75th Tumblelog |
A place for Lanny Heidbreder to write while he's too lazy to finish his own site. |
Modern Zelda games have a tendency to roughly follow a pattern:
In The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks, after the first cycle, you’re sent to a small village with six people living in six huts. You solve a little puzzle there that involves talking to everyone in the village. When you get it right, you’re told where to go next and dismissed by the chief.
Some gamers might leave the village immediately; but the more thorough and compulsive types like me go talk to the entire village again. The idea is that you might get earlier-than-intended access to a reward, a mini-game, or a hint about where that chief is sending you off to.
What actually happens, most of the time, is that you see a bunch of useless throwaway text the developers had to throw in to keep the game from breaking.
I was somewhat irritated as I pondered this fact while compulsively talking to all the residents of the village. Imagine my surprise when this last villager offers me something:
Hey! Guy! I hear you’re headin’ for that crazy tunnel.
If I were you, I’d say ixnay on the unneltay.
Ya wanna know why?
The game cartridge, enchanted with the malevolent spirit of the developers, then laughs evilly to itself as it presents me with the two options of this dialogue tree:
Choosing “No!” makes the villager beg you to reconsider, then ejects you from the conversation, giving you no option but to talk to him again, at which point he says the same thing and the game offers you the same choices.
Choosing “Don’t care!” makes the villager call you a jerk, then ejects you from the conversation, still giving you no option but to talk to him again, at which point he still says the same thing and the game still offers you the same choices.
Consider what has happened here. The behavior of checking all the conversation trees after an event has been intermittently reinforced — something interesting and novel happened, which is the primary form of reward in the explorative aspect of games that have such an aspect — ensuring that I will continue talking to every villager multiple times in the future.
But the reinforcement is actually a punishment, and a form of ridicule at that. The game developers have actually just made fun of me for trying to get the most out of their game, and they’ve done it in such a way as to make sure I will make myself available for any future such humiliation they should wish to dole out.
And so, like the rat in the Skinner box, I will continue pushing the Response Lever that is this game and all video games. But my explorative side has not escaped unscathed, and I may think twice before again trying to enjoy any future Zelda titles too much.1
1. This sentence, like this entire entry, is written with tongue firmly in cheek.
