You can tell how far back I was with my email. This was back with GDC!
Greetings Malstrom,
Greetings Reader.
Long time reader…big fan…you know the drill! I’m writing in regards to your GDC post, in particular your analysis of Zelda: Spirit Tracks. I won’t beat around the bush; I’m a pretty big Zelda buff who’s rather stoked for Spirit Tracks. Still, it’s good to have our views and paradigms challenged, and it’s nice to hear things from the point of view of someone who lived through the rise of Zelda from the beginning (I’m only 19, and got my start with Zelda with Ocarina of Time, Link to the Past, and Wind Waker around 2003). Of course, this means I have a few questions and challenges regarding your assesment, especially regarding the concept of “mythos”.
I can definitely relate to the love of the Zelda universe, including fascination with the timeline and mythology of the series, and I’d love to get a Triforce tattoo someday. Still, I don’t see how the inclusion of a train along the same lines of Phantom Hourglass’s steamboat is in violation of the Zelda “mythos”. If anything, it just makes me curious, it makes me want to explore the depths of this new game further to understand how the universe has devloped (if train technology is now viable, then who knows what else has developed?). Interestingly, I as a fan had actually been daydreaming about the possibilities of a Zelda game where you explore Hyrule via train for several months beforehand (then again, I went through a “train obsession” phase as a young child, so trains have a sort of special place in my heart).
Don’t get a Triforce tattoo. Trust me on that.
Mythos isn’t really ‘Mythology’ or the game universe itself. But let me ask you this, “Do people turn to Zelda to play trains?” The answer is likely no. While airplanes and laser guns would also be surprising in a Zelda, they would be crossing the line. The game wouldn’t feel like Zelda. Zelda always has been the Celtic Wonderland and Industrial technologies don’t seem to fit. It would be like installing computers in Link’s village.
Young kids DO love trains. I have a nephew who is obsessed over them. He forces his parents to watch trains all day haha. It makes me wonder if Spirit Tracks is making a run for the younger audience. Trains just don’t make sense in Zelda just as trains don’t make sense in Lords of the Rings.
One particular comment that made no sense to me was “The game looks like it is the Wind Waker world. Isn’t that world flooded? How on earth is a train even in there?”. I’m kind of devolving into nerd whining here, but just because it shares the same graphic style as Wind Waker/Phantom Hourglass doesn’t mean it’s set in the same world (Four Swords Adventures and Minish Cap shared the same style, albeit in 2D form, and had nothing to do with those games). The game quite clearly appears to be set in regular ol’ unflooded Hyrule, Hyrule Castle and classic Princess Zelda intact. Isn’t that an encouraging sign that the game is sticking to the Zelda universe’s core “mythos”?
You are right. I mistook Spirit Tracks as a sequel to Phantom Hourglass. At the time, all we had was a trailer and no much else in information.
I’m going to assume the tangent about user-generated content at the end wasn’t directly related, since neither Spirit Tracks, nor the rest of the conference (aside from Moving Memo Pad on DSi, which is a basic, inexpensive application) seemed to contain much push for it.
The only way any game company could embrace user generated content is if they believed they were not in the content business. Gaming is in the content business just as music and movies are. The content of Zelda is very important. If it wasn’t, you wouldn’t consider tattooing the tri-force on you.
By now, you’re probably facepalming at how I keep putting the word “mythos” in quotations like this. It’s not that I doubt the validity of concept; in fact I think it’s fascinating and holds a lot of depth. It’s just that I’m not confident I understand it yet! You’ve spoken at length regarding mythos several times in the past few months, but you’ve yet to really explain the concept in a comprehensive way as you have with your thoughts on disruption, user-generated content, etc. I can understand that your big article on the subject won’t be done for a while (speaking of which…how are the other articles coming along? ;P), but not having a really clear understanding to work from makes it much harder to understand your point of view. I’d like to suggest a sort of “Mythos for Dummies” blog post…you know, so “casuals” like me can understand!
Mythos may or may not be the correct word to describe the phenomenon. But everyone gets a sense of the grandeur of it by how close ‘Mythos’ resembles mythology.
You sense mythos when you look at Stonehenge or the pyramids or read Plato. Academics are in furious war over the concept. Mythos is the secret of the poets. I don’t mean the modern poets who live from university positions and write stuff that no one reads. I am talking about the immortal poets of history. Isaac Newton was obsessed over the subject. Religions of the world seem to acknowledge it.
Before the invention of writing, communication was all done orally. However, not everything was communicated to everyone. There was a type of ‘special knowledge’ known only in the elders of the tribe that was supposed to be the explanations of the universe and all (of how it was perceived back then). This knowledge was passed down generation to generation orally and kept within the elder circles.
Much of this knowledge, I suspect, was astronomical and mathematical. In a world without electricity, the night sky is more prevalent. There were no clocks. And to sail a ship, you had to look at the stars. And in order to plant crops, you needed to know about cycles of seasons and all. Much of what we know of mythology was likely rooted from stories based on this knowledge and wasn’t really taken seriously.
One remarkable fact about the ancients is that there was no such thing as a ‘time travel story’. It is like they saw time entirely different than we do. To them, it was not a linear line shooting forward. It was likely something circular. This circular unison was the calendar which the ancients seem obsessed about. Tales and mythology seemed to grow from this computation of the heavens not so much as literal beliefs but as a type of marks on the clock.
The modern view is that ancients were barbarians, almost monkey like, and that is why they never progressed was because they were stupid. I contend they were as intelligent as we are but that the major difference is that, due to their cyclical view of time and the heavens, there was no concept of freedom. What was is what it should be. What broke the cycle was evil and had to be fixed. It is no coincidence that every ancient tale begins with the ‘breaking’ of the cycle due to some monstrous villain. The ‘hero’ defeats this monstrous villain and time, the cycle of the heavens itself, is set back in motion.
The best concrete window I have to show the outside that is mythos is Pythagoras. From Wikipedia:
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No texts by Pythagoras survive, although forgeries under his name — a few of which remain extant — did circulate in antiquity. Critical ancient sources like Aristotle and Aristoxenus cast doubt on these writings. Ancient Pythagoreans usually quoted their master’s doctrines with the phrase autos ephe (“he himself said”) — emphasizing the essentially oral nature of his teaching.
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Now look at this:
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Pythagoras and his students believed that everything was related to mathematics and that numbers were the ultimate reality and, through mathematics, everything could be predicted and measured in rhythmic patterns or cycles. According to Iamblichus of Chalcis, Pythagoras once said that “number is the ruler of forms and ideas and the cause of gods and daemons.”
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Pythagoras was probably one of the last people to have known mythos although I suspect even what Pythagoras knew and taught was a slip of what the mythos originally was. The ‘cause of gods and daemons’, of what we know of mythology, springs from that mythos. Mythology is not the source. Those gods and daemons were like markings on a clock, marks on a calendar, like saying February serpent is eating the January mouse.
Pythagoras, despite being intelligent, did not believe in freedom. He believed in a cyclical view and, in such a cyclical view, one cannot be free if your destiny is essentially already set. The mythos believed all throughout the ancients of the cyclical views is the best explanation why civilization never really advanced for thousands and thousands and thousands of years.
While Pythagoras was a smart man, he deliberately chose not to write any of his teachings down. It was expected, in that age, for teachings to be transmitted orally. Writing was seen to be the liar’s tool as anything can be written. Socrates dismissed the invention of writing while many people like to laugh at him about. But Socrates was absolutely right that writing is used for rhetorical means and to distort.
While it doesn’t shock people today that ancient people like Pythagoras chose not to write down his teachings, it is forgotten that more famous individuals made the same decision. Jesus Christ, who was obviously very smart, didn’t write a single word down of His teachings. He chose the mythos tradition of conveying teachings to a select circle of handpicked people who become his disciples. They wrote down the teachings, but not the teacher Himself. How lowly fishermen suddenly began writing material that rivals the greatest of poets is a mystery no one has, or can, explain. The oldest Western institution is the Church, and while its teachings are passed among the Church elders to Church elders not unlike the tradition of the ancients, the Church is relatively modern. Most of what we know of the mythos comes at least four or five thousand years ago or even older. We cannot truly know how old it is since it is before the invention of writing.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about mythos is that it is universally the same across the globe. Of course, the mythologies and tales that emerged from it differ from one civilization to the next, but the mythos underlying it is identical. For example, the Illiad is incredibly identical to parts of the epics of India. Either the Illiad was a tale, told and retold, slightly altered with each telling, that traveled from India and somehow got to Europe or the source material was similar (such as the stars being devised on star movements). Or, perhaps, both possibilities are true.
Aristotle mourned the loss of the mythos. At the time he lived, there was none of it left. Plato is the last person we know who spoke that language of the ancients.
What is fascinating about the old mythos tales is that they, being oral in nature, are poetical. To understand poetry is to understand music. To understand music is to understand both art and math. This ancient poetry is as complicated and precise as a clock. The first plays seemed to contain these mythos elements as well.
The soul of mythos is not going into modern books, movies, or poetry. It is going to where no one suspected: video games. Video games demand a curious combination of mathematical ability as well as artistic flow from both the developer and the player. The ‘stories’ of video games are curiously similar to the ancient tales. The story always begins when the world’s universe is *broken* or a monstrous villain appears in an attempt to *break* the world. The ‘hero’, which is the player, is the magnificent person whose destiny is to defeat the monstrous villain and to repair the cycle.
When reading something like the Muhabarata, I’d scratch my head and be like, “Say, this sounds like Final Fantasy!” Apparently, shadows of the Indian epic made their way to Japan and got immersed in their lore. When Square made the first Final Fantasy, for example, the company was on the point of collapse and it was called ‘Final Fantasy’ because they wanted to put forth the greatest story ever told. Ironically, the first Final Fantasy doesn’t have a ‘story’ in Western terms. There are no real characters. There are no real plot twists. Yet, the game oozes with a charm and character that transcends plots and characters. The designer was putting in what he felt was ‘epic’ at the time which was likely based on whatever he learned as a child of epic stories that Japan knew. So it is no surprise that there are airships in the Muhabarata. There is even a spaceship battle around the moon! When the NES came over, one of the shocks was the Eastern lore which was foreign to Westerners.
Video games, like all things, have variety in them and change over time. Many people dislike the modern video game that attempts to become a cinematic movie or be about modern commentary, something like Grand Theft Auto, and yearn for those mythos stories contained, unwittingly, in the old school games. Though, they don’t know why they yearn for those tales or why the mathematical gameplay and music is seared in their head. They just know they do. The characters of the first games did not have ‘personalities’ or ‘issues’. They were just the destined heroes. There was no backstory on the villain, no revelations about the monster villain’s childhood. There was just that the villain was breaking the world or about to break it, and that alone was reason why he was the villain, and the hero was destined to stop him. The plots of the old school video games are remarkably similar in that regard. The more fleshed out accounts, such as Final Fantasy IV, began with the villain attempting to destabilize the cycle via the ‘crystals’. The game, absurdly, summons forth a giant whale for a spaceship and the game ends with a climatic battle on the moon. However, none of this is absurd when comparing it to the mythos earlier civilizations. Final Fantasy VI had the villain defined not by the ruler of the empire (Gestahl) but by he who disturbed the position of the Magic Statues, of the cycle (Kefka). Of course, this tore the world apart but it would heal only once the villain Kefka was defeated. Such is how all the stories go.
Zelda is a game that contains the feeling of growth, of a boy into a man, this ‘growing up’ is no reason why the series is revered as it is. The Zelda series is, very much, cyclical. The cycle is presented as The Triforce which contains a neat little geometrical design of triangles. The villain, reborn from age to age, is of course Ganon who either attempts, or captures, the Triforce and, thus, disturbs the Cycle. It is because of that the heroes emerge by destiny: Link and Zelda. Ganon is defeated, the Cycle is restored, and all is good with the world. However, Ganon never truly dies. He returns again in another age to start the process all over again.
Only one Zelda game (there are a couple I’ve haven’t played, so I might have missed one) that did not have Ganon defeated, at least, not as the premise. The beginning of Windwaker clearly states that Ganon appeared and the hero, Link, did not appear to defeat him. Thus, the world was flooded. The breaking of the cycle, also, is not new and it always results in a gigantic world change for the worse such as a massive flood. The cataclysm in Final Fantasy VI is another good example of what happens when the hero doesn’t stop the villain from messing with the cycle.
Zelda I
Zelda II
Kickass Magazine
Zelda 3: A Link to the Past
As you can tell, the Link of Zelda I and Zelda II has an obvious cross on his shield. In the last image above, from Link to the Past, the cross was changed to the Triforce. Despite the change from a well known religious icon to an icon of the game world, no change has been made. The Cross and Triforce both represent the Cycle that the hero is to preserve (i.e. King Arthur’s tales uses the Cross in the same way). The Triforce is a triumvirate, a three-that-acts-as-one, and it is not new but a very old idea. The obsession of Zelda fans over the timeline is really the need to put the Zelda games into a cycle collectively, since the games act independently as a cycle.
If you’ve read this far, when I say that focusing the game on trains is getting away from the mythos of the game, perhaps you can sense where I am going. There is nothing reverential or cyclical about a choo-choo train.
Ah…one more thing before I forget. For all I know you’re already planning on talking more about it, but I’d like to know more about why Nintendo seems to be struggling in Japan lately. It can’t be just because of focusing too much on user-generated content, because the same is largely true in the rest of the world where Nintendo seems to be doing better than ever.
I put much of the blame on Nintendo not recognizing that video games are in the content business, not gameplay business. The purpose of gameplay is to act as bridge to the content. Without content, the greatest gameplay in the world won’t do you any good. The embrace of user generated content such as Wii Music as well as re-using old content such as Animal Crossing Wii stopped the Wii momentum cold.
The ‘core’ Wii games also are duds in Japan. Metroid Prime 3, like the earlier two Prime games, doesn’t sell in Japan. Twilight Princess wasn’t that well received over there. But the biggest problem was Super Mario Galaxy. “Is that like Mario Party?” people in Japan wondered. 3d Mario never sold well in Japan. N64 and Gamecube sold mostly in America for a reason. Yet, Nintendo stubbornly kept making 3d Marios as if people who didn’t like them would suddenly jump up for them.
Nintendo, as all console companies do, see the content as games. Customers, however, see content as what the games are about. We do not need two thousand mini-game fests on the Wii. Customers are looking for games with content. PlayStation 3 had some content heavy games release on it in a short amount of time (such as Resident Evil 5 and Street Fighter 4 as well as the demo for Final Fantasy 13).
Wii’s loss of momentum was because of the lack of games and the games that did come out did not have the content or, in the case of Wii games, interesting new motion controls.
Thanks for reading, and keep up the awesometastical work! You’ve really expanded my mind and view of the industry since I started reading your work, and I look forward to even more enlightenment as you wrap up your work!
This is very kind of you to say so!
As one last addendum to the mythos discussion, have you ever wondered why Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” is so popular? It certainly wasn’t Shakespeare’s more popular play at the time and there are more entertaining plays and better illustrations of his poetry. Yet, why is “Hamlet” so revered? Like all of Shakespeare, the tragedy is practically a comedy until the last act. Hamlet, bizarrely, becomes revered as a hero yet the character destroys the kingdom and murders Polonious in cold blood.
The ‘Hamlet’ story is not new. It is very old. It keeps reappearing in the ancients, and is one of the more popular mythos tales. The King always represents the Old Age, the Hamlet character always represents the New Age. The King always usurps the throne and is often the uncle who killed the rightful king and married the prince’s mother. The tale is to mark the passing wane of one star system for another as the heavens do slightly change every hundred or so years due to the wobble of the Earth. Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” has removed many of the mythos strings that bounded it but, every now and then, odd lines appear which baffle the Shakespearan Scholars. What could be more mythos, more of ‘Hamlet as the hero to save the cycle of time’ than this quote (which makes no sense in the context of the play):
”Time is out of joint, and cursed spite; that I was ever born to set it right.”