You know, I played the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy game referred to in the text; at that point, I was relatively young, so even if we had a copy of the book in the house, I hadn’t picked it up yet. Wouldn’t for years, actually. I kept trying and failing to get into it: I feel like I’d probably only properly appreciate it if I went back to it now. So anyway, I kept at it, and kept failing again and again to do the one single course of action that would help me progress to the next stage. Literally, I’m pretty sure I tried just about everything bar actually laying down in front of the bulldozer. I never did get there.

Much in the same vein, when I was in middle school, the computers were built with an edition of Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego. I hung around the computer room a lot, so naturally, I played it whenever I got a chance. This would have been completely fine, except the game was supposed to come with a companion book that provided details and clues and evidence to go along with the story to help kids puzzle through it. For whatever reason, even though it was on literally every computer, we did not have those books. So again, I constantly tried every option but the right one, day after day getting frustrated and quitting only to try again.

Eventually, I either graduated or stopped trying: I don’t really remember which.

Aarseth explains that in an ergodic text like interactive fiction, “intrigue
is directed against the user, who must figure out for herself what is going on”

Yeah, I’m very, very bad at this. Rather than focusing on an online narrative, I’m making the call to focus more on games and the increasingly popular approach to an open world concept in a narrative driven story. I want to say I love it, honestly; I get the appeal, and the intrigue, to picking up clues in the ‘text’ and working based off of that. The problem is, frankly, I suck at that – at least to an extent.

Let’s take for example the Legend of Zelda series. Way back in the day, when I picked up Ocarina of Time when it came out on the Nintendo 64. And by picked up, I mean my mom’s friend bought it over because he was stuck at the beginning of the game. This being a dungeon on the inside of a massive, living tree, now full of malevolent spiders and fun things like that. He’d explored every area he could, but couldn’t seem to progress any further with it. There was this great big web in the center of the tree, and from other experiences in the dungeon, he assumed he was supposed to use a stick lit by one of the torches to bypass it. Of course, it was on the floor, and there was no way to press the stick to the floor, and rolling via dodge just put the stick out. So, he was at a loss, and bored with both the system and the game as a result.

I’d say maybe I was better with these things when I was a kid, but I wasn’t, really: I knew falling could hurt me. But I saw a health item, a heart, floating out in the middle of space just outside of reach of the highest place the character could climb. So, I took a leap of faith, and lo and behold, through that clue, I was able to unlock a new area.

In the newest game, Breath of the Wild, I was right back to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy all over again. You start out on a wide expanse of grass, and you need a glider to go anywhere else. To get the glider, you need to talk to an old man. For the old man to give it to you, you need to collect five artifacts. The first one was easy, right nearby! – then for the others you had to try and mark them from a high tower, and they may or may not be accessible from where you’re currently stationed because there’s really no way to know that. So, you mark them and wander around. You fall off the island about seventeen times. Random enemies keep murdering you. You keep flinging your weapon instead of swinging it because for some reason there’s a button command for that, so you die again trying to rush into the enemy hoard to get your weapon back. Eventually you get a little tougher and you can hold your own – yay! – but where’s that dungeon? What is the point of this abandoned building? Why do you keep finding peppers? They keep saying to cook things, but anytime you try to toss anything into the fire, it just burns up or sits there in the fire until you burn yourself trying to pick it up because you think “wow, maybe it cooked!”, but it didn’t. You think maybe a magnet item will help you. You drop a boulder on yourself and die, again. Your friend finally tells you you’re supposed to cook a certain number of these in order to temporarily go into an icy area without dying shortly after the fact of hypothermia. That’s great, except you still keep setting yourself on fire when you’re trying to cook, and eventually you get mad and go play Pokemon again instead.

“Montfort notes there is no real role to play, only an existing history that waits to be
discovered. The player character can be steered through the station to
recover his memory. But the interactor does little more than steer and
sense. The author, not the player, is the one who decides when the player
will cry, the one who defines all the details of the player character’s
earlier and more expressive actions and reactions.”

This is true of Breath of the Wild, of most video games! That’s literally what the game is about! I’d love to know his goddamn history if I could stop killing him long enough to get anywhere!!

“Hence one of the more challenging features of early interactive fiction: the reader is
given a character identity but then forced to behave in a way that makes
little sense for that character.”

This is still true, by the way. Link has no dialogue. He just woke up in a cave and we are controlling him and going on this journey. Why the hell is he eating peppers to go stomping through the snow instead of I don’t know, skinning one of the animals he can hunt down? Or finding some sort of magical venue to do it? If the old man can make me clothes to warm me up, which is apparently also a possibility if I can figure out this weirdo recipe that’s nostalgic for him, but why would Link do that and how would he know that??

I am all about intrigue, and I really want to be able to enjoy Breath of the Wild, and games like it – after all, this seems to be becoming a trend, these beautiful and awe inspiring worlds with supposedly unlimited options which ultimately all end up killing me – but intrigue can only get a person so far. (Also, why am I so bad at this? Why?)