Since I was a small boy, I’ve had a means of escaping into a separate realm. A ticket into other worlds in which I am in control, free to explore gorgeous landscapes and seek adventure. I am speaking, of course, about my Nintendo 64 video gaming console. That little gray box represents a substantial part of my childhood, a passion. I would become absorbed in the video games’ aesthetics and their gloriously concise plotlines: jump over a million random objects, throw an evil dinosaur into explosives, rescue the princess, and receive a kiss on the cheek. And along with the fun of the games themselves came the joy of competing with friends for the title of Super Smash Brothers champion and the thrill of playing long after Mom said it was bedtime.
Perhaps the greatest part about these games, however, was their irrelevance to any other part of my life, particularly school. It was simply nice to have an indulgent hobby with which I could put aside a world made up of classes, homework, and any thought whatsoever. We all have these sorts of things, even if they’re not video games. For some, it’s watching Jack Bauer punch a thousand terrorists in the face, for some it’s stalking people you hardly know on Facebook, for some perhaps even watching “The OC” Season Dvds for the tenth time. You know who you are. These things are best enjoyed with a blank mind and possibly with a small amount of drool hanging out of one’s mouth.
However, last year an experience I had with my all-time favorite game, entitled The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, changed the way I would consider academics and the entire world forever. I had been emailed a link from a friend and fellow “Zelda” aficionado. It was a fourteen-page paper entitled, “The Message of Majora’s Mask” written by Dan Merrill a.k.a. “Hylian Dan,” an electronic game design major at Champlain College. What I read became one of the most fascinating academic compositions I have ever encountered.
First, let me give you a description of this amazing game: Link, a young swordsman traveling distant lands finds himself in the realm of Termina, a hapless kingdom overshadowed by an enormous moon. Link soon finds out that the moon has been hexed by the dark power of Majora’s Mask, the only remnant of the ancient and powerful demon Majora; thus, Link has only three days to stop the moon before it crashes into the earth, obliterating Termina and all its terrified inhabitants. In order to save them all, Link must travel to the four corners of Termina, the swamp, the mountains, the ocean, and the canyon to rescue the four giants, ancient guardians of the land who could grab the moon out of the sky and halt its deadly fall. Only they could allow Link to climb inside the moon itself to slay the demon Majora, forever ridding the world of his horrifying existence. That’s awesome. I fell in love with this story when I was eight years old; I grew up with it. It was fun, it was original, it was nothing like school. I knew it like the back of my hand, and, as I opened the website of Dan Merill’s paper, I thought there was nothing this guy could tell me about Majora’s Mask that I didn’t already know.
Allow me to present his thesis: The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask is a philosophical and religious commentary on the necessity of faith in the face of imminent doom. My first reaction, of course was, “…what?” but as I kept reading my eyes got wider and wider at his compelling and well-supported argument. He began by pointing out the religious structure of other Legend of Zelda games, in which the characters worship the three goddesses that created them. Merrill declared that in The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, the people of Termina have rejected this traditional worship of the three goddesses and instead idolized the four giants of Termina. This loss of traditional religion, he said, was symbolized in the omnipresence of the number four, and he cited pictures of four sided objects in the architecture within the game as well as the four-pronged map of Termina. He continued to quote direct character dialogue, emphasizing their absence of morality, compassion, or human connections. His points were hard to absorb, but, to my utter shock, irrefutable.
Already fascinated by his concepts, I returned to play the game to seek more proof for Merill’s theories, and, to my utmost surprise, all I could think about while playing my favorite game was what I had been taught in school. I searched furiously for more instances of the number four, and recalled Ms. Cleary and her fascination and possible obsession with the number three in Macbeth. Pondering the loss of traditional values in the people of Termina, I remembered discussing Hemingway’s expatriates from Ms. Schwartz’s 10th grade English class. War had scarred Hemingway’s characters so deeply that they had given up on their own religion -- and then it occurred to me! The crashing moon must be an allusion to the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, in which the United States dropped nuclear bombs on Japan in World War II. As I learned from US history and from the Coyle Scholar two years ago, this gruesome event impacted Japanese art in countless ways. If it had such a remarkable impact on Japanese artists and animators, why not Japanese game developers as well?
Thus, I went back to scrutinize the most terrifying scene of the game. If, for some reason, the player cannot stop the moon from crashing in the time allotted, the game displays an aura of fire engulfing the land, and, sure enough, I found that the exploding moon bears remarkable similarity to the characteristic mushroom cloud of the nuclear bombs. Suddenly, the game was no longer just one of my favorite childhood adventures, but a profound reflection on human nature and its response to the horrors of war.
At this point I was so thrilled with the way in which my academics were deepening this game, that I decided to take it and run with it, but this time I wanted to focus on one of my favorite aspects of the game: the music. Video games in general use music in a fascinating way: for every new room, area, or even plot twist the protagonist encounters, the music changes to adjust the player’s mood. This, actually, has been one of Nintendo’s most successful aspects of their games, not only because the songs make all their games a journey through a spectrum of feelings, but also because they’re so charming and catchy. Raise your hand if you think you could hum part of if not all of the Super Mario Bros. theme song right now if you were asked. And don’t actually hum it. That song came out with the game in 1985, and every year it’s on the top ten list of most downloaded ringtones. There’s something to be said for that sort of longevity in such a simple melody.
Anyway it turns out that the same musician, named Koji Kondo, who composed the Mario bros. theme song, composed the soundtrack to The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, and for that matter, every popular Nintendo game that’s been released since the eighties. I thought that his work in Majora’s Mask was especially entrancing: all the songs had a profoundly ominous quality, a sense of fear that never let you forget the moon was about to crash.
I decided to download the game’s soundtrack and bring it in to AP Music Theory, where Ms. Bergeron was kind enough to let us take a class period to analyze the songs. We found that the music was not only beautiful but absolutely brilliant with regard to theory. Koji Kondo’s music contains complicated chord progressions, explorations of various modes, and thematic material that permeates each song, much like a symphony by Beethoven. Each song carried its own feeling, conveyed through the exotic instruments Kondo chose, and gave the game emotional significance beyond its look or plotline. In short, it turned out that Kondo was both a technical master and an innovator, and, once again, my doors were completely blown in by the intellectual brilliance of this game.
Later, when I logged onto the comment page of Dan Merrill’s article to contribute my proof of fours and nuclear bombing theories, I found a massive ongoing discussion between readers. Countless video game enthusiasts were bouncing different ideas off one another in a heated argument, but there was a common tone to each of their comments. It was a sense of excitement. The same excitement I saw in my peers when I presented Koji Kondo’s songs to music appreciation club last year. Intellectual thrill. The mind-blowing experience of taking something superficially fun and seeing something profound and meaningful. How bizarre, unexpected, and thrilling it is to take class out of class, and suddenly see so much where you thought there was nothing below the surface.
So next time you’re watching Family Guy, giggling as Peter Griffin gets in a fist fight with a giant chicken for five straight minutes, ponder for a moment the symbolic value of their conflict. Next time you’re watching the newest Harry Potter movie, contemplate the possibility that the problems of the wizarding world are a comment on our own society. Keep your brain turned on, keep what you’ve been taught by your side, and seek meaning where no one else will. Your life will be richer for it.
Thank you.