I loved your long reply to the “My Zelda Experience” email. You really highlighted the RPG roots of the game that are so easily missed when you look back at it now. Just watching that video of the first Zelda that you posted you can see it’s built in the tradition of old RPGs, only instead of separating all of the action into an abstract set of numbers and stats the game builds a real-time gameplay frame for everything to naturally occur in. New abilities aren’t numerical increases in an attack output stat, they affect the way your attacks function on the grid that you occupy. A boss becomes a real threat because suddenly, instead of avoiding the patterns of the single moving bodies of the normal enemies, there are three projectiles thrown across the screen to avoid. This is ironically a huge contrast to action game bosses in the current generation that simply introduce a new puzzle for the player to solve, but themselves aren’t all that difficult after their puzzle weakness has been broken open by the player.
I think a big issue with the newer Zeldas is that the old RPG elements that built the first game have been themselves built up into a story. The progression of a quest or adventure can be construed as a story, but that story can be the simple act of moving across a varied landscape and reaching new goals, it doesn’t have to be a literal story of characters and dialogue.
A game like Minecraft parallels the original spirit of the game in some really obvious ways. It just exists as a game, it never feels the need to explain itself, and there’s no need for a story. It’s a game and that’s reason enough for you and the protagonist to progress through it. It’s funny because I would guess that Notch himself is unaware of how well the narrative of the game fits and sees its lack of story as a weak point and something that should preferably be changed.
The problem with Zelda is that ever since Miyamoto became ‘manager’, the easy way of development always gets taken over the hard way. Every awesome game that has ever come out, including one’s favorite Zelda, did not have an easy development process. The development process is not being undergone with the attitude of ‘winning’ but rather the attitude of being ‘comfortable’.
It is EASY to design Zelda around puzzles. It is HARD to design Zelda around arcade/RPG elements. Which is the victor? The easy way, the puzzles.
It is EASY to diminish and ultimately remove the overworld completely. It is HARD to make a vast, interesting overworld. Which is the victor? The easy way, the diminishing and disappearing overworld.
It is EASY to make a linear adventure. It is HARD to make a nonlinear adventure. Which is the victor/ The easy way, the linear adventure.
It is EASY to produce a canned, cliched, and crappy story. It is HARD to allow the player to make his own stories. Which is the victor? The canned, cliched, and crappy story.
It is EASY to make such a story recycle ideas from previous games (such as making swords into characters). It is HARD to make a story that is entirely new. Which is the victor? The easy way, the recycling formula and story.
It is EASY to make the ‘new feature’ of the game to be identical to the hardware added in the console. It is HARD to make a ‘new feature’ of the game to be something integral to the universe of the game and not an alibi to keep making the oldest puzzles in the newest ways. Which is the victor? The easy way, the use of the hardware to keep recycling the oldest puzzles in the newest ways.
It is EASY to try to make every video game under the nature that it will be the next Star Wars phenomenon. It is HARD to resist the 3d and special effect doodads and just focus on making a game. Which is the victor? It is the reliance on doodads to make-believe that the game will cause a ‘Star Wars’ phenomenon.
It is EASY to get the Nintendo President to declare with you that Zelda is and always will be about puzzles and anyone who says otherwise is wrong. It is HARD to admit that you’ve changed the direction of Zelda which has led to it becoming the biggest joke since the latest Final Fantasy games. Which is the victor? It is just declaring that Zelda is X way, not Y way, and you demand everyone to accept it just because you still think this is the 80s where your customers are 8 year olds.
By the way your commercial post really threw me off. There are opinions of yours I disagree with but I still enjoy reading them because I find what you have to say clear, engaging, and honest. But your commercial post seemed very out of character. Your regular insight sort of dissolved into this commonplace assertion that sexist imagery and language in advertisements equal fun and interesting advertisements, but this is in direct contrast to your stance on blue ocean and widening the player base. Why push women away with ads like these that cater to the same demographic already interested in games? In the same way that you say 3D Mario is pushing away people who like to play regular Mario, I would say sexist and objectifying imagery in advertisements push away the larger female fan base.
I hope you don’t feel that I’m attacking you, it’s just when you say that you feel like a marginalized second-class gamer part of a huge untapped player base, I wish you would also make the connection that girls and women fall into the same category as you, just for different reasons, and one of those reasons may be this stagnant, off-putting way games are sometimes advertised.
Huh?
What!?
Are you serious? You cannot possibly be serious.
It is the writer’s job to get inside people’s heads. This becomes a crisis when it comes to woman. I enjoy watching science fiction writers (many of which are men) not get anywhere close with their portrayal of women. Let me give an example: the recent Battlestar Galactica series (which had horrible ratings which is why the network pulled the plug on the show). Every woman in that show was written as a cigar smoking, super-athletic, heavy-drinker, bed hopping go-go-go macho character (come to think of it, a main female character in Farscape had this issue too). Contrast this to how women were written in Firefly. Note the huge difference? Note how the women in Battlestar Galactica were all written as cold, serious, drug-taking female Rambos while the Firefly women come across as warm, playful and fun to be around? The reason why I’m saying this is that the reason why you see games having rambo women or something of that nature is not because the game designer is mean spirited or has an incredible huge male ego, it is because men do not understand women (and for the man’s sake, women prefer it this way).
The next time a stunning woman comes walking down the street, instead of doing the typical male thing and look at her, you look at reactions from other women. They will be staring daggers at her. The point is that there is another universe out there that men do not understand. And those who do understand it go half-mad.
Many male comedians tend to understand. Jeff Foxworthy realized, in his later age, that women were smarter than men. His story went like this: “My wife and I were on the sofa watching TV. The wife said, ‘I’m hot.’ I got up, walked over to the wall, and turned on the fan. When I walked back to the sofa, I stopped and thought, ‘Wait a minute. She never asked me to turn on the fan. She has me trained, and I didn’t even know it.'”
There is the sci-fi story of the scientist who, studying some other dimension, is so shocked that, to protect everyone else, he destroys all his research, erases his computers, and ends up half-mad. And on this subject, I must do the same.
(Men like to believe they are powerful and controlling… either in real life or in video games. It is very tempting for men to believe women think they are being mistreated by ‘powerful and controlling men’ [because this is how man prefers to see his kind]. Since man doesn’t prefer to see the definition of man as ‘weak, manipulated, drone-like’, a possibility never enters his head.
(The inventor of Chess was a genius in ways more than the gameplay. The King just limps along and his role is only to be captured. You have the other pieces that do the work such as the knights and bishops. And then, there are many pawns. But what is the most powerful piece on the Chess board? It is the Queen.)
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