its been a minute since i done one of these, lets hope i still remember how to do it.
i went to hang out with the irl homies a couple weeks ago and it was just the three of us long time friends, like, since elementary school long time friends.
one of these friends brought his gamecube along with Legend of Zelda Ocarina Of Time and he wanted us to get through the fire temple before the end of the night.
this particular friend is very old school: he dont really get down with alot of the trimmings of modern media culture; he dont follow streamers, youtubers, or any other kind of internet personalities, he doesnt play any new video games, he really loves old television and 80s culture, you get the idea.
and so, he decided to share this little world of Hyrule, one that he had been explorin' since his childhood on the N64, with us
and man was it captivating.
just for that evening, it felt like the whole world existed just in that living room, in that little box, and on that screen, for just us.
ive often decried the modern internet for being like a party that never ends that also TELLS you it never ends. the centralization of people through social media and monolithic platforms makes the internet lose some of its distance that you would feel in the olden days of web 1.0 where explorin' the web felt like venturin' into the fog of war in a strategy game
and with the internet being connected to us LITERALLY at the hip, it feels like everyone and everything is all up in yo shit ALL THE TIME.
that fog of war i mentioned has been stripped away and ALL of the goings on are incessantly shoved in your face by tech companies that want you to hate yourself and the world around you.
we shouldnt have that level of connectedness. and this little excursion into OoT reminded me what it felt like when we didnt.
that looming intensity, that oppressiveness, that feeling that youre missing out, that feelin' of havin' to keep up social appearence like you would at a public event, that pressure to engage and interact, that feeling of prying eyes, that BIG WORLD... all melted away.
and that Little World in that living room was right there for us.
so we set off on our adventure, takin' turns and passin' the controller around like in the old days.
one of us, who did not grow up with vidoe games and didnt really understand their language, was... unimpressed by the dated graphics and somewhat cumbersome inventory interface but i was completely engrossed.
as someone who didnt have an n64, and whose only other experience with OoT was playin' it with school friends durin' an internet outage decades ago, i was comin' into this mostly blind and, as someone who is rather disenchanted with how intrustive, invasive, and obstructive modern games can be, i was enamored with the feelin' of agency the game gave me.
YOU had to remember what quest you were doin', YOU had to use YOUR brain to come to logical conclusions for puzzles (for which there were more than one way to skin a cat, might i add; another big bonus), and YOU had to make shit happen.
it made every triumph mean something as opposed to a lot of modern games that just COULDNT BEAR havin' the player think for themselves or get lost or, god forbid, experience somethin' that wasnt EXACTLY what the dev wanted them to experience pfft.
further enhancin' the experience was all of the tips that the friend who owned the game was givin' out during our adventure; they felt so much more meaningful knowing that they were learned over years and years of personal experience, hundreds of hours of delicate and diligent exploration comin' to the surface in the moment, not just because he watched some trivia ridden entry of a video essay describin' all the glitches and secrets in the game.
it felt like i was being led by a sherpa through a treacherous mountain pass of which he had called his stomping grounds.
in the end, we persevered through traps, puzzles, perilous monsters, and all other trials with me taking down the final dragon boss, no deaths, preservin' the record on the save file.
my friend shared with me this Little World of his and it was burstin' at the seams with the essence of what will save us: true human connection, the kind of thing the industrial revolution wishes, tries, and fails to synthesize for us.
and for just that night, without the oppressive expectations of the Big World, that childlike wonder was sparked back up and the stars seem to glisten a lil bit brighter.