Returning to the Solitude of Hyrule

The character Link takes in a vista of the land of Hyrule in this screenshot from the Nintendo Switch version of the video game The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, published in 2017 by Nintendo.

How a video game landscape offered a refuge I didn’t know I needed

Quiet.

Loneliness.

Solitude.

These words keep coming back to me when I think about The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the massively popular open-world video game published by Nintendo in 2017.

Quiet.

Quiet.

Quiet.

I first experienced the sprawling adventure that is Breath of the Wild in the summer of 2020. I set out on that adventure alone, privately, in late corners of the night stolen away from pandemics and bottle feedings, extrajudicial killings and book drafts, tear gas and baby tears, wildfire smoke and sleep training. Those precious moments of escape brought me to a place I hadn’t realized I’d longed to visit, a place of rich detail full of possibility and the promise of freedom. I hadn’t expected any of that in a virtual world, nor had I expected the characteristics of that world that I now treasure most: its quiet and the particular sense of peace that quiet delivered.

I’m the chatty one in my relationship. The loud one, so my partner will probably be mystified by the following claim (as may other close friends and family): quiet nourishes me despite my extroverted tendencies. Only in that cacophonous year when everything changed did I realize this. Actually, even then I didn’t know how much I craved quiet, nor had I yet recognized that I’d turned so often to Breath of the Wild in the months and years following the pandemic’s onset because of the role it played in satisfying that craving.

Of all of Breath of the Wild’s impressive features — the openness of its world, its visual beauty, the flexibility that came with abundant quests for the player to pursue — the impression that lingers most for me is the intentionality of its soundscape. A certain noiselessness pervades the game despite its wealth of creatures, monsters, and characters, and that noiselessness immerses players in the aftermath of a tragedy that has left the land of Hyrule — the game’s setting — ravaged and lonely. The quiet underscores Hyrule’s desolation, but also a resilient, simple beauty persisting despite tragedy to emerge throughout the world should one only look closely. The game balances stillness and dynamism, with its sound, or lack thereof, often maintaining that balance. I enjoyed Breath of the Wild for many reasons, but I savored playing it because I could get lost in its noiselessness.

I wouldn’t have thought to find such sensory nourishment in Hyrule, which has served as the Legend of Zelda’s primary setting since its 1986 introduction on the Nintendo Entertainment System, or NES, but that’s where I found it. The world I discovered through Breath of the Wild felt like a place only I knew. It felt like I was the only one there. It was my world.

Millions had experienced Hyrule’s many forms already. Many had visited this specific iteration of it years before I did. Though I’d avidly played the original NES game and its early esequels, by the time I arrived in Breath of the Wild’s “Shrine of Resurrection” I knew little about those who had been there already and even less about those whose own voyages to Hyrule were also just beginning. In that first summer of this new world of ours, surely others found solace in this incarnation of an old familiarity, but by then I’d come to feel as if everyone was drifting silently away from one another, flung from life as we recognized it by cataclysm upon cataclysm.

Link and Zelda explore an underground cavern in a screenshot from the opening cinematic of the 2023 video game for the Nintendo Switch, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, published by Nintendo.

This May, three years after I first played Breath of the Wild and six years after its release, Nintendo released its sequel: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. In a departure from previous Zelda games’ re-imaginings of Hyrule, Tears built off the same fictional landscape its predecessor introduced. Only then, after I’d returned to that world this Spring, did I realize what this version of Hyrule had meant to me when I’d started playing Breath of the Wild and what it means to me now.

That realization didn’t come while I was playing either game. Instead I was on a walk. It was late on a Friday, one of those amazing warm late spring nights when the feeling of daytime heat blends into the comfort of evening warmth. I was slowly meandering to a pinball bar where I wanted to practice before an upcoming playoff match scheduled for my bar league team. Tears of the Kingdom had been released less than 24 hours prior. I wondered why I’d left my home when I’d waited so long to return to Hyrule and see how it might have changed, but I also knew that had I stayed home I’d have wondered why I wasn’t out enjoying the nice weather and a chance to play pinball nearby.

While I was walking, I noticed the night’s stillness and the sense of possibility it promised. Summer’s approach was tangible. The weekend had begun. Lights glowed from living room windows. I could see people laughing in front of television sets and scurrying casually around their kitchens, but I could not hear them. Everyone was living in their own little worlds. I had no knowledge of what they’d traveled through to reach this point and where they might be headed, but I could see how alive everyone I saw was in that moment.

I felt alive as well. I could have been at home. I could have been doing any number of things, but I savored the quiet of my walk. Then, thinking about Tears of the Kingdom and Breath of the Wild again, I finally realized the role the latter had played for me and wondered if the former could play a similar role. Three years after 2020, the what-once-was of life before that year has transformed into the what-could-never-be-again, while the what-could-be has become the what-is. This vastly-different existence has, at least for me, become familiar, even normal.

A windswept mountain in the land of Hyrule as seen in this screenshot from the Nintendo Switch version of the 2017 video game, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, from Nintendo.

Anticipation and Payoff

Breath of the Wild hadn’t just provided an escape with its noiselessness, it reignited my long-dormant interest in video games. When it was finally time to revisit Hyrule via Tears of the Kingdom, I wouldn’t return alone. Instead, I experienced something I’d rarely experienced before: the payoff of sharing the long-anticipated return of a beloved cultural entity with a community that cherishes it as much as I do.

In the early nineties, I’d experienced similar anticipation and satisfaction when I became a fan of the rock band U2. I first connected with their music a bit after the release of their landmark 1991 album Achtung Baby. Not only had I found what would become my favorite band, I’d discovered the sensation of discovering music. This discovery was well timed: I became a U2 fan just in time to anticipate Zooropa, the band’s 1993 followup to Achtung Baby.

What had been for me a 1-2 punch of musical discovery coincided with a 1-2 punch of personal and global upheaval. Globally, the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union shifted a world I’d grown up perceiving as static. During the same period, my dad died, I started middle school, and my life lurched from the static tranquility of childhood into adolescent uncertainty. The what-was now wasn’t.

Finding music, from U2 and elsewhere, provided a similar refuge to what Hyrule would offer three decades later amid new global and personal upheaval. They didn’t play identical roles, however. For one thing, in 2020, my personal life pivoted for a far more positive reason: the birth of my first and only child. Moreover, my foray into the contemporary version of Hyrule was not my first foray into video games (nor even Hyrule). Before U2, however, music had never really “stuck” for me. I wasn’t returning to anything (and yes, I do realize that Zelda and U2 are each massively popularly and commercially successful, but I can’t control those facts and they shouldn’t diminish my interest in either).

When Tears of the Kingdom first arrived I joined Zelda fans in discussing it and my discoveries in social media. I don’t remember ever entering the public discussion of other games’ releases like that. But my participation in that discussion soon tapered off as I found that my most compelling moments playing the new game were ones I experienced by myself, and willingly so. I liked the private joy of these discoveries. I treasured how I didn’t have to share them. Though I have returned to Hyrule under different circumstances than I had three years earlier, I still prize its quiet, solitary moments. Tears of the Kingdom feels unimaginably expansive, yet for me at least, the experience of playing it often feels deeply intimate and private.

My world in 2023 looks familiar to that which existed before 2020, yet it has vastly changed. I recognize the place where we are, but it’s not what was, just as the Hyrule of Tears of the Kingdom has subtly changed from that of Breath of the Wild. This Hyrule has been deepened and elevated (literally, as the game’s setting involves vast underground caverns and airborne “sky islands”). It is a land of filled-in outlines. It is also a land recovering from tragedy, yet not fully repaired, even as it faces new, more complicated challenges.

The character Link stands in shadow at the edge of a “Sky Island” in this screenshot from the 2023 Nintendo Switch video game The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, from Nintendo.

Insider and Outsider

In 1987, for Halloween, I dressed as Link, the primary protagonist of the Legend of Zelda series. The original NES game had captivated me earlier in the year and my costume extended the wonder it inspired. Yet a tangible awkwardness I’d also felt wearing it still colors my memory of trick or treating that year (amid a torrential Halloween rainstorm rare for my Southern California childhood). Though I loved the costume and knew even then how popular the game that inspired it was, I still felt very alone so publicly declaring my interest in video games.

The costume had certainly been my choice and I knew other kids who liked video games, even Zelda, but I didn’t meet anyone during my childhood who shared quite the same passion for games I felt. In my teens, college years, and beyond, I would meet others who would openly discuss their own passion for games. Whenever I did, it felt liberating and revelatory because it reminded me that I wasn’t alone.

Today, it’s not unusual for someone to admit to enjoying games, yet I missed out on much of the hobby’s normalization as I pursued other interests and experiences in my twenties and thirties. I continued to play video games quite often, but I didn’t keep tabs on new releases and I usually played on my own. Gaming wasn’t something I talked about in much depth with friends or family, except a few who I knew liked at least some games or with whom I had specific experiences or memories of playing games. I enjoyed games, and I knew they were growing in popularity, but I couldn’t keep up. I also still felt a bit of stigma for liking them. It took me years to shake that sense and even now it’s not completely gone.

Meanwhile, as gaming became a nuanced and complex subculture, I discovered I couldn’t find a place in it where I felt any more comfortable than I did outside of it. I’d long felt like an outsider because of how much I liked video games only to later feel like an outsider because I’d missed out on the evolution of video games and the game-playing community and because I wasn’t bought into its subcultural trappings (despite my childhood Link costume). Like so many interests of mine, I’ve come to feel neither here nor there. I don’t quite have the language one needs to be an insider, though I’m interested enough that I don’t want to exclude it from my life. Fortunately, i’m increasingly less interested in being an insider in any world.

The Private Medium

Except, perhaps, in my own world. I think I’m finally settling in there. I was a lonely kid, though content from a fairly early age with finding my own fun. When Nintendo and the NES arrived in North America in the mid-eighties, I felt almost as if it was crafted specifically for me. The NES was this massively popular and seemingly revolutionary product, yet to me it felt so personal and so very much ... mine (as much as I may have discussed it with others). I was the baby of my family and video games were really the first passion of mine that I chased on my own.

Now that I have a child of my own I’m realizing, maybe this very moment, how crucial that was. My kid’s an only child and still a preschooler, yet he’s already picked up many interests from me, my partner, and his peers at day care. I’m always excited when he enjoys something I like, but I revel most in the enthusiasms toward which he’s found his own way — even the interests of his that I don’t enjoy — especially when I can’t figure out what might have inspired these independent passions.

If that personal passion of my child is so important to me, why do the passions that so defined my first decade of life feel so distant in my fifth? Why does it feel like something I have to explain or justify? So much has been written about nostalgia’s role in culture, often with dismissive or at least qualifying undertones, yet gaming seems to only recently be included in those discussions.

Perhaps the very privateness of my connection to games is what makes my discussing that interest so challenging. Perhaps there’s something about the medium itself that’s complicating things for me. Perhaps the intimacy involved with video games is what’s at play here.

Playing a video game was largely and almost exclusively a private experience when I was young. Especially for a child, few options existed in the 1980s to play with others besides games with “local” (i.e. in-person) multiplayer features. Yes, “multi-user dungeons,” or MUDs, and similar text-based games existed on dial-up “bulletin board systems,” or BBSs, and video arcades with competitive multiplayer games were common in that period, but as the decade progressed one increasingly experienced video games at home with one’s own controller.

No two people can experience playing the same video game in quite the same way they might experience attending the same concert or viewing the same painting. Yes, all art is subjective and one’s experience of art depends upon one’s unique situational perspective, but individuals can’t influence performances or change artworks after they’ve been produced in ways whose results only they can experience. On the other hand, the experience of a video game is universal before play begins, but as soon as one interacts with it a game becomes an individual experience mediated by how they manipulate its controls (or otherwise interface with it). Even watching someone play a game is a fundamentally different experience from playing one.

I’m getting rather abstract here, but now that I’m rediscovering my interest in video games I’m reminded how private the experience feels to me. Others might have played Breath of the Wild long before I did, but I found it when I needed it, when I needed to expand into some other space beyond my day-to-day and couldn’t do so. Just like when I was a kid, video games allowed that expansion to occur inward. In those late nights of 2020, that space was mine and mine alone.

Hyrule Castle rises in the distance in this screenshot from the 2023 video game for the Nintendo Switch The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, published by Nintendo.

This Noisy World

That night in May, as I walked home from pinball practice, I stopped at a corner to add some thoughts to a note I’d started brainstorming all these thoughts I was having about Zelda, video games, quiet, and the peace they brought me in a troubled time.

Then an unmistakable sound.

Bang

Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.

A yell. Maybe angry. Maybe Despairing. Unmistakably raw whatever emotion.

Silence returned for the briefest of instants. Then a siren. Then another. More sirens, and more, and yet more. Engines roared as car after car raced down North Lombard Street, blue and red lights streaking past the houses between them and me. Still not fast enough to save a young man’s life.

A night’s potential takes many forms, not all welcome. For all the noise and chaos and stress I might have wanted to escape these past three years, the challenges I face (real as they may be) differ dramatically from the calamities inundating so many of my neighbors and fellow humans. I can escape to video games, pinball, earnest bands from Ireland and long walks on summery nights. Can everyone? Where do those with no escape find peace? What treasured moments from childhood provide them solace?

Whatever other worlds one visits, one cannot completely escape this one and the noise that heralds its pain. What we can do is savor the joys we experience. We can treasure the life we live, for we only live it once. The beauty we encounter may not return again.

Once, not long after I started playing Breath of the Wild, I talked about it with a friend who’d played it before me.

“I wish I could experience it for the first time again,” he told me. I understood immediately.

Whether the first minutes of a video game adventure, the initial notes of a piece of a transformative piece of music, the first glimpse of a vista never previously seen, we only get one first time for everything in this life, but we get many chances for new first times, for whatever escapes we’re able to make.

I returned home from my walk safely. I was likely never in danger, but the experience had reminded me of the fear and uncertainty of the summer of 2020. Instead of going to bed, I went downstairs, turned on my Nintendo Switch, and returned to Hyrule. There in the dark corners of the night I felt a sense of awakening, aware that as much as this world was mine, it is also ours. It is there for anyone who wants to find it, just as desolate, lonely, noisy and scarred as it once was, but also just as full of quiet potential and a promise of space for each of us to build our own world.