Wish You Were Here (Link's Awakening)

The concept of writing about classics has always seemed to me like an odd tack to take when blogging - especially in something like this where the purpose is to make recommendations, rather than to necessarily add to the available scholarship on a subject. You don't need me to tell you that something already widely regarded as a classic is worth reading/watching/playing etc, not least because that sort of blogging can sometimes come across more as a way of making the blogger seem good than as a way of making the subject seem good; the subject having the more credible claim to glory available for reflective purposes.

To that end, I'm going to generally steer clear of anything everybody has already been meaning to read for ages, but just hasn't got round to doing so. At the same time, as I'm pretty slow on the uptake with new releases, a lot of what I write about is going to be from the past anyway - ideally the recent past, but from longer ago as well if it seems right. Ideally the point of this is going to be building a readership by having something interesting to say and rewarding that readership by pointing them in the direction of things that they might not be aware of yet. My dreams are lofty.

Having said all of that, I'm now going to talk about Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, one of the best video games ever made. I recently had to do a bit of training at work - one of those group things where everybody gets together and grows as people (it was actually very good), and during one of the exercises we had to say where we would like to be right now. I ended up saying something about wanting to go to America again - which is true, in terms of feasible places I could actually be, but not in terms of my actual hearts desire. A few days later I changed my desktop wallpaper at work and ended up putting just a raw chunk of the map from Link's Awakening up there. So, I'm staring at that every day now and in doing so I have come to realise that where I want to be right now is Koholint Island.

Link's Awakening may not be the most epic Zelda game, or the most experimental or even the most polished and accomplished but what it does have is a beautiful internal coherence that is rare in gaming in general, and rarer still in modern gaming. The tendency, what with DLC and achievements and the huge storage space on current discs is to make game worlds seem limitless - to suggest to the player that they can do whatever they want, or at the very least that the characters could go wherever they want if it wasn't for the plot of the game keeping them in a certain place.

Link's Awakening, on the other hand, makes a feature of the limits of the system. It's a closed world and you are trapped in it, but every single screen has got something interesting on it. Because most games are so huge, you can spend an awful lot of time not actually playing the game, but instead getting into the next position from which you can play the game. In Link's Awakening you are always doing something.

I am a big believer in the idea of constraint when it comes to artistic endeavour. A piece of work is interesting not just because of what it does do, but also because of what it doesn't do. This is one of the reasons that I read genre fiction - the artificial constraints on expression actually enhance the meaning of the things that the writers are trying to say. It forces writers/creators to concentrate on their themes and to question how they are going to delineate those themes in a way that a person who has the whole of the world to work with doesn't.

Of course any artistic act will start with a decision about what not to include. But I find that - when it is approached well - the fact that in genre work the constraints are already there can engender even greater feats of imagination and conciseness of expression. This is what I am always looking out for, and this is what I find on Koholint island.