I am not actually good at life.
I was ready to fight Calamity Ganon. I had my Master Sword. I had the power of all four Divine Beasts and their ghostly masters on my side. I had a full inventory of restorative homecooked meals. This was the beginning of the end. It was now or never. So I stopped paused the game and went on the internet to look up how to use my shield.
I would made it through the entire game probably some hundred hours of playtime without ever using a shield after a few early skill acquisition trials. Not on purpose, mind you. I occasionally thought it would be very nice to be able to block enemy blows in battle. I just could not ever remember which button to push. I did a lot of desperate sword smashing and running away instead.I am so bad at The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. And you know what? Its great.
Breath of the Wild BotW came out five years ago. You likely know what it is. Everybody knows what it is. Its been hailed as one of the best games ever made with critics and players spilling endless virtual ink gushing over its open-world design. People love it. They lament how it ruined them for other video games. Or praise how it taught them important things about their relationship. Or got them through the early days of the pandemic. Some guy is building the entire map in Minecraft.
Its a great game and I am pretty bad at it. I somehow manage to be pretty bad at it in spite of having watched a friend play it all the way through before I played it myself. I even named my cat Link, but that did not help me. I have beat the game but I still do not know which button to press to use a shield. I managed maybe half of the side quests mostly because I kept running away from children who wanted me to run errands or source cooking ingredients for them. And so many men want me to race them? Why? Go race somebody else. I once died seven times in three minutes by getting repeatedly struck by lightning. Another time an ostrich head butted me off the side of a mountain and into a lake of molten lava then it happened again headfirst into a different lake of molten lava. I do not know if it was a different ostrich.
I fell off so many cliffs because it started raining while I was climbing. I ran away from every single Lynel I saw I beat the entire game without ever properly fighting one of those fuckers. Once I set myself on fire trying to cut down a tree.So there is an element of very personal very visceral recoil in my reaction to the idea that stories exist to reach goals. But there is also good dose of dissatisfaction as a reader and viewer and game player a person who enjoys experiencing stories in many different forms. I love going into a story without knowing where it’s headed or how its going to end. I like to be surprised and that remains true even when some surprises are disappointments and some stories are not remotely to my taste. So when we the experience of stories is reduced to a checklist of familiar beats along the way toward a known ending, it feels to me an awful lot like that 24-minute BotW speedrun in that it reaches the goal by skipping over everything thing that’s interesting about the game.
I am not saying that stories should be written like open-world video games different media are suited to different kinds of stories. And I am certainly not saying that stories should be written like BotW and definitely not how I play BotW. Although more characters in every genre could stand to be headbutted into fiery lakes of lava by disgruntled ostriches. But playing BotW and playing it badly gave me a lot of time to think about why I was enjoying it so much even when I was making no discernible progress. Why I felt no sense of achievement when I won the game only disappointment that it was over.
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