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Does The Legend of Zelda series exploit nostalgia for success?
Ohhhh, The Legend of Zelda... for just about any gamer, the story, the characters, or the music brings
back some pretty strong feels.
I'm not the only one who felt that, right?
Even though it's been around forever, people are crazy about the series. Perhaps
troublingly so.
Zelda symphonies, elaborate Hyrulian cosplay, and copious amounts of fan art dedicated to Link.
But why, after nearly three decades and more than twenty different titles does this series drive so much energy and excitement?
Is it just that the new games are so amazing? Or is something else, a little more... calculated?
Is The Legend of Zelda's continued success due to an exploitation of nostalgia?
But hold on a second. What is nostalgia anyway?
First used by Swiss physicians in the 1600s, nostalgia was a mentally dehibilitating longing
for one's homeland.
Spending too much time fighting for foreign kings and missing your comfortable straw bed back home.
Well that was called it nostalgia.
And it's exactly those longings for home that that keep drawing us back to, well, more than
TWENTY different Zelda games.
Of course, nostalgia can't be the only reason for Zelda's massive lifespan.
To keep something relevant for more than thirty years, you gotta start with something
pretty remarkable.
And to their credit, Zelda games are really good, and the original Legend of Zelda was a game changer,
but I've noticed something.
The Zelda games that people tend to have the fondest memories of are the ones that they played as a child.
For some, it's Epona leaping the fence at Lon Lon Ranch in the Ocarina of Time.
For others it's discovering a fairy queen behind a waterfall after hearing a playground
rumor, of course.
And for other's still it's being hopelessly stuck in the Phantom Hourglass like I was during a vacation in Florida
Pro-tip: You have to close the DS to make the seal. Just trust me.
Childhood memories even influenced Zelda's creator himself, Shigeru Miyamoto.
According to an amazing New Yorker profile, that I will link to in the description,
The Legend of Zelda was based on Miyamoto's early childhood cave excursions in his home town of Kyoto.
It was a deeply personal allegory for adolescent exploration and escape.
Another reason that we love Zelda is that we know exactly what we're getting.
The stories might be different, but the world is persistent throughout.
Early Zelda games had an "overworld" arrangement, while later ones made the shift to 3D, eventually
sailing the oceans blue.
Remember losing your way in the lost woods, finding the master sword in the cemetery, or collecting
the shards of the Triforce?
These adventures all built out that larger world piece by piece, despite changes
in perspective and locale. Whenever we jump into a Zelda game, we're always coming back to that world
Even the eternal Mario, doesn't have this level of consistency when it comes to world
building. You've got Mario Party, Mario Kart, Sonic and Mario go to the Olympics.... and the list goes on. If you can tell me
what universe Mario Sweater exists in, please be my guest.
And yes, I know that Link and Sheik are part of the Super Smash Bros. series, but
so is like every Nintendo character. Like the Game n' Watch guy. I mean, who's next
the Wii Fit Avatar?
Oh, okay. Cool
And of course, imprinted in everyone's mind is Zelda's legendary sound.
The triumphant *do-do-do-do* of opening a treasure chest. The satisfying *chime* of finding a secret passage.
Or Navi, just trying to get your attention. Which is super-annoying...Look, I know...
The Legend of Zelda was one of the first game series to recognize that music
and sound were part of the gameplay, a concept that the Ocarina of Time
later developed.
But wait, In their own way, the story, the world and the music play to deep psychological impulses
that feed nostalgia.
For most of us, we played The Legend of Zelda during our formative years, so those
ideas stay with us.
Researchers at Columbia University studied how we make nostalgic attachments to various
forms of media.
It's different from person to person, but most people have their strongest nostalgia for things that they experienced
from their teens to their early twenties.
For me, that would be Stone Temple Pilots to Arrested Development (Pre-Netflix).
So it's not surprising that yet another opportunity to be a hero grabs us by the heartstrings.
The persistent story and world of the new games is constantly calling you
back to your original experience, creating a vortex
of nostalgia that sucks you back into the past.
It's not as bad as it sounds.
As for those aforementioned seductive sounds and melodies in the Zelda franchise,
new research suggests that music can
be a phenomenal trigger for establishing nostalgic feelings.
So is The Legend of Zelda exploiting nostalgia to hook generation after generation?
The answer is a resounding yes.
Nintendo has created a nostalgia producing machine in the guise of an adorable elf
wearing a little green hat.
It's a great master scheme to sustain a franchise forever.
Nintendo should change their motto to: "hook em when their young".
They bake in these nostalgic qualities and release the game, targeted at kids, every
few years, to guarantee that every generation will be Zelda fans.
As these kids grow up , they continue to play Zelda, because it reminds them of the first
time they played Zelda.
They'll probably even play it with their own kids. I know I will.
For example, Wind Waker HD and the 3D-version of Ocarina of Time targets kids who maybe got a Wii U or
3DS for Christmas. But also targets big kids like me who played
the GameCube or N64 version and want to revisit.
A Link Between Worlds is a direct sequel to A Link to the Past, a twenty year old Super
Nintendo game that came out long before the kids who will play it were even born.
So yes, Nintendo is exploiting our nostalgia.
But as long as the games are good, then maybe the exploitation of our dearest memories isn't quite so bad.
Unlike the new Golden Axe and Double Dragon releases which drove their nostalgia into the abyss,
Zelda has successfully
built on top of its own legacy.
And frankly there are far worse things to exploit than nostalgia, like violence.
Moreover, nostalgia is actually good for us. Research has shown that people prone to nostalgia
have higher self esteem, find it easier to trust others, and suffer from less depression.
So when we play as Link, we're not only remembering what it was like to play as a child, but we're also triggering
all sorts of good vibes.
And the end result is this living breathing universe that can be entered or exited at
anytime. At any given moment, there's a kid somewhere who's entering Hyrule for the very first time.
Twenty five years down the line, she'll probably be wondering why she gets so wistful and all teary-eyed
every time she hears the Legend of Zelda overworld theme
You and me both, sister. You and me both. So what do you think?
Does The Legend of Zelda exploit our nostalgia? Hash it out in the comments and if
you like what you saw, please subscribe. I will see you next week.
Hey! So as you may notice, I am NOT in the studio right now
which may be a good thing because there's like 6-10 inches of snow in the
ground in New York right now.
I'm in Las Vegas for the annual DICE Conference which means I wasn't able to record
comments like I normally would, but I went through the
comments from last week's episode about whether or not A.I. should be a part of
competitive e-sports
and here's what I found: let's take a look.
Thomas Voth says he got a lot more out of
this episode than maybe some of the other people did. Thank you very much Thomas, I
appreciate that. He had two things to add, both of which were very insightful.
The first was acknowledging that passing the Turing Test doesn't mean that the players were
better, the A.I. bots were better*, but they were just playing more like humans.
Which I i think was a good prompt for us to do this episode in the first place.
But he adds something different; he actually asks about data input
and alludes to the fact that Watson, for example, got a whole stream of
information from Jeopardy, it's not like Alex Trebek was literally talking to Watson
and then Watson responded. In fact they had to
systematically introduce the data to this machine in a way that the machine would
understand, which I think is a really good point, which is that
that's an acknowledgement by the makers by the folks behind Jeopardy
that Watson was going to be part of the competition and in fact for there to be meaningful
competition that meant
changing some of the ways that the questions were ostensibly delivered.
And I think the same thing would have to happen with esports,
where if we were going to introduce these AI elements, A.I. competitors
we'd have to speak to them in their own language, so to speak. So excellent point, Thomas.
vengefulzucav also didn't like the idea of there being bots in e-sports
for the simple reason that players are already doing a lot of
automatic calculations in their head, having memorization timers, etc.
You know, it's really interesting that you and other commenters
by the same kind of formalism that we find in other types of sports
on the idea being that there is this platonic ideal of
how a particular game, let's say League of Legends, should be performed.
an introduction of new elements will sort of change the inherent value
of that game system in and of itself. Which is a little like, just like the folks at, behind
FIFA, for example, don't like introduction of new technologies, instant replay was
something that was really
looked down upon in sports like baseball, and eventually people come to their wits, and so
it's interesting that people are, that all you who don't like the idea of bots being introduced to esports
have this kind of greater idea of what esports is supposed to be.
squidb8 said that competition is testing the human condition and introducing
any kind of, say prosthetics, sort of changes the
natural rhythm of the game itself. And you know it's interesting, because this is
the big question that's
happening in lots of places, not just in e-sports. A really good example
is the Razor swimsuit that was used at the Summer Olympics a couple of years ago
that gave all the swimmers a particular advantage. Or Oscar Pistorius's legs
which some argued gave him more spring, even up through the things that obviously
the doping scandals that have ravaged
professional cycling. I think that the thing that's worth acknowledging
is that I do think that
all technology is assistive technology. There's a great essay about it in
Abler and another follow up in the Atlantic that I will link to in the description.
But yeah, I think that this idea that if we introduce any form of technology, anything that helps us,
all of a sudden that makes the sport itself suspect and I think that that's been
proven patently untrue and, you know, lots of different sports, the NASCAR analogy,
Formula One, we talked about but, also you know, introducing like gloves that football
players use that stick to almost anything
that a type of technology, not a digital one, but it's a new type of technology that alters
the game itself. Ivan Pozdnyakov didn't like the idea that I called certain aspects
of particular sports inane. I'm sorry if I offended anybody by that.
All I was saying was that there are certain types of behaviors in
esports, in different types of esports, whether it's counter-strike, or looking at
respawn times, whatever it might be, that I I think are more primed
to systemization than other ones. For example, in professional football you
notice a lot of quarterbacks have a little wristband on their arms
that gives them signals for plays, for example. That helps them decide what audibles
they wanna choose. That's something that could be used by human memory but instead
they use a tool to help them sort of solve that dilemma, how to memorize bunch of different
things. I think the same thing that could happen
in particularly esports. Yeah and I do think you're right. It's up to fans and ultimately
the players to decide which types of behaviors actually make the most sense.
hurican310 says that the reason why he watches
esports is for the human element, and I think that's an important thing to remember.
I'm not saying that the whole point
is for robots to just replace us and play by themselves.
Because I think that is kinda boring. But I think the question is whether those human abilities
might actually make for ultimately more interesting
public spectatorship of a particular game if we introduce
more automated elements into them. But yeah I agree. I think that there are human elements
that sort of can't be, that can't be
undone. I mean those are ineffable. MenioMarseilles
makes an amazing point that in chess there are separate championships for humans and computers
and maybe that is something that will end up happening. We'll have a separate human
round and a separate computer round and,
I don't know. I guess we can watch it with our computer friends and invite them
over and then we can crack jokes with one another...
Maybe I've gone too far...