Is Hyrule worth saving when the real world is in so much trouble?

On Tuesday, November 5, 2024, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States of America for a second, non-consecutive, term. His first term was a bonafide disaster, in ways that people seem to hardly remember, ranging from his Covid response to his destruction of international institutions to family separation at the border and, of course, his appointment of judges who would dismantle everything from gun control to abortion rights.

The second term will be worse. He's angry, looking for revenge against his enemies, and he's had time to plot and build an even more loyal and fanatical group of enablers. and faced with institutions that have already been worn down and weakened by the first Trump term. Whether this becomes "just" another terrible American administration where we hurt the world and ourselves and are left trying to pick up the pieces later, or something far darker in line with the 20th century's worst regimes, has yet to be determined. There is fighting left to be done and maybe things will go well and the harm can be limited, but there will be harm, and lots of it. The hurt that will be done to the climate change effort alone may be catastrophic. They're already planning on rounding up and deporting millions of people, often to unsafe places.

We are at the opening cut scene of a video game where darkness is about to blanket the land. A mother and child cower underneath a bed while, in the next room, authoritarian agents threaten the home owner, demanding their location so they can be dragged out, separated, and sent to cages. That's not exaggeration, that's something that happened and that they are campaigning on doing again, only this time much worse.

A hero is needed.

I am not that hero. None of us are. We do what we can. I voted against this. I reminded friends and loved ones to vote. On Tuesday afternoon I joined a friend on a hotline, trying to arrange rides to the polls in battleground states so others could have their voices heard and vote against it. I could have done more, but the truth is that the loss was so widespread, so staggering, that none of it would have mattered. This was what the people wanted, for various complicated reasons. This is the power of demagoguery. The shadowy tendrils that are literal in video games are metaphors in real life, but they do exist and they are blanketing our land, just like a continent away in Ukraine there are real bombs falling on real heads and ending real lives so that Vladimir Putin can play out his Tsarist fantasies.

That is reality. But there is also fiction.

On Wednesday evening I finished The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom and saved Hyrule yet again. There was much rejoicing.

Zelda is a comfort series. It has its origins as a child's fantasy play in the back yard and it adheres pretty well to those rules, even as other parts change and morph over the years. Hyrule will always face a great darkness of some kind, but while it will be bowed it will never be broken, a hero will rise, hope will be restored, and a new dawn of renewal will break the night and bathe the land in its glow.

This is the promise of Zelda, and even the darker entries to the series, like Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom, adhere to some version of it.

Echoes of Wisdom is a "top down" Zelda, which means it is even more traditional. Here there are no scenes of body horror and dissolved arms, or decayed settlements filled with the remnants of lost battles. Instead you have dark rifts that blanket the land, and though people are captured in those rifts and frozen in time, once the rift is dispelled they are rescued and everything lost can be restored. It is a world where only monsters die and the power of friendship triumphs over all. This is a children's game, like a lot of Nintendo games are at heart.

I’d like to write about some of the newer aspects of Echoes of Wisdom, like the fact that Nintendo finally gave the fans the opportunity to play a traditional Zelda game with the princess as the protagonist and how the way it was done is appreciated but a little unsatisfying (she is in many ways just a version of Link), or how the game’s clearly Tears of the Kingdom inspired use of summoning objects and monsters meshes with the traditional Zelda formula (pretty well for puzzles, not so well for combat), but those things have been covered elsewhere and seem a little trivial. We’re looking down the barrel of a historic disaster and getting into the details of how the summoned monsters in Echoes of Wisdom have awful AI, leading to frustration, even if the game’s so easy I never came close to a game over, seems trivial. People are going to lose everything. Who cares if your octoroks can’t aim vertically?

Instead I want to talk about something I was thinking about as I finished the game, which is “why?” Why am I playing this? Why should it matter to me? Why aren’t I doing something more productive, more important, with my time? Why did I spend so much time on gaming when I could have spent that time on other, more important, pursuits?

Why do we save digital worlds while the real one falls apart?

There are no definitive answers, of course. Why anything? Humans exist on a speck of dirt circling an unimportant star in a backwater galaxy and we will all crumble into dust and go extinct eventually, like every other species. On a long enough time horizon America will be forgotten, or even if it’s not it will just be a name in a history book, the way we think of Carthage now, and none of us will matter in it. Even Donald Trump will become obscure, given enough time.

But if we ignore those more existential issues we are still left with the matter of our own lives. We have choices of what we do with our time and money, and those of us on this site choose video games, at least in part. That’s a choice a lot of people have looked down on over the years for various reasons, even though their own choices may be just as wasteful or even more destructive. Obviously, games can be played to excess and should be enjoyed in moderation, but if you do choose gaming it should be for positive reasons, and it should be a worthwhile pursuit, even if what makes it worthwhile is just that it relaxes you and takes you away from the troubles of the world. There is value in that. A lot of value.

If you spend all your time working you will burn out. I’ve been there and done that and I’ve seen it happen to others. Leisure should be enjoyable and for a lot of us gaming is just that. Enjoyable.

But even within the category of video games there are choices. Not every game is about saving the world or anything at all. There are sports games, job simulators, surreal and abstract games, even games where you are the villain and your goal is to inflict harm.

Why spend time saving a virtual world specifically?

I think there are a number of reasons. One is just that it has been a baseline dramatic conceit for as long as people have told stories. Many of our oldest myths are about heroes saving the world, or at least a nation within it, in one way or another. The bible is full of such stories. It’s a great way to give actions high dramatic stakes.

Another is the sense of control it imparts in a world where we really have none. A lot of people fought a lot harder than I did to prevent this from happening and they not only failed but failed in a major way. They got their butts handed to them. Years of sleepless nights organizing and warning and messaging only to be swept aside almost casually by a man who is gleefully ignorant, lazy, and criminal. That doesn’t happen in Hyrule. If you put in the time you will see the results, and that feels good. It’s one of the main reasons that video games do feel good. They are structured to let us access the dopamine burst of success when life so often gives us failures.

Beyond the certainty of success, games often reaffirm our values. One of the horrors of our current moment is how willing people are to knowingly and intentionally hurt others. One of Trump’s main promises was to sweep through the nation, finding undocumented people and expelling them from the country, brutally and without mercy. He has placed children into cages before, separated them from their families without even paperwork tracking what child belonged to what parent, and allowed sexual abuse and exploitation. He has also promised to embolden abusive police and hurt, really really hurt, vulnerable trans children. These are acts of clear villainy, the kinds of things we’d consider cartoonishly evil in a movie or game. Yet they are a winning promise in the real world.

It’s isolating to feel like so many people around you have values in opposition to your own. In Hyrule everyone wants to help each other. Sure, the River and Sea Zora may argue and fight, but they want the same things and ultimately they come together to help each other. There are exceptions, of course, but most games have gentle, universal, values where the bad guys are clearly defined and often literal monsters, rather than neighbors and family members who tell you they love you and then show that they actually want the worst possible things to happen to you and the people you care about.

Saving Hyrule doesn’t matter, of course, but wanting to save Hyrule reminds us that we should still want to save the world we live in, even if it can be ugly, cruel, and endlessly complex. And succeeding in saving Hyrule reminds us that victories are possible even in the depths of despair. The first Trump term was awful, but the nation survived it. It has a chance to survive the second. World War II was horrific, but some people endured and found hope and renewal. Hiroshima got hit with a literal nuclear bomb and today it is a thriving metropolis. Like Hyrule, the real world can recover, even if it’s not as simple or clean or guaranteed and much is lost along the way.

I wish I could say that finishing Echoes of Wisdom made me feel better about the world or took my pain away, even for a second. It didn’t. It distracted me a bit, but so would any game. I’ve used games for distraction my whole life. I killed the big boss, watched the cut scene, and felt nothing. Hollow. Empty. Watching the people of Hyrule celebrate is meaningless when so many real people won’t be able to celebrate in the years to come. Some day soon yet another woman is going to die, moaning, in a hospital because the doctors are too cowardly to remove the dying fetus and save her life. She’ll reach out her hand, weak with sepsis, asking for someone, anyone, to help. Her husband will pace nervously begging the nurses for news. And they won’t save her. She’ll die. Abortion is illegal and they don’t want to risk their own lives to save hers, which is understandable if not always forgivable. This is the future Donald Trump and his supporters want and it’s the one they’re going to get. The little plastic people of Hyrule aren’t real. They don’t have her history, her dreams, her stolen future. They aren’t needed like she is. They don’t matter like she does. Saving them doesn’t matter.

But I hope one day, soon, it will feel good again. Because I’m a real person too and being a fictional savior is fun. We shouldn’t feel bad about that. Everyone needs pleasures, most people enjoy fiction, fantasy is a good thing in moderation. Saving Hyrule doesn’t hurt anyone and it reminds us of things that really do matter. So yes, it’s worth it. It’s good to have worlds where everyone can be saved. I just wish we lived in one where more people were committed to trying.