* I am not actually good at life.
I was ready to fight Calamity Ganon. I had my Master Sword. I had the power of all four Divine Beasts and their ghostly masters on my side. I had a full inventory of restorative homecooked meals. This was the beginning of the end. It was now or never.
So I stopped, paused the game, and went on the internet to look up how to use my shield.
I’d made it through the entire game—probably some hundred hours of playtime—without ever using a shield after a few early skill-acquisition trials. Not on purpose, mind you. I occasionally thought it would be very nice to be able to block enemy blows in battle. I just couldn’t ever remember which button to push. I did a lot of desperate sword-smashing and running away instead.
I am so bad at The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. And you know what? It’s great.
Breath of the Wild (BotW) came out five years ago. You likely know what it is. Everybody knows what it is. It’s been hailed as one of the best games ever made, with critics and players spilling endless virtual ink gushing over its open-world design. People love it! They lament how it ruined them for other video games. Or praise how it taught them important things about their relationship. Or got them through the early days of the pandemic. Some guy is building the entire map in Minecraft.
It’s a great game, and I’m pretty bad at it. I somehow manage to be pretty bad at it in spite of having watched a friend play it all the way through before I played it myself. I even named my cat Link, but that didn’t help me. I have beat the game, but I still don’t know which button to press to use a shield. I managed maybe half of the side quests, mostly because I kept running away from children who wanted me to run errands or source cooking ingredients for them. And so many men want me to race them? Why? Go race somebody else. I once died seven times in three minutes by getting repeatedly struck by lightning. Another time an ostrich head-butted me off the side of a mountain and into a lake of molten lava—then it happened again, headfirst into a different lake of molten lava. (I don’t know if it was a different ostrich.) I fell off so many cliffs because it started raining while I was climbing. I ran away from every single Lynel I saw; I beat the entire game without ever properly fighting one of those fuckers. Once I set myself on fire trying to cut down a tree.
I want to make something clear: BotW is not a difficult game.
Small children play it with little to no difficulty. Nintendo even released DLC that gives you the option of making the game harder, because people thought it was too easy. I’m not bad at it because it’s difficult. I’m bad at it because I play video games to look at pretty imaginary scenery and smash things with swords and escape the crushing bleakness of daily life in our disintegrating late capitalist hellscape, and I only sometimes remember that there is technically a goal involved that I could be playing toward.
And, maybe, another reason. See, I have a theory about this game in particular.
My theory is that being bad at Breath of the Wild is the entire point of Breath of the Wild.
Maybe being bad at Breath of the Wild can teach us a lot about storytelling—which means that it can also tell us something about life, because how we think about stories is inextricably linked to how we think about life.
The ostensible purpose of the game is to defeat an ancient evil known as Ganon, release the land of Hyrule from its slimy purple clutches, and free Princess Zelda from where she’s been single-handedly protecting the kingdom in dire combat for one hundred years. You, playing as Link, wake up in a cave and wander around for a while learning the game mechanics. A strange old man gives you a hang-glider and tells you to go save the day.
At that point you could, I guess, head off to save the day.
Or you could do whatever the hell you want instead.
It’s very difficult to focus on saving the world in BotW, because the world you’re supposed to be saving is just too much fun to explore. It’s this beautiful, pastoral post-apocalyptic landscape full of greenery and wildlife, monsters and treasures, oceans and mountains, ruined castles and thriving villages. There’s an entire town full of fearsome warrior women. Sometimes rocks come alive and try to kill you. You can ride horses around and keep them as your own and name them after your sisters’ cats. Some evildoers turn into bananas when they die. You can collect an unlimited number of cooking ingredients and spend as much time as you want mixing up recipes by campfires. Everywhere you go, travelers and small children ask you for favors. There are 900 little leaf-people hidden around the world that will give you seeds if you find them: under rocks, in trees, in ponds, atop mountains. You need to find some of these seeds to expand your weapons inventory slots, but you certainly don’t need to find 900. Unless you want to. All the little leaf-men have the same laugh. Find a bunch of them in a row and you’ll hear that laugh in your dreams.
That’s not to say there is no story-related guidance. There is. It’s just very easy to ignore. So ignore it I did, until I happened to stumble upon a strapping fish prince or traumatic memory that put me back on the main quest, which always lasted only as long as it took for me to get distracted again. Why does that child want me to swim downriver with their letter? Who the hell knows. Guess I’ll find out.
This is, of course, the defining feature of true open-world games. What’s the point of all those lovingly rendered landscapes and painstakingly detailed locations if you don’t get lost on your way to every battle and accidentally find yourself at the opposite side of the map with only the vaguest memory of what you had set out to do? The lack of rigidity, the immersion, the freedom, those are all what make open-world games fun to explore.
At some point between getting struck by lightning seven times in a row and going into the final battle without knowing how to use a shield, I started to wonder if people speedrun BotW. Of course they do; gamers speedrun everything. There are a few different types of speedruns: defeating Ganon only, defeating Ganon and all the other major bosses, finishing all the shrines, completing 100% of the game, riding every rideable creature up to and including your fish-prince boyfriend, etc. The first kind exploits a bug in the game that lets you fly across the landscape; the current record is just under 24 minutes. But I am more interested in the 100% speedruns: every boss, every shrine, every key item, every weapon and clothing upgrade, every side quest, all 900 Korok seeds. The current record is around 15 hours.
I think it took me about 15 hours of play time just to figure out how to sneak up on that stupid stag you have to ride to find that one shrine next to the accordion-playing bird man.
Now, I know—because I know the internet, and I know gamers—that there are people reading this who are just dying to tell me how to do it better. Before you set your keyboards afire with advice on how to ride that stupid stag in five minutes, consider this: I don’t care.
Because the number one driving force behind the way I play BotW is not narrative momentum, nor a desire for any sense of achievement, but curiosity.
This is one of the genuine joys of playing BotW. No matter what you set out to do, you will always be distracted by spotting something on the horizon or on the map and thinking, “Huh. I wonder what’s over there?” Why is that mountain glowing? What happens if you roll this giant snowball down this hill? What happens when you mix monster guts with cane sugar and crab legs? Will that lost traveler turn into an evil banana cultist when you fight them? Can you ride a bear? How far can you soar if you climb the highest mountain and jump off?
The practice of indulging in curiosity is one that holds an odd place in how we, as human adults, think about our world and ourselves. I think most people recognize the value of it in some general sense: we want children to play, we want scientists to experiment, we want to try new things. At the same time, on a very practical level, there is sometimes quite a lot of dismissal, or even scorn, for indulging in curiosity for its own sake. People talk about falling down a Wikipedia rabbit hole looking up names for clouds and realizing seven hours later they’re deep in an article about troop movements in the Franco-Prussian War, and it’s so often framed as a failure of focus, a neurosis that must be pathologized and explained away, rather than a sign that, perhaps, the world is full of interesting things to learn, and sometimes it’s fun and engaging to go learn about them with no particular goal in mind. We often define activities by an intended result, not by the activity itself: Learning random facts on the internet is research; children’s playtime is educational; taking a ramble through the woods is healthy; a new hobby is productive—or, even worse, potentially profitable.
Of course, all of these activities can be those things. Kids do learn by playing. Walking in nature is good for us. And, yes, sometimes seven hours on Wikipedia is a sign of a problem that needs to be addressed. Human are complicated animals; many things can be true at the same time.
What interests me, however, is how this framework of defining activities by their outcome has infected the way we create, experience, and talk about stories and art.
Buy the Book
Hunters of the Lost City
It’s a common complaint among bookish circles that it’s much easier, these days, to learn a book’s list of character types, tropes, and the relative happiness of its ending than it is to learn anything that actually tells us what the book is about. The function of this approach is easy to understand: People want to know what they are getting into, and other people want to provide that information. Nobody wants to waste their time (or money) on something they won’t enjoy.
And I get that. I really do. Life is short, none of us can pay our rent, and we all want to read and watch and play things that we’re going to like.
At the same time, I find such rigorously goal-oriented approaches to stories and art frustrating, even a little sad. As a writer, it’s distressing. For me the absolute joy of writing comes from having a creative process best described by the creepy boat scene in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971): hurtling into a dark cavern while chanting, “There is no earthly way of knowing in which direction we are going!” And now you want an itemized list of tropes before I even write it? You want me to know how a book will make readers feel before they read it? You want me to know how a BookTok reviewer who wasn’t even born when I started writing this book will describe it when it’s finished? Did you just call my book content? Please don’t. Help. This is my worst nightmare.
So there is an element of very personal, very visceral recoil in my reaction to the idea that stories exist to reach goals. But there is also good dose of dissatisfaction as a reader and viewer and game-player—a person who enjoys experiencing stories in many different forms. I love going into a story without knowing where it’s headed or how it’s going to end. I like to be surprised—and that remains true even when some surprises are disappointments, and some stories are not remotely to my taste. So when we the experience of stories is reduced to a checklist of familiar beats along the way toward a known ending, it feels to me, an awful lot like that 24-minute BotW speedrun, in that it reaches the goal by skipping over everything thing that’s interesting about the game.
I’m not saying that stories should be written like open-world video games; different media are suited to different kinds of stories. And I’m certainly not saying that stories should be written like BotW, and definitely not how I play BotW. (Although more characters in every genre could stand to be headbutted into fiery lakes of lava by disgruntled ostriches.) But playing BotW, and playing it badly, gave me a lot of time to think about why I was enjoying it so much even when I was making no discernible progress. Why I felt no sense of achievement when I won the game, only disappointment that it was over.
We live in a world that is obsessed with levelling up. Everything is a ladder: careers, relationships, families, hobbies. Young people seem to have more anxiety than ever about aging, as arbitrary numbers represent points of success or failure. College-career-marriage-house-kids. Recent years have revealed more and more of the rot in the rungs of the life paths we’re supposed to want to follow, but there is still pressure to follow predetermined narratives.
The creation of art is not immune. Set out on any particular creative endeavor and you’re inundated with advice on how to learn it faster, in fewer steps, with less trouble. Finish more efficiently. Become an expert. Make a career out of it. In fiction publishing, prolific is often treated as synonymous with skilled or successful, which is a whole big can of worms to dig into. But I understand it. I’m a professional writer; we have to adapt to survive, regardless of how unhappy we are with what the world demands of our art.
But I wonder about what’s being lost, for both storytellers and audiences, when the stories themselves, and our experience of them, succumbs to the same kinds of pressures that fills our lives with so much relentless stress. Know where you’re going. Identify every step. Get there as fast as possible. Never waste a moment. Check it off the list. Package your content. Tell the world. Move on. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
Is that really what we want every story to be? Of course not. I am absolutely certain of that. I know I’m not the only one who loves a ramble through a monster-filled forest, a bit of unpredictable playfulness, a chance to get lost in the tale without knowing the way out. I don’t want stories that offer such an experience to fall out of style simply because it’s momentarily en vogue to strip everything down to a checklist of marketable tropes and assured experiences. It’s such a cliché, but it never hurts to remember that in storytelling, as in life, the journey really is more important than the destination.
Maybe we could all stand to be a little more comfortable with wasting a bit of our time. I think we might like it, in the long run.
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. Her newest novel is Hunters of the Lost City, a middle grade fantasy adventure out now from Quirk Books. Find her newsletter at kaliwallace.substack.com.
I stopped half-way through the article to see if my library app had any books by Kali Wallace, THAT’S how into this world-view I am.
This article does a very good job of illustrating why I hate open-world games. Not knowing where I am going or where my actions are leading me is incredibly distressing to me.
I don’t mind that others enjoy them, but I wish it wasn’t the mainstream opinion. With how popular they are, it looks like open-world games will be dominating the gaming landscape for quite a while.
A well made video game allows people to indulge in imaginative play, something that is harder to find the space for as an adult, instead of ticking off goals met. I really enjoyed this essay
I unfortunately, and I mean very unfortunately, can not play any video game that’s more compelling than Spider Solitaire, Wordle, Sudoku, etc. I have found myself twice in the last year downloading an innocent looking phone app game and find myself obsessed. You think one could handle playing EverMerge and Homescapes. “This is what happens Larry, when you play a video game in the Alps!” I sneakily played the game under my desk, ignored my husband for three months, cleaned only when absolutely necessary AND spent money on the damn things. It’s always innocent fun at first, but then the cycle starts and fun turns into obsession which fills me with guilt, which I eventually confront, and then I delete the game.
I would love to play this game, but the cycle will begin again, even if like described, you can play without any purpose further than indulging your curiosity.
Like the last commenter, I will check out Wallace’s writing instead. I’m sure reading a Kali Wallace book will be more satisfying and healthy for me than playing this lovely looking game.
That’s really why I love botw and open world video games, even if I do get to play them really well with time. One thing doesn’t take the other, it just makes you more proficient. I do stand by your point of view and support it, it makes life meaningfull to me too to stay playfull and uninterested in a degree in achievements and grown up mentality. In the other hand, I don’t entirely believe you’re that bad a player of botw, the gameplay is so intuitive and gets inside you so easily that if you play it for a couple dozen of hours you just get good.
To me, BOTW is both distracting and beautiful and exploring and curiosity make it more fun. Side paths are not for everyone, clearly. I got lost in WOW as well, more often than not. Curiosity is so human, whether we are in or out of a virtual, written, or drawn world. A sandbox is so much more than a box of sand (and even a box of sand is something curious).
This is the best not-content I have read in a long time. Seriously, made my night. And it was nice to read a large chunk of it to my seven year old, who loved your descriptions of Hyrule and it’s inhabitants as much as I did. It was great for him to see that somebody could be so excited about the same thing he is, and also take time to write about it in an interesting and passionate way. Thanks for that.
It took me the longest time to finally chose to tackle Ganon. I had way too much fun exploring all corners of the world. By the time I finally faced Calamity Ganon, I was so overpowered, it took only 30 seconds! I still love running around Hyrule just for kicks.
I gotta say, if you did everything you said you did in the game at the beginning of the article–you’re good at BOTW! And for what it’s worth, I too barely used my shield at all during my first playthrough (except for when I got into a loop of creating Ancient shields, which requires no fancy skills to use if you want to deflect a Guardian’s blast with it). :)
I really loved how you describe this. I think you hit the nail on the head for Breath of the Wild. It’s such a fun game to get lost in, I have more than 200 hours on record. I hope a few years down the line you can pick the game up and replay like it’s your first time again. Maybe next time, you’ll remember which button is shield.
Hey, this is by far the best article that I read on BotW, maybe you are the only one who caught the meaning of this title or you are just the first one who writed it online.
As a BotW player I thank you for having your experience shared and now I want to restart playing it, so I hope you can have fun in your life as much as you had in game.
One important thing to consider with speedrunners. Typically, they do the speedrun only after they’ve already done a full, more casual playthrough of the game. They didn’t skip over the interesting stuff; they just did it in a different save. Speedrunning is almost never something they do instead of playing through the full game; it’s something they do after, as an additional challenge. It’s certainly not everyone’s cup of tea (I enjoy watching speedruns, but I would never enjoy doing it myself), but it’s not meant to displace regular play or exploration. Indeed, speedrunning requires a high level of familiarity with the gameworld and the mechanics in order to do things as efficiently as possible.
Excellent article, both for the game discussion and the story / writing discussion. I, too, love open world games (albeit for Xbox, not Nintendo). I am currently playing Skyrim, again, because I love wandering the countryside and finding things I haven’t found before (and I never use a shield).
The core of a game or a story is not the end but the journey.
The one thing you mention in passing that I find important is the tone. You call it playfulness but I would go beyond that and call it humor. It doesn’t need to be the full-blown humor of that marvelous storyteller Terry Pratchett but I like to laugh occasionally (and an author including an ostrich headbutting someone into a lava lake would definitely do the trick).
I didn’t hate BotW, but it would not make it onto my all-time favorite list (as a side note, I’ve been gaming for something like 4-1/2 decades, mostly a PC gamer but more recently a console gamer too). It’s safe to say that I would never have played it if my daughter hadn’t forced me too.
And I didn’t just feel mediocre about it because it was hard—it wasn’t, although difficulty levels are a good idea in any game, something Nintendo is not great at providing—I felt mediocre about it because its storyline is uber-generic fantasy storyline. Well also, because one of the, I forget what they’re called but they’re basically puzzle boxes of a sort, buildings you walk into and solve various puzzles, one of them was basically impossible for anyone with a Switch Lite. Granted, I had a regular Switch, but I was trying to play it as a handheld, and had to connect it to a TV in order to complete the puzzle, because it required tilting the console to the point that I couldn’t see the screen anymore. This was a Nintendo-published game, right? Were they trying to push their more expensive console, but also much harder to get for some period of time? (No, no, of course we did not need to complete every one of those puzzle boxes, but a lot of us like to.)
Anyway, I have the same problem with the very popular and critically acclaimed Elden Ring: uber-generic fantasy storyline. I was expecting more with GRR Martin’s name attached, which is why I pre-ordered it, but I started nodding off during the opening narration. I might as well have been playing a Diablo game. And don’t get me wrong, the Diablo games are fun, but their battles are a lot more fun for me than Elden Ring’s. If I’m going to power through fights that I don’t find fun, I need a storyline that is at least going to make me curious about what’s going to happen next. Luckily, I paid for the PC version of ER, mods exist, and since I paid for it at some point I’ll load up the “easy” mod and start playing again. For now, I’m into my sixth playthrough of Horizon Forbidden West…now *there’s* a storyline.
BoTW was my first Zelda game, so I had very little knowledge of what I was getting into. I looked out from the plateau at the right moment and was thunderstruck to see Farosh floating in the distance. (I tried to follow, only to be LITERALLY thunderstruck for my troubles, LOL.) I later tried climbing up a random snowy mountain, only to run into Naydra at the top. And finding the Korok Forest… *sigh* I wish I could erase this game from my memory, so I can go through the wonder of experiencing it all over again for the first time. Can’t wait for Tears of the Kingdom!!!
I loved botw so much and still do. every time i play the game, i end up discovering something completely new to me. and the same goes for other open world games like elden ring, there’s always something new that i find after only like 10 minutes of playing. one comment said they want to erase the memory of this game from their mind just to get the feeling of playing it for the first time again. i wish i could do this too, re-explore everything, learn everything again, just have fun. the article also mentioned taking walks outside. this is also very enjoyable, i almost always find something new walking on the path behind my house with my dog. real life can be like a video game too, but you have to let it be. go outside and walk through the woods or somthin idk
This is exactly how I played BoTW :)
This is EXACTLY how I’m playing BoTW right now! There are sooooooo many buttons to remember, my strategy is to just wail on enemies and eat lots of food so I don’t die. And I’ve definitely been butted off a mountain by a goat.
I love the ideas in this piece. Our culture is WAY too obsessed with goals. There has to be a reason for everything we do every moment of the day, and “because I enjoy it” isn’t a valid reason.
Really glad I’m not the only one who can’t remember how to use the shield!
Shout-out from a fellow sufferer who died 7 times in 3 minutes by being struck by lightning! Several years later and I can still picture that section of landscape exactly. I think it wasn’t until later in the game that I realized you’re not supposed to wear metal armor or wield metal weapons in a thunderstorm and finally understood what had happened.
I loved this article as it reminded me of the many small stories of my own play-through. Adulting and parenting whilst indulging in my favourite hobby was something that I was finding increasing difficult, until the Switch and my commute alined to give me some protected, uninterrupted adventure time. No other game seemed to let you feel as accomplished in the same amount of time! Hyrule just lines up “What ifs?” across the horizon and invites you to uncover answers.
I have learned to appreciate my circle of friends and internet acquaintances even more, because before this article I never even made the connection that as a Legend of Zelda game Breath of the Wild was supposed to have a “defeat the baddie and save the land/lass” situation. The way they talk about it, I never thought it was a game that can “be completed”. (Also, no sane gaming console should have a LZ button.)
I also am not good at blocking. It’s okay to not be good at blocking but unfortunately for Gannon I believe it is a required skill. My first foray into Gannon was day 2 or 3 after release when nobody knew anything about how the game worked. There were no help articles online. There was a rumor on Reddit that you didn’t need all 4 divine beasts or the master sword to finish off Gannon so I figured I’d try it and see what came of it
I. Got. Pulverized.
But I won. It was almost 120 minutes (real time) of fighting. Dodge rolling and waiting for Daruks power to recharge so I could block Gannon’s death beam and get in a few hits.
I poured about 600 (plus? My switch stopped counting >.>) hours into BOTW doing the exact same shit lol. There came a quest where i had to shieldsurf and i was so deep that nothing bothered explaining how anymore
I ended up transfering my hyperfixation to Pokemon Legends Arceus, and now consequently have written 50,000 words in universe on “how wild it is that they know the face, name, and approximate location of their Creator diety” (and villain redemption of course)
Through all of that, ive definitely landed in this “we are here to vibe” mindset in life and games alike. Its comforting to think that the meaning of life is that you’re doing it right now ig
Thanks for the words <3
I love this whole article. Technically, I did everything ‘right’ in BotW, save for finding all the Koroks (ya-ha-ha! Ya-ha-ha! Ya-ha-ha!!) and Trial of the Sword, complete with lists to check off, because I enjoy it. But honestly, the bits I found when just having a mosey around were amongst the most magical. Climbed a mountain to see what was there and found a dragon in need of help. Found a gorgeous grove full of mushrooms on the side of another mountain. Walked into an interesting-looking temple and was immediately targeted by four Guardians (okay, that was less magical and more I said a very loud swear word). The bits you learn when you’re just wandering around are phenomenal.
I rode that dumb stag all the way to a stable, but the stable master wouldn’t let me register my funny little “horse”.
#15:
> This was a Nintendo-published game, right? Were they trying to push their more expensive console, but also much harder to get for some period of time?
The Switch Lite was released more than 2 years after Breath of the Wild, which itself started development before the Switch – if you think about it, the Sheikah Slate makes much more sense as a Wii U gamepad than a Switch in any of its modes.
I do agree that they should have tested the puzzles carefully in hand-held mode prior to the game’s release, but there’s really no need for conspiracy theories.
Before reading this article, I did not own a switch and had never played any Legend of Zelda. Many, many months later, I finally gave into my piqued interest, got a used switch and a Breath of the Wild cartridge, and have now spent far too many hours running from skeleton monsters, climbing every vertical surface I can find, having moral crises about killing monsters for item drops (Undertale was a formative experience for me, and now it always bothers me slightly when I have to kill enemies to level up – not that it stops me from killing them), forgetting to use powerful skills I just gained in situations where they would really help (you know which island you are), trying to use said powerful skills in situations where I can’t access them (you mean I can’t use Revali’s Gale to skip to the end of the shrine?), and the usual litany of self-destruction like blowing myself up, stepping off really tall cliffs (twice, one right after the other) and trying to befriend adorable blue blobs that turn out to want to kill me.
All this is to say that this article is responsible for introducing me to the world of Zelda. Thank you, Kali Wallace. Without you, I might have gotten more sleep, but my life would have been lesser.
P.S. I, too, don’t know how to properly use a shield, and I have no intention of learning