Since its release in May, I have played The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom a normal number of hours.
Playing Tears of the Kingdom is pretty much the same experience as playing Breath of the Wild, and I mean that in the best possible way. Don’t worry: I still don’t know how to use shields; at this point I’m never going to learn. I love TotK’s addition of new regions, new powers, new monsters, and new ways to totally and completely fail at engineering rational and efficient solutions to problems. Most of all I love how playing feels like rambling aimlessly around a familiar, magical landscape, only this time I sometimes have to stop and build an off-road Jeep for a traveling folk band.
I don’t know what other people wanted from TotK, because I don’t really keep up with gaming news or chatter, but it is exactly what I wanted. I’m too poor for therapy, so I have to settle for self-care in the form of the intense satisfaction I get from strapping rockets to Koroks and watching them fly, or exiting a conversation by ascending directly through the ceiling without warning, or killing a Lynel using a weapon diabolically constructed from the bones of another Lynel.
I have a few friends who are also 100+ hours deep into TotK. We talk about it a lot: who cleverly builds a little motorcycle to get around, who has avoided the underground regions due to a fear of the dark, who will go out of their way to ride around in mine carts at every opportunity. None of us are terribly invested in making plot progress, but we were all very excited to be able to invent pizza. The other night some friends and I were hanging out after dinner and I watched one of them angrily yet painstakingly build Hyrule’s longest lava bridge because she didn’t feel like finding a more efficient way to get from one place to another.
Through all of this, I have come to a realization that is somehow both expected and startling:
I’m a video game person now. I’m a gamer.
The signs were there already. I progressed quite naturally from disinterestedly watching other people play, to interestedly watching people play, to writing about it, to playing on my own, and now I’ve reached the point where I am sometimes so invested I almost—almost—feel sorry for the Yiga clan idiots who think they are springing a clever trap only to get turned into a banana smoothie with a single blow from my Lynel smasher.
But it’s not really a new hobby for me. It’s a very old hobby, one that I sort of forgot about for a good thirty years before discovering it again.
I think the first video game I played was Space Invaders. Maybe Frogger or Pac-Man or Asteroids. It could have been Pitfall, which we didn’t have for our Atari at home but our grandparents had in their basement rec room, there for us to play when we visited once a year. They also had the historically terrible E.T. game; I remember trying (and failing) to play that once or twice, decades before I learned anything about its pop culture notoriety. There’s a small chance my first video game was Donkey Kong, which we played as an arcade game in a dark room at the back of the video rental place in our neighborhood. We played Donkey Kong for pocket change long before we had any need for the video rentals, as it would be years before we got a VCR.
But I think the first was Space Invaders. That Atari joystick, that single red button, that dashed line of defense, the sounds. I remember it pretty clearly. I was very young, but I have older siblings; my memories of playing are mixed up with my memories of watching them play.
Then came an NES and the delirious joy of that first successful beginning-to-end Super Mario Bros. 3 playthrough without using any of the level skips. A few years later it was the classic computer games of the ’90s: The Secret of Monkey Island, King’s Quest, Myst. I was one of those kids absolutely obsessed with Myst, which in retrospect was a pretty good sign of what would bring me back to gaming after decades away. I always loved the experience of being dropped into a strange new world and left to figure things out.
Those were the last games I really played until a few years ago. There was a brief foray into the Professor Layton puzzle-solving series, and the usual puzzle games when smartphones became a thing, but that was it. There was never any particular reason for it, except for the same reason that infects all of adulthood: It always felt like there were other things I ought to be doing, other ways to use my time, other ways to spend my money.
I don’t have any particular video game nostalgia; I have no desire to play those old games again. Nor do I have a very competitive nature; I don’t care about getting the best score or the fastest time or even finishing if it stops being fun. I certainly don’t have any desire to get into multiplayer online games; the thought of having other people intrude on my video game time makes me shudder.
What I do have is a very sincere fondness for just fucking around.
People often joke about how writers spend a lot of time staring out the window and doing absolutely nothing. And there is, of course, some truth to that, because quite a lot of the process of writing happens entirely within in the squishy, soggy folds of the brain, rather than between the hands and the keyboard. You would think it would be the perfect vocation for something who really enjoys just fucking around. And it some ways it is, because being a writer requires a great deal of unstructured time. But in other ways, it’s a terrible career choice, because being an author means existing in a constant state of never-ending hustle in which you are endlessly bombarded by reminders from every side that You Should Be Writing. It’s ingrained in literary culture, impossible to escape, but it is a bit disconcerting, during this period of historically significant labor action across many industries, to still see authors still cheerfully sharing that they haven’t taken a day off from writing in months and only wrote 4000 words today and feel like failures because they only have three novels and seventeen short stories planned for publication.
This is not an essay about ongoing and unaddressed labor exploitation in the publishing industry. It’s just some necessary context, because it is no coincidence that my rediscovery of video games after decades of adulthood without them coincided with the pandemic, which means it coincided with the realization that late capitalist hustle and grind culture is blisteringly stupid.
It’s so very stupid. There is nothing stupider than the grind. Can we agree on that? Are we at that point yet? It’s stupid and harmful and makes everybody miserable except for a very tiny number of people at the top, who are also miserable and always will be, because they are terrible humans who kill every spark of joy before it has a chance to grow.
At some point I started thinking: What could I be doing with my time instead? What could my life look like? What would happen if I actually enjoyed some hours of my day without guilt or regret? What would I enjoy, if I let myself enjoy life?
It turns out one thing I really enjoy doing in my free time is smashing those fucking Lynels with weapons fashioned out of their own bones.
Playing video games is not revolutionary praxis. But creating space for pleasure in a world that demands nonstop productivity in service of distant and often unachievable goals is.
I’m talking about fun. It’s good to have fun. Fun without a purpose. Fun that does not contribute in any material way to your economic status or career progress. Fun that does not serve any boss except itself, does not need or ask to justify its existence on any moral or practical axis, does not exist only as a stepping stone to a specific achievement.
It’s so easy to forget how to do that. It’s so easy to fall into the habit of evaluating everything we do according to those external pressures that demand we assess everything we do in terms of visible productivity and measurable value. Everybody does it to some extent, although some people, situations, and life stages lean toward it more than others. It tends to seep into everything, because we live in a world that is always demanding that we justify our choices in terms of their utility.
That includes those things that are ostensibly about pure leisure. Yes, of course, we are allowed to pamper ourselves with in self-care—because our families and jobs and communities need us to be active and productive and present. We can sit down and read a book—so long as we can identify who will benefit from the message in the book, which means our scifi should be about Fixing The World, our romance about Promoting Relatable and Aspirational (Heteronormative) Relationships, our horror about Allegorizing Society’s Ills, our kidlit and YA about Helping Young People Grow Up Right. Watching TV is acceptable, because it is necessary for us to participate in the cultural zeitgeist now that we’ve all agreed it’s a so-called golden era.
Doesn’t it get a bit uncomfortable when the language we use to talk about the things we do for fun is indistinguishable from the language of diet culture? “Of course you can indulge from time to time—but make sure it’s good for you!”
I’m exaggerating a bit, of course, because it is easy to be overly salty when considering the uneasy intersection between the very persistent human desire to enjoy things and our pleasure-killing modern existence. What’s interesting to me is that video games have always been right in the middle of that intersection, dodging all the traffic Frogger-style. Ever since their invention people have been researching, opining, and arguing about what video games do to us and our world: rot our brains or develop our brains; make us violent or teach us patience; turn us into zombies or develop useful skills; destroy childhood playtime or encourage healthy problem-solving; make us all loser loners or create vibrant healthy communities; cause our mental illnesses or treat our mental illnesses; and so on, and so on, and so on.
What I love about Tears of the Kingdom, and Breath of the Wild before it, is that when I’m playing none of that matters. Is the game moral? Who cares. I will happily ignore a kingdom suffering apocalyptic turmoil to collect silly hats and cook forty-seven mushroom-themed meals in a row, so maybe morality is a meaningless measure of what the game is trying to achieve. Is it relatable? The only character I relate to in TotK is that dude who stands around in rainstorms and on snowy mountaintops trying to build signs despite apparently not knowing anything about how to build signs.
Is this game good for me?
Well. It makes me hate the world less.
Video games are simply another form of art—and I’m saying simply not to minimize, not at all, but to revel in the expansiveness of it. There is so much delight is in this particular creative and technological medium that invites us in to play make-believe for hours on end. As with any other kind of art, the medium does not dictate the subject matter, the purpose, the impact, or the importance. Like novels, poems, songs, paintings, dances, fashion, all kinds of art, everywhere, a video game can be about anything, for anyone, intended to provide any kind of experience, capable of eliciting any kind of emotional reaction.
And, yes, “I am having a nice time doing fuck-all of significance in a magical world where I surely won’t be attacked by a bear, oh shit, there’s a bear, time to run,” is an emotional experience, because fun and relaxing escapism is as an emotional experience.
All the heavier stuff—the weighty purpose of art, the importance of interpreting the human experience—it’s all still out there. It’s not going away. I think about it when I sit down to write, because I very much want to write books that say truthful and genuine things in powerful and interesting ways. But that’s not all there is, and it’s important to remember that. This is particularly true, I think, when there is very little space between an act of artistic creation such as writing and the Sisyphean reality of trying to earn a living from it. It’s important to maintain enough perspective to make that space ourselves, even if the world would rather we didn’t. In the words of the 21st-century philosopher Kim Namjoon, “I wanna be a human before I do some art.”
Playing Tears of the Kingdom is not going to make me a better writer. It’s not going to make me a better person either. It is not going to pay my rent or progress my career; it’s not going to deepen my friendships or expand my consciousness. It is not particularly intellectually challenging or emotionally engaging, although there is both challenge (many failed attempts) and heightened emotion (many, many curse words) in those shrines where you have to go beat down killer robots with a stick while wearing nothing but your underwear. The 165+ hours I’ve spent playing since May haven’t produced anything tangible except this essay and the many, many balls of fluff I harvested while brushing my cats during cut scenes.
And that’s fine, because all this game has to do, it’s only real purpose, is to remind me of what I knew when I was seven years old and shooting alien invaders out of the sky: It’s okay to have fun. The chores will still be there later.
With that in mind, I have to go do battle alongside a ghost-possessed mecha in an underground temple. Wish me luck.
Originally published August 2023
Kali Wallace studied geology and earned a PhD in geophysics before she realized she enjoyed inventing imaginary worlds more than she liked researching the real one. She is the author of science fiction, fantasy, and horror novels for children, teens, and adults, including the 2022 Philip K. Dick Award winner Dead Space. Her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, F&SF, Asimov’s, Tor.com, and other speculative fiction magazines. Find her newsletter at kaliwallace.substack.com.
