Nostalgia, Nature, Neomedievalism: The Narratography of The Legend of Zelda

“[To have archive fever] is to have a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement” (Derrida, Archive Fever, p. 91.)

There’s been much abuzz about Nintendo in video game industry outlets as of late, and it hasn’t always been positive. Lagging sales of the Wii U and pressure from the internet’s media spheres had apparently pushed the once hermetically sealed Kingdom of Mario to finally make the move to mobile gaming--but that was debunked as a rumor. This would have been a big step for Nintendo, a company that has, like a dragon of old Germanic lore, covetously clung to its (intellectual) property, wanting it to be experienced exclusively on its own hardware.  The times are changing, and while Nintendo stubbornly resists, even dragons of legend must get up and go with the flow from time to time, as much as they’d like to stay stuck in the golden age. 

Nintendo’s penchant for nostalgia is itself the stuff of legend, a quirky trait that has even led to some epic failures. The rise of the Sony Playstation in the mid-90s—and Nintendo’s promptly thereafter being dethroned from living room entertainment centers everywhere—was, in a way, a result of Nintendo’s bumbling affection for the past. Initially, Sony had only intended to design the CD-ROM drive for a Nintendo Playstation, but Shigeru Miyamoto—Lord of Mario World—put a stop to that plan because of his steadfast commitment to the game cartridge as physical medium.

This past weekend the company re-released an installment of The Legend of Zelda series and, for a limited time, made it available for free. I promptly took advantage of the offer for my young daughter, who recently became a fan of the series.  This particular game (Four Swords) was initially released three years ago in a nostalgic celebration of Zelda's 25th anniversary.  My own nostalgia for playing Zelda evoked by the re-release, I revisited some earlier thoughts of mine on the game’s design.  The standard design of most Zelda games is, I think, an instantiation of Nintendo’s nostalgia for the material history of the video game medium.

Remediating the material

Garrett Stewart has analyzed a similar concern with the material medium in re: film (2).  In an initial foray into narratography, Stewart defined this novel method of narrative analysis as interested in “specifying the [representational] procedures” by which narrative works: i.e., its wrangling into a coherent plot the micro-units of language (in a text), or those of filmic representation (22). Alternatively, one could understand narratography through a spatial metaphor as the identification of the way in which a narrative uses linguistic or visual devices to map its virtual world and the events therein; narratography, then, is similar to cartography in that it identifies a preexisting space, but nonetheless reimagines it in the process (22). Most pertinent, though, is the conclusion Stewart draws in his specific application of narratography to recent Hollywood cinema: there appears to be a fascination in filmic storytelling with the transition from one medium of representation to another (photochemical film to digital pixel) (2, 22-23). He unearths a meta-narrative obsessed with telling the story, dramatizing the material process, of film-based cinema: a kind of nostalgia for the medium’s original material condition. From Vanilla Sky to The Matrix, he points out how match-cuts and camera shots visualize and put into plot the material movements of film that underlie it (See Framed Time 88-90). Material movement that traditionally was to remain invisible in order to further the illusion of virtual movement within the diegetic world now becomes the focus of cinema’s attention. Preserved, if you will, in the abstraction of narrative plot.

Figure 1: The back of a Zelda game cartridge's circuit board.

Narratography’s attention to the evolution of the visual markers by which we tell narrative—from text to film to pixel—is edifying in the case of The Legend of Zelda and its design. In a cursory analysis of this videogame we find a similar fascination with the representation (and preservation?) of its material medium in the working out of the game’s plot and mechanics of play.  As the player-avatar Link manifests his heroic destiny in the diegetic world of Hyrule, it is not just his own movements that are mapped across space, but also those of the material hardware that is the game’s condition of possibility.  The space of the game is divided up between different “dungeons” whose design very often requires the player to shift blocks and trip switches in a particular order that will unlock the next level or adjacent space. These movements of the avatar strongly correspond to the movement of electricity along the data paths of the game cartridge’s circuit board—the circuitous route that data travels behind-the-scenes of the TV screens on which players focus their attention. The movement of electricity that unlocks spaces of data on the circuit board is represented, in Zelda, as the movement of the player in a dungeon in order to unlock—to open the gateway—to the next level. Link’s cycling through an array of puzzles in his virtual world manifests his identity as a legendary hero even while the medium of the electronic game is remediated as the onscreen movement of the player.

Figure 2: The world map in LoZ: A Link to the Past. Cf. Figure 1.

There’s a way in which Zelda’s dramatization of its material medium can be seen as therapeutic relief for anxiety over the quicksilver-like nature of the digital. Early Zelda games and their reflection of the medium might be explained away by the limits of available technology. But to maintain that design, as they have, in the wake of graphical advancements seems a curious nostalgia.  Indeed, with the re-release of Four Swords we see Nintendo exhibiting that same desire to preserve some kind of original gaming experience: Nintendo re-released this remastered version only on its current handheld, the 3DS. There’s no port for the home console Wii U (of course, maybe that was just a marketing decision: there are far more 3DS owners than Wii U owners, so potential for profit is motivation enough).  Nintendo’s own concerns are in accord with those of a scholarly community newly obsessed with the preservation of video games. "Data rot” is a bogeyman that has scared up lots of research grants for digital museums (See this nice explanation of the phenomenon by CBS news.)

In the case of Stewart’s analysis of Hollywood, the nostalgia was for a medium that was already (at the time of the making of the films he close-reads) giving way to replacement by things digital. Nintendo’s nostalgia is a little bit different. It’s a little bit preemptive. A little bit more paranoid. Nintendo appears, to me, to have always already been nostalgic for a silicon circuitry that has yet to give way to a successive material condition. Further, this intense nostalgia seems to tap into a higher level of concerns in our culture.

Now you're playing with nostalgia

In the case of Zelda, there are, unsurprisingly, multiple levels of remediation and nostalgia. The basic design of adventure games--of which Zelda is one of the earliest and superlative examples--is itself nostalgically (neo)medieval. The progressively difficult series of dungeons (and ‘dragons’) one must conquer is transparently borrowed from the hero’s journey of medieval romance. Reluctantly rocketed forward with the times, Nintendo game design looks backward at a history and origin seemingly disappearing (kind of like Benjamin’s angel of history).

There is irony, though, in Nintendo's nostalgia for older forms of life. Miyamoto, eccentric creator of Zelda and Mario and many other properties, has repeatedly said that the Zelda games were inspired by his childhood (and analog) adventures in the Japanese countryside, which was pocked all over with caves and other natural geographic wonders to an adolescent boy (See this biographical article). For the father of Nintendo and its now iconic characters and worlds, it is a fondness of the natural world and a human's organic situation in it that inspires his artificial and virtual constructions.  Zelda is an attempt by him to imprint or impress in a digital world his experiences as a child. He, like all of us I suppose, longs to return to the childhood-as-origin.  In the current parenting climate, filled largely by paranoid "helicopter" parents, such lone childhood explorations of, and adventures in, the natural world seem to be replaced by virtual ones like those in Miyamoto's games.

So, Nintendo's nostalgia is in a certain way ironic; the same past it longs for is one it has replaced. Even if unintentionally. It does, however, carry that past with it. Time, as Carolyn Dinshaw and others have forcefully argued, is not linear. There is no straightforward movement into a future, and the past isn't simply left behind. The past builds up and puts us in the present, a present built, not just on, but by the past. Constituted by it.

My own childhood involved outdoor quests like Miyamoto's, even though I played a substantial number of hours on my Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). That virtual exploration accompanied by the real, both were the better for it: the limited graphics of the NES were supplemented by my knowledge of real nature, and the explorations around my neighborhood--a space that, though filled with towering oak and pine, was lamentably bereft of orcs, goblins, and magic--in turn supplemented by an imagination steeped in Nintendo fantasy.

I regrettably admit that my daughter, at least thus far, has not been able to enjoy outdoor explorations as I once did. Sure, she goes on walks with her parents, but has yet to explore the outdoors on her own--and thus as an adventure. Overzealous in our concern for her safety in what seems like a more dangerous external world (have we come to believe our fictions? Now the orcs and goblins are all too real?), we shelter her and keep her with adults nearly all of the time. Yet she has her Nintendo and her Zelda games. The virtual simulacrum has effectively supplanted the real.

However, Zelda doesn't merely nostalgically try to preserve within its own traces the materiality of the video game medium, and its archive fever also doesn't end in the preservation of imaginative childhood adventures. It also is nostalgic for the medieval, and appeals to a more general level of cultural fascination with this epoch. The medieval is popularly understood as a grittier, more base, and more human because more base, period of time. It's this quality that has made it an enduringly popular playground for imaginative writers, and a stage on which our popular culture increasingly depicts some of its best human dramas (e.g., Game of Thrones, of course.) Given that preoccupation of Zelda's, does it also appeal to a cultural nostalgia for the natural condition of human beings as organic entities, a condition that we fear will be destroyed by the prophesied and constantly looming future of synthetic intelligence and humanity (See Stewart at 222)?

As a preliminary (and unsatisfying) reflection on my relation to this topic, I end with what I began this post: a thought by Derrida. At the end of Archive Fever, he says that our impulse to archive/preserve the past is always accompanied by a yearning to know what hasn't been preserved, "to know what was lost, what burned and disappeared with the ashes" (100).   There's always going to be something that is lost, but what, exactly, has been lost? What am I seeking to preserve, and why? What am I failing to preserve? What am I incapable of preserving? 

Print Sources Cited

Derrida, J. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. 

Stewart, G. Framed Time: Toward a Postfilmic Cinema. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.