Zelda taught me the importance of play — and helped me deal with work, parenting, and grief | culture

I I had a complicated relationship with video games when I was a teenager. I clearly loved the Nintendo games I grew up with, wandering through the primary-colored dreamscapes of Super Mario 64 and having the time of my life. But as I grew up and became an ambitious young man in the early 2000s, I started wanting more games, and I wasn’t finding it. Many were reckless, juvenile, or unnecessarily violent. A few of them seem to have any He says. I started to wonder if gaming might really be a waste of time, like the wise adults in my life had told me.

My response to this was to relentlessly intellectualize the games I played, in order to justify the time and attention I was spending on them. I’ve covered high profile gaming magazines and written huge blogs about them Serious adult topics In Deus Ex, Metal Gear Solid, and the old Fallout computer games. My childhood love of Nintendo, with its bright colors and unconscious gameplay, was embarrassing. Then I played The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, and I realized the nature and importance of gaming that would shape my life.

The Wind Waker was released in 2003, just before my 15th birthday – but I didn’t play it at the time, because I considered it too childish. I based this on his purely artistic style. Where the blocky 3D Zelda games of my childhood, Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask, had gone for an almost serious fantasy look, Wind Waker has been revealed as a live-action cartoon. Link, the series’ hero, had giant eyes and adorably small stature; The menacing monsters he fought were transformed into slapstick visuals. At this time, there was a shift towards graphical realism and mature themes in games: “grimdark” titles such as Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto were notable Xbox and PlayStation titles. Nintendo’s risqué cartoons inspired mockery of self-proclaimed serious gamers.

So I turned him down, with the misguided certainty that only a teenager could do. But then I came back to it, when I was 17 and in the depths of my existential crisis over video games, where I was seriously considering abandoning them as well as my burgeoning career as a games journalist to do something supposedly worthwhile with my life. And what I found in Wind Waker was a path back to joy. This cartoonish Link, with his unusually expressive face and elegant sword, seemed like a manifestation of childish curiosity. Zelda is a game about exploration: designed to reward your purest playful impulses. Embodying this character, I felt free to just play. To plunge my sword into the grass, sail the seas in a bright red talking boat, chase piglets on the shore, set a course for distant islands and search for secrets. For the first time in many years, I was fully immersed in a game. Don’t overthink it, just enjoy it.

Wind Waker radically changed my relationship with gaming, as I realized that being childish does not mean being childish. Play is important in itself, and it is not only allowed, but necessary. It’s not something you excel at or think about. I have nurtured and cherished my innate playfulness ever since. A strong sense of fun has guided me through life: it has helped me recognize when jobs and relationships weren’t for me; It was a coping mechanism for more than my fair share of grief; And it made me a better parent. It made me open, curious, and unafraid of new things. Fun is not a bad thing to organize your life.

In adulthood, especially for women, there is a constant feeling that anything you do must be productive or self-improvement. You don’t read books for pure pleasure, but for enlightenment. If you exercise, it will be framed as maximizing improvement or maintaining bone density rather than the enjoyment of moving your body. A hobby is not just for fun, it is a side hustle. Everything we do is framed by capitalist thinking and this abstract sense of merit.

There is still a widespread idea today that playing games is small, a waste of time, or somehow shameful. But importantly, humans are playful animals, one of the few animals that play beyond childhood. Keeping space and time in your life and your heart for play is a survival strategy against a world that wants to pressure you to have everything you have.