The Legend of Zelda

I was playing Zelda in the basement when I heard the crash and my dad began to yell. I registered the commotion but did not stop the game. A few moments later he called from the top of the stairs. “Forest,” he said, “Sumac has been hurt.” Sumac was a two-year-old colt that I had been training. I had put a saddle on him for the first time that week. I didn’t really like riding but I liked that horse a lot; he liked me also. I stopped the game and went outside. Sumac stood stunned besides the coral, his front right leg had broken off at the knee and was dangling by a piece of skin. Stampin Kid, the stallion, had run into him knocking him through the logs of the coral fence and breaking his leg. Horses, like other large quadrupeds, cannot survive a broken leg; he would have to be shot. I went back down into the cool basement and, crying, resumed playing Zelda; soon I couldn’t see the screen for how hard I was crying. I was eleven years old. Zelda has always, in all its many versions, cast a spell over me. It’s the only video game I can ever tolerate. The open world landscape with its many stylized forests and rivers, lakes and caves, dungeons and castles has never failed to occupy me; the game has the uncanny ability to generate landscape moods; subsequently these absurd landscapes have infiltrated my dreams (I dream in-game). The game totally absorbs me; hours, days, weeks, will go by before I get bored. At age 19 during my first week at college, having moved from the big north woods into the city and, in a state of culture shock, I played my roommate’s N64, Zelda: Ocarina of Time until he took it away (because I played it too much). Zelda (for me) has the efficient ability in turning the greater world off; one might speculate that these games are addictive because they so neatly turn off the world. For the child they operate as an overly effective defense against a reality that might otherwise be unbearable; the video game regulates the sheer intensities of life to which the child (more so than the adult) remains susceptible. D.W. Winnicott claimed (prior to the era of screens) that “playing is itself a therapy.” I am not yet sure if Zelda is therapy, or merely an elaborate off-world portal (anesthesia), or both. In the basement that day, and after I had stopped crying, I was trying hard not to hear the gunshot when I entered (in-game) the lost forest, a maddening labyrinth of endlessly repeating screens.