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In September of 1982, a young engineer named Thomas Zimmerman filed a patent for an optical-flex sensor mounted inside a glove. The mitt would measure the yaw, pitch, and roll of its wearer’s forearm and the bending of their fingers, a useful way to transpose a person’s movement onto a screen. Seven years later, a commercial version known as the Power Glove launched for the Nintendo Entertainment System. The technology was simplified and styled to look like a knight’s gauntlet, to which a video-game controller appeared to have been inelegantly glued. The idea was alluring. While wearing the glove, a player could throw a punch from the sofa, and watch it land in an explosion of pixels behind the television’s glass.
Nintendo was not involved in the Power Glove’s development, but, in 1989, exactly a hundred years after the company was founded, it placed the accessory in “The Wizard,” a Hollywood film about a gifted child who travels to California to compete in a video-game tournament. In the United States, the device, which cost seventy-five dollars, sold out immediately but received poor reviews. Users complained that the glove was difficult to use and the controls imprecise. The idea of a gauntlet that bestowed celestial power upon its wearer was quietly shelved.
In the opening moments of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, the most recent entry in the long-running adventure-game series, first imagined by Nintendo’s master inventor Shigeru Miyamoto, the protagonist Link receives a Power Glove-like accessory, which grants him an ability called Ultrahand. This confers the kind of magician’s power that the Power Glove only promised. With a Zen-like wave of Link’s hand, you breezily lift a boulder to clear a path, or right a toppled mine cart and then lower it gently onto the tracks, or fling wide the twenty-foot-tall gates of a fortified castle. Pick up a wooden panel, or a set of wheels, and you can spin them while they hover before you, before gluing the parts together to form a rickety contraption, such as a teetering wagon that hiccups along the track when tethered to your horse.
With its Lego-like capacities, the gauntlet welcomes haphazard works of overengineering. To traverse a moat, you might glue together a series of unstable timbers to form a long, bendy plank. Next, you wave them across the gap and lower each end onto the ground to test the scheme. Success or failure each offers distinct rewards. If the planks topple into the water with a mournful splash, the world provides a slapstick rejection of your hubris. But if they land just so, snag into a cranny, and provide a sturdy foothold to cross, you’ll feel a keen sense of cheater’s glee, as if somehow you beat the designer at their own game. (Even though it was, of course, the designer who created this possibility space in the first place.)
This is not a video game for lovers of crosswords, or sudoku, or any kind of puzzle with a single, key-like solution. Tears of the Kingdom is a project for fudgers, riffers, and make-it-up-as-they-go-alongers––with room, of course, for the odd Da Vinci-style genius, whose inventiveness will be duly applauded on the Internet.
Ultrahand is just one of several supernatural abilities conferred by Link’s glove. Ascension enables Link to plunge his arm into the ceiling or cave wall above his head, then swim through the stone or rock to emerge, molecules intact, on the upper side. Recall reverses the motion of any moving object, unwinding a cog or sending a fallen boulder shooting back up onto the cliff top from which it fell, thereby turning a hazard into an elevator. Fuse, meanwhile, works with its precursor, the sophisticated chemistry set in 2017’s Breath of the Wild (which fooled the Irish novelist John Boyne, who included the game’s fantastical ingredients for dyeing clothes red in his historical drama “A Traveller at the Gates of Wisdom,” published in 2020). Almost any seed or plant or monster part can be attached to a weapon to apply its elemental properties: affix a Fire Fruit to an arrow and it will burst into flames; attach a rocket to your boomerang and you have a boomerang; stick a stick to your stick and you have a high jump pole; fix a mine cart to a shield and you have an impromptu skateboard.
Tears of the Kingdom––a title with a peculiar resonance in the U.K., where Nintendo delayed its marketing plans for the game following the death, in September, 2022, of Queen Elizabeth II––is a different kind of game from its immediate predecessor, or any rival, really. The interplay of goal, tools, environment, and imagination imbues this installment with a giddy sense of freedom. Its systems intersect and collide to spark novel moments of creativity and delight. Typically, in a Zelda game, these superpowers would be granted to the player sparingly, at intervals along the arc of the hero’s journey. Tears of the Kingdom subverts the convention. The tutorials, such as they are, are elegant and minimalist. Within an hour or two, and before you set foot in the intimidating expanse of the fantastical land of Hyrule, Link has almost the full range of his powers. First the game makes you a god. Then off you toddle.
Great power, it turns out, can be a touch finicky. In 1986, when The Legend of Zelda débuted, players controlled the game using only a directional pad and two buttons. Since then, the complexity of video-game controllers has burgeoned. Tears of the Kingdom requires dozens of button combinations to switch between weapons, affix items to notched arrows, swivel props through 3-D space as they dangle in the air, or ride your shield as if it’s a surfboard. This dialogue of digits and haptics must be mastered before the player’s will can seamlessly translate to onscreen action. Few games have required so many “tiny feats of exactitude”––as Nicholson Baker, then a newcomer to the medium, described mastering video-game controls in the magazine, in 2010––as Tears of the Kingdom, which demands that we become mechanic, alchemist, warrior, horse whisperer, and a dozen more vocations besides, each with its own secret language of stabs and squeezes.
Nintendo’s designers cede control (that is, the control shared by authors and film directors that insures the audience experiences their work in a plotted, chronological order) in order that we might gain it. This transfer of power represents tremendous creative risk. In less able hands, it might leave us lost and aimless, intimidated by the vastness of the proposition. In the game’s opening moments, the world explodes into fractured continents, forming an archipelago of floating islands in the sky, above the expanse of Hyrule and leading down into dark caverns beneath the world’s crust. The goal is vaguely stated: find Princess Zelda (no more the distressed damsel of earlier decades, but now a trousered archeologist with whom you struggle to keep up). The where, when, how, and why are mostly yours to answer.
And while all this freedom is daunting, yes, it is also thrilling in its density of opportunity. As you glide high above the world (Link must hike between towers that propel him into the sky), with rivers coruscating like threads of tinsel far below, you experience not choice-paralysis but choice-arousal. There is a frisson of possibility to any reality in which you are sole initiator and consolidator of your schemes.
Most blockbuster video games allow for some moments of improvisation. In the The Last of Us Part II—a series recently transposed, sometimes shot for shot, into a prestige television drama—or in Sony’s God of War Ragnarök, you typically enter a series of bounded environments filled with foes against whom you can concoct traps and other grisly methods of disposal. The designers press a clutch of tools into your hands and allow for some experimentation within the boundaries that they have set and calibrated. But these are video games in thrall to cinema’s rules and conventions. Tears of the Kingdom bears no such ambitions or, maybe, hangups. It represents not so much an evolution of the blockbuster-video-game template as a counter-proposition.
The game reveals how often, in the settings of blockbuster video games, we feel the shadow of the designers watchfully standing behind our backs. Even in determinedly open-world games, such as Grand Theft Auto or The Witcher, the possibility space feels as if it has been carefully catalogued long before the public arrives. In Tears of the Kingdom’s Hyrule, though, it feels as though the chaperones have abandoned the playpen and left the toys unattended. Nobody is waiting for you to happen upon the solution to the puzzle that they foresaw (at least, not outside the game’s numerous shrines, which present more traditional set-piece puzzles). Here, you succeed by your wits, or luck, or a mere happy accident of physics.
The game’s story is sparingly told and received in a jumbled order largely of one’s choosing. Miyamoto, who found inspiration for The Legend of Zelda in his boyhood experiences exploring the countryside without a map, and becoming lost amid the maze of sliding doors in his family’s home in Sonobe, once professed a “fundamental dislike” of games that emphasize scripted, predefined stories. For Miyamoto, a more free-form approach heightens the medium’s unique strengths. It’s a viewpoint that has proved prescient in a world now oriented around Twitch and YouTube live playthroughs, where games that facilitate specific and personalized experiences generally make for the most compelling viewing.
Not everyone will submit to the spell. Some would prefer to be guided through a series of set pieces, as if trundling along a fairground ride’s track. And for a game that strains at the technological limits of its host hardware, there is something almost medieval about the way you must carefully plan each journey into the hills, equip Link with appropriate clothing, cook and pack provisions, and ready the horses. This requires an energetic commitment to the fiction. Still, for many, Tears of the Kingdom will represent the high point of a medium whose core strengths and competencies are still being tested and debated. In the three days following its release, the game sold ten million copies, almost four times as many as the best-selling book of 2022. And, shortly afterward, Josh Sherr, a narrative designer who worked on The Last of Us Part II, tweeted a question shared by many designers and players alike: “Hey Nintendo, quick question regarding Tears of the Kingdom: how in the fuck did you make this.” ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
