently open-ended, oriented towards something outside of ourselves. Through attention and curiosity, we can suspend our tendency toward instrumental understanding—seeing things or people one-dimensionally as the product of their functions—and instead sit with the unfathomable fact of their existence, which opens up toward us but can never be fully grasped or known.
By slowing down and paying attention to our (in this case, virtual) surroundings, we are brought into what Odell calls an “ongoing state of encounter” that is decidedly not goal-oriented. It is anti-instrumental, and thus non-productive. We’re not sprinting through the Louvre to get a shitty picture of the Mona Lisa to post on Instagram; we’re genuinely coming upon whatever’s next on the wall, being drawn into the encounter as it unfolds. We’re also accepting the fact that it’s actually okay if you don’t see every last painting in the museum, check out every last book in the library, or read every last unhinged tweet on the Internet. My world won’t crumble, therefore, if a piece of armor in some obscure corner of Hyrule lies uncollected.
Although changes in my own life helped me resist the call of gaming instrumentalism and hyper-productivity in favor of a slower, more attentive approach, a few elements of Tears of the Kingdom really helped facilitate it. The main one is a shift from Breath of the Wild, which begins with Link reawakening with no memory after a hundred-year sleep. Zelda, too, has been mysteriously sealed away for all this time. As a result, almost nobody in the vast land of Hyrule remembers either of them. Link wanders around as the former Hero of Hyrule, and few feel inclined to even give him the time of day. It’s a crucial story element of Breath of the Wild, but can become alienating.
In Tears of the Kingdom, on the other hand, Link and Zelda are both well known and beloved after (prepare to be shocked) saving Hyrule from certain destruction at the end of the previous game. The years that have passed in between games show their markings, with hints of memories, interactions, and impacts that Link and Zelda have made on Hyrule evident as you wander about the kingdom and re-encounter old places. Rather than being lost in both space and time, you—as Link—get the blessing of both knowing the place of Hyrule and being known by it.
A productivity-oriented mindset might look at this circumstance and celebrate. A shortcut! I already know where everything is, and the characters already trust me; therefore, it will be easier to get things done.
This time, though, I found myself simply comforted by these conditions, and challenged amidst the familiarity to get to know these places and people in a new way. In this way, the structure of the game was conducive to what philosophers and meditation experts call “beginner’s mind” — approaching a place, a feeling, or a thought with no preconceived expectation, as if you’re encountering it for the first time. In doing this, you can learn novel truths about places, people, and experiences that you don’t get just from falling into all-too-familiar habits, behaviors, and strategies.
One particular experience in the game really codifies some of the lessons I learned from Tears of the Kingdom. At one point or another, you find yourself (as Link) in Hateno Village, a familiar little hamlet from Breath of the Wild that has gotten itself into a bit of a pickle. A previous resident of the village named Cece has returned after a long time away, and—having become a great deal more cultured and cosmopolitan in the interim—has opened up a fashion boutique in the heart of town that’s taking the villagers by storm. Right as you walk into the village, you can witness the aesthetic and environmental changes this has wrought. The village’s character and identity have changed as a result of Cece’s fashion influence. Approximately half the townspeople are all about this modernization; the other half, wrought with a rustic nostalgia for how things used to be, loathe the changes.
Things come to a head when Cece decides to really go for it, and runs for mayor of Hateno Village. She is challenging an incumbent, Reede, who falls squarely into the “old ways are best” camp, and appears to loathe the fashion revolution that’s gripped his town. So we’ve got incumbents, elections, and political culture. At this point, the political scientist in me is bought in, hook, line, and sinker. More specifically, I’m a political scientist who studies “place politics”—what makes places different from each other, and how these differences influence our political choices, issues, and leaders.
Screw saving the princess, we’re doing this now. Because of an accident of my wandering, I’m now playing political peacemaker in this small village. I’m meeting voters (and sometimes bribing them) to learn about their concerns, how they think about and love their hometown, and reporting back to the candidates. I’m also helping out loved ones of the candidates, who become concerned about their secretive behavior as the campaign progresses. It turns out that Cece has a soft spot for locally-grown Hateno fruits and vegetables that defined the identity of the village before her fashion-forward worldview took hold. For Reede, it turns out he secretly admires Cece’s sense of style, and wants to integrate the aesthetic into new local foods; but he’s too stubborn and embarrassed to admit it.
Naturally, both candidates’ secrets come out, and the two candidates reconcile. Cece bows out of the race, and the two decide to work together, each making concessions in order to help the village prosper while maintaining its unique identity.
Aside from being a cute story, the Hateno Village Election sidequest highlights some of the place-based elements that make the Zelda franchise, and Tears of the Kingdom in particular, such a tour de force in place storytelling. For instance, I can’t emphasize enough that solving the local political problems of Hateno Village has exactly zero impact on the main story of Tears of the Kingdom. It is, clinically speaking, completely irrelevant. You can, if you wish, beat the entire game and not move one inch forward in this zany side quest. But—at the risk of being prescriptive—if you take this approach, you’re missing out. The Hateno Village side-story is a tale as old as time (old vs. new, rural vs. cosmopolitan, etc) told in a fresh way, and with mercifully low stakes that make it a genuine pleasure, rather than a heart-stopping race against the clock.
Another strength of the game illustrated here is its masterful relationship with attention. For context, here’s an observation I like from 19th-century German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz:
The natural tendency of attention when left to itself is to wander to ever new things; and so soon as the interest of its object is over, so soon as nothing new is to be noticed there, it passes, in spite of our will, to something else. If we wish to keep it upon one and the same object, we must seek constantly to find out something new about the latter, especially if other powerful impressions are attracting us away.1
One particular innovation of Tears of the Kingdom, then, is that it doesn’t just pelt us with new stuff to do (though it does do that); it also orients towards rediscovery. It could be tempting, upon entering Hateno Village in this most recent game, to buy a few necessary items at the shops, acknowledge that you’ve already been here in Breath of the Wild, then be on your way. Here, though, Hateno Village has both the nostalgia and comfort it had in the previous game, while adding wrinkles that honor the attentional behaviors that von Helmholtz talks about.
But what this mechanism also does, beyond just keeping your attention (impressive enough), is to draw you in and help you truly inhabit this particular place on the map. Hateno Village is not just the simple but charming little town you retreated to for a little R&R in Breath of the Wild. It’s a fresh, vital place beset with (minor) conflict, diversity, and beautiful complication. This makes it a joy to rediscover, and leads the player to a deeper appreciation and affection for a place you thought you understood. Meanwhile, attending to and helping to solve this political conflict—as Link—also deepens your character’s relationship with the place, making this a reciprocal re-familiarization that could constitute an entire game in and of itself.
I have played Tears of the Kingdom for well over 100 hours and still feel as though I’ve barely scratched the surface of what the world of the game has to offer. I’ve completed the main story and quests, but put off finishing it as long as possible, well after I had gathered enough strength and stamina in the game to “win” it. I was having way too much fun wandering around, watching sunrises, finding rare horses, and using new tools to build increasingly-elaborate vehicles so I could putter around Hyrule with even more aimlessness.
I’ll say again here that there’s nothing wrong with being a video game completionist, or an anything-in-life completionist. There’s also nothing wrong with challenging yourself to finish something you love with deliberate speed (for example, I’m glad I’m not entering year 10 of my PhD program, though I would not be the first to do so). Indeed, one mystifying but undeniably impressive subgenre of gaming is that of the “speedrun” which, as the name implies, features players (usually semi-famous Twitch streamers) attempting to break local or worldwide records for how fast they can complete the main story of the game.2 There’s no arguing with the skill necessary to accomplish something like this.
I also haven’t meant to imply that I wandered through Tears of the Kingdom like a zen Buddhist monk, breathlessly taking in every last tree, cricket, and blade of grass on a plodding walking meditation through Hyrule. However useful the initial gameplay was in getting me to slow down, the game is also ingeniously designed to incentivize you to move on, improve your situation, and get into fighting shape so that you can take on the Big Mean Boss at the end.
If anything, the fact that games like Tears of the Kingdom and Breath of the Wild can be enjoyed by taking either approach—the instrumental, or the more deliberative—just speaks to how special the Zelda franchise is, and how masterful these two games in particular are at drawing you so deeply into a specific space, fictional though it may be. Any piece of art that captures the power of “place” so elegantly is a thing to cherish.
Source: Jenny Odell (2018). How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (Penguin/Random House)
It’s really a testament to the depth of Tears of the Kingdom that the fastest speedrun yet recorded in the entire world is around 44 minutes, which to my understanding is quite lengthy. For reference, the fastest Breath of the Wild speedrun clocks in around 24 minutes.
All the korok seeds?? You absolute monster
I’ve never actually played an open world video game, but I remember thinking how intriguing and appealing the concept was years ago when I heard a friend talking about Eder Scrolls or something, and realized that this was because this is how I approach the actual physical world, and isn’t it cool that we live in an open world? Not to diminish the unique joys of a fictional/gamified one, but I love having this semi-magical mindset about where I live.