The Great Calamity

I feebly grunt when I hit the ground, then die on the spot. This was first time I played The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild—I walked out of the Shrine of Resurrection, turned the wrong way, ignoring an obvious cue, and walked straight off the edge of the Great Plateau. The abrupt fall caught me off guard, and as I plummeted off the cliff, my stomach lurched up into my throat. It was as if my body mirrored the character, Link’s fall to the craggy earth below. After only a few minutes of play, my heart was already racing, my controller slimed by sweaty palms.

With 28.8 million units sold in 2020, the Nintendo Switch will figure prominently in the story of the COVID-19 pandemic once we figure out a way to tell it. I bought mine in October of that year, and it became one of the many cliches in my own pandemic story. At the time, I was excited to try out the latest installment in the Zelda franchise, which had been released a few years earlier and which huge portions of the internet had deemed the greatest video game of all time. My excitement began to dissipate after I tumbled off the cliff. It wasn’t that the game was too difficult—but it was too intense, too immersive. I still stuck with it for a couple more weeks, but it became less a diversion and more a challenge in not becoming physically sick. When Guardians pointed their laser sights at me and the dissonant piano ostinato started, my entire body would become tense and my jaw would clench. When I had to fight the Lynel on the mountaintop above Zora’s Domain, I’d grow nauseous with nerves as I tried to dodge his swinging sword. The game is supposed to be challenging and the threat of enemies and a hostile landscape are obsessively engineered to cause an adrenaline rush, but for me, what was supposed to be exhilarating just felt like emotional labor. Though I’d sunk hours into the game, I eventually put it back in its case and tried not to think about it.



At the beginning of the pandemic, the novelist and essayist Arundhati Roy published an article in which she described it as a portal. Today, we’re post-lockdown, post-vaccine, and seemingly post-pandemic in many ways, but nothing about the world today feels post-portal. We’re still, like she wrote, “dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us.” Escaping through video games still feels like a vital survival tactic. So, in light of our ongoing calamities, I came back to Breath of the Wild a couple summers later with a reckless kind of commitment.

That first time with the game turned out to be a lot like the first time I tried cocaine. I was seventeen and went with a friend to her dealer’s grandma’s house—way out in what that dealer called “the cat-in-the-hat suburbs.” We did lines off of the Party Monster DVD case in the car. As soon as that powder flew up my nose, I was blitzed with the elation and confidence that make coke so seductive. My friend had warned me that the high would be great, but also that the strongest sensation you feel on coke is the need for more coke. Sure enough, the baggy was empty before we knew it and wild desperation took over. The acute hunger for more was physically painful, so I spent the rest of my night dealing with the crushing comedown by chewing my own lips and making a mix CD with handwritten liner notes for my high school band teacher. All the anticipation yielded a few great moments, but then I was raw wit sleeplessness, loneliness, and remorse. My resolution to never do hard drugs again, though, was promptly swept away by a bottomless craving for that first euphoric rush, a rush I chased all the way to hospitals, treatment facilities, and recovery meetings, which is where I can still be found several nights a week. I’m a self-identified addict, and though I won’t call myself a video game addict by any stretch, anything that’s designed to make me feel good can easily activate patterns of addictive behavior. So, when I came back to Zelda after some time away, I came back witha vengeance.

Though I work during the summer, my teaching load is light and all the auxiliary work of helping run a community college English department is put on hold. That left me, in the summer of 2022, with hours every day to dedicate to Breath of the Wild. Whenever I sat down to play, I felt like I was testing the edges of my addictive personality, seeing just how much time and energy I could sink into the game while still maintaining some self-control and dignity. Despite my best efforts, the game is painstakingly engineered to keep me playing. It’s relentless, the way it continuously taunts the player with a new challenge, a new area to explore, a new character to talk to, a new puzzle to solve, or a maze to navigate. I didn’t stand a chance against something so bent on inducing incremental dopamine releases, so it didn’t take long before I stopped putting up a fight.

If you know anything about the Zelda franchise, you know that Zeld isn’t the name of the main character. You play as Link, an ordinary boy who’s called on to help Princess Zelda save Hyrule from a malevolent force called Ganon. Zelda’s the physical incarnation of the goddess Hylia, and Link is the reincarnation of a legendary hero who fights on behalf of the goddess. Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka released the first Zelda game in 1986 and, over the years, shrewdly developed a storyline that lends itself to infinite variation and iteration. Every game can be a continuation of another or a new incarnation of the same material. Some games involve time travel and the creation of multiple timelines too, so the franchise is an impenetrable sprawl of interrelated storylines—all of which center on a boy caught in a loop of repeatedly fighting an defeating an undefeatable evil. Link—the white boy with his blue eyes, tights, and pointed elfin ears—has come to strike me as fragile and tragic, lugging around his sword and shield to complete the same quest over and over again. He’s like us, dragging carcasses and perpetually on the brink of passing through the portal.

He strikes me as a particular kind of queer too. His name does rhyme with twink, after all, and the immortally young, thin boy with his fairy friends is like an idealized version of the gay man who would otherwise end up degraded by age, illness, addiction, and heartbreak. That degradation, though, is also the stuff of life. It’s as much what we can’t escape as it is what we show up for in the first place. As for me, I’m getting too old to be called a twink anymore, even though I’m still pretty skinny, and I’m too mixed race to pass for white all the time. Along with the fact my HIV is undetectable, I’m privileged with some proximity to Link, but I’m also grateful for the gap between us. Link’s the perfect skinny white boy, all alone. He’s a sad kind of figure to turn yourself into, but endlessly tempting nonetheless. To play the game is to experience a life with the edges smoothed away—all stimulation and sensation. The thing about video games, and Breath of the Wild in particular, is that there’s a pronounced corporeality to them. To project my consciousness into a character like Link isn’t to leave my body, but to augment it. That took some getting used to, but it’s becoming an increasingly familiar sensation. The pandemic showed us how our bodies stretch outward and brush against the permeable boundaries of other bodies either through microbes or digital mediation, so the blurring of my senses with Link’s was consonant with these expanded corporeal limits.



The premise of Breath of the Wild is that the land of Hyrule has been decimated by an event called The Great Calamity. Nearly everyone was wiped out by a villain called Calamity Ganon, so Zelda put Link in a 100-year sleep. When he awakens at the start of the game, he’s lost all his memories so the player’s task is both to figure out what happened in the Great Calamity by recovering his lost memories, and to prevent it from happening again by defeating Calamity Ganon. Long before we knew it would be called Tears of the Kingdom, we already knew that everything was going to repeat itself in the next game, but it should be clear that’s part of the point.

What set Breath of the Wild apart from the eighteen Zelda games that came before wasn’t the storyline, but that its world is both open and vast. The game’s main quest does have an end goal, but the player can complete the quest however they want. There’s no designated order of where to go, what to do, and when to do it. The game is predicated on total freedom and exploration, and as such, it became something that I would co-create as I played it.

The open-world concept also reflects something of what attracted the artist Marcel Duchamp to the game of chess. Chess shows up across Duchamp’s body of work: his early paintings, his readymades, his photo-graphs, even in a performance with Eve Babitz, who played nude with him in a gallery to get back at her ex. “The chess pieces are the block alphabet which shapes thoughts,” he wrote, “and these thoughts, although making a visual design on the chessboard, express their beauty abstractly, like a poem.” To Duchamp, the game of chess was a sign system that manifested infinite motions and maneuvers. Chess was a set of rules and moves, to be sure, but it was also the endless potential those moves indexed. In 1968, Duchamp played a game of chess with John Cage on an electronic chess board. Based on how the pieces were arranged on the board, speakers would be activated to play portions of different music compositions. There’s no record of the moves themselves, but there’s a recording of the musical performance that arose from the game. My favorite moment in that recording is Cage’s voice, that wonderfully queer Vincent Price combination of earnestness and theatricality, saying “I have to concentrate.” The name of the performance was Reunion.

Coming back to Breath of the Wild that summer in 2022, I experienced a sense of reunion. The game is both what happens on my screen and what doesn’t. It’s the narrative I create and everything I don’t—inherently incomplete but encyclopedic in its potential. It’s music created by my playing against no one but possibility. I have to concentrate.



In light of the calamitous events that have landed us in this portal, I’ve been concentrating a lot on the question of how we’ll tell the story of how we got here. How are we going to narrate this back to ourselves? With the start of the pandemic years behind us, with the cascading social upheavals that followed still churning, with the fallout of one fascist takeover barely coming into focus, and the possibility of another on the horizon, how do we represent these calamities—the ones that were and the ones that still are? Seeing attempts to do that has been alternately heartening and dis-appointing. There have been albums, novels, poems, and films that aim to represent this sprawling impossibility in which the world was reconfigured into something unidentifiable, but most of what I’ve seen has been pat or contrived, like the poems making puns of the words and phrases that were once lyrical but now just boring: social distancing, zoom room, and flatten the curve. Even writing those down now gives me the same wince as surf the web. More and more, I think the only honest way the pandemic has been represented came from the Sex and the City reboot And Just Like That…, in which the pandemic is squarely in the past, its elimination fitting in perfectly with the overall wish-fulfillment that is the premise of the show. Carrie Bradshaw wears designer gloves because she gained an appreciation for them during the pandemic, but don’t worry, those gloves aren’t utilitarian anymore because the pandemic is finished. It’s corny and ridiculous, but at least the show feels sincere in its commitment to simplistic fantasy.

Some films and TV shows have attempted to slide the pandemic in as part of the background. The final scene in Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car has a chauffeur wearing a mask while grocery shopping. Claire Denis’s Both Sides of the Blade has its characters inconsistently masking and distancing when they remember or when it’s convenient. In these versions of the pandemic, we register a global tragedy in minor adjustments to our day-to-day life. These moments in which a mask is accidentally worn while driving for miles alone are objective correlatives for collective trauma. But what about the trauma itself? Is it cowardly to leave the center of our lives empty and only illustrate how our behaviors and interactions have bent to its gravitational pull? Is it more accurate to depict the pandemic as a banality or as a dystopia? I wondered this when I read the final section of Hanya Yanagihara’s To Paradise, which imagines a future of rolling pandemics, a future that somehow feels truer to this one for all its outsized speculative catastrophes.

In the summer of 2022, as I was playing hours of Breath of the Wild, I was also noticing a sort of collective effort to narrate the historic period of upheaval we were living through in real-time. But every attempt felt insufficient. Every attempt tried to make sense of a privately registered experience of a trauma that was also embarrassingly public. We were caught in the bind of creating vital art out of something we were all bored with. Even earlier, back in 2020 right after the lockdown began, there was an Old Navy commercial in which RuPaul rapped through a mask about how it was still possible to buy fleece pullovers while maintaining a safe distance from other customers. That might be the most representative version of pandemic art I’ve seen so far—the sloppiness, the triteness, the cringe of it.

None of these questions were on my mind as I headed for the Akkala region. My favorite region of Hyrule is immaterial to the game’s overall storyline. It’s a space for nothing but exploration and side quests, like working my way to the center of the Rist Peninsula, a giant curling spit of land modeled after Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. It took forever to dodge and fight the monsters that guard the way to the shrine at the spiral’s center, but once there, I was given a spirit orb by an emaciated monk who had been meditating and waiting for me for at least the last hundred years. According to the Zelda Wiki, there are 120 monks in Breath of the Wild. Spirituality has always hovered at the margins of the Zelda franchise, but these monks put the deity at the center of the story.

Outside of the game, that summer was a godless season. A season of libraries closing because they refused to pull books with gay characters, of fascists insisting blue lives matter but trans kids’ don’t, of white boys with guns terrorizing Black and brown communities, of white boys with guns holding the whole country hostage. In June, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, setting into effect trigger laws all across the country that instantly banned abortion. I had to get used to omitting the word effectively when talking about abortion bans. The new restrictions made it outright impossible to receive that care. The torrent of truly terrifying possibilities that followed—bans on gay marriage, gender-affirming care, even sodomy—continues to haunt our imaginations.

In the face of a fascist takeover, there’s terror, grief, and pain—but there’s also that strangely familiar kind of embarrassment I’ve been feeling for the last few years. Along with hundreds of millions of people, I watched Donald Trump mobilize the National Guard to suppress a protest against police brutality and in support of Black lives just so he could pose with a bible. How can I comment on such a patently dull kind of evil? I’ve been registering an impulse to give shape to experience, to fear and hurt, through language, but any shape feels like such a formless cliché, like RuPau rapping through his mask.



At the end of one of those summer days spent mostly in Akkala, I went to the queer recovery meeting that I attend every Monday night. This particular meeting once had a bad reputation for being made up of white gay cis men—ones who look like Link, young and perfect. Some derisively called it The Three C’s (car, condo, and career) because everyone there seemed to be acting out a straight, white, upper-middle class fantasy, or at least they aspired to it. That brand of classism, racism, misogyny, and transphobia won’t come as a surprise to many queers. A lot of gay men have internalized white supremacist patriarchal values, ones that manifest themselves in forms of exclusion and consumerism. But by that summer the meeting wasn’t nearly as homogenous. It was almost a utopia, the way so many different kinds of queers could be brought together by the hope of recovery. Somehow, in the middle of that godless season, there was this authentically welcoming space in which queers could try to imagine new lives predicated on love and service. In spite of addictions that wanted us dead and fascists that wanted us erased, we were still showing up.

One of the things the meeting offered was a way of giving shape to our grief through storytelling. We would speak, but mostly we would listen. We used the room to give language and be given language that narrated the calamities that brought us there and the work of restoration that continues ahead of us. We were all telling the same story in this room, and out of that chorus of voices, we found harmony.

As for me, I went from snorting coke off of Macaulay Culkin’s face to being 5150’d for chemical dependency in only a few years, and these meetings helped me understand the intervening chaos that connected those two ends of my story. This is why I have to believe in the vital necessity of narrating even that which bores us.

The phrase “interactive fiction” first appeared in an article published in Byte magazine in 1981. Computer games, according to the article, earned the label because they are works in which “you play the title role.” That’s not the case with Zelda, though, where you play a supporting character to Zelda’s legend. Early video game ludologist Jesper Juul pushes the distinction between game and story to its limit in resisting the label interactive fiction altogether. He insists that the two categories are mutually exclusive. A narrative is something that, even when told in the present tense, exists in the past tense as a sequence of events leading to a conclusion. Those events and their conclusion are predetermined for the audience, but in the case of a game, that interactivity is defined by how these events have not yet been determined. A game exists in the present tense. A game also utilizes entirely different scales of time and space. In a narrative, time is constructed through shifts, cuts, compressions and augmentations. Even stories crafted to unfold in real-time are exactly that: crafted. There’s nothing real about it. In a game, the sense of real-time isn’t a product of authorial craft but rather an endemic trait of the genre. The player is made to fully register the passing of time over the course of gameplay. The game, whether Breath of the Wild or chess, can’t move any faster or slower than the players make it move. The same goes for the spatial component. When two players sit down at the chessboard, they continually perceive the entirety of the board, including all the unoccupied spaces and the ever-expanding array of possibilities they offer. A narrative focuses on the occupied spaces or the spaces that the author considers relevant t the story.

But Juul’s take on narrative seems grounded in a narrow under-standing of the art form. In her lecture “Plays,” Gertrude Stein considers the issue of what she calls “nervousness.” It’s a surprisingly pedestrian word she chooses for a complex affective entanglement between audience and artwork, which stems from, as she puts it, “the different tempo there is in the play and in yourself and your emotion.” Nervousness is the sense that time represented in the narrative is out of sync with your own feeling of time passing. Nervousness is what Juul feels when reading a narrative, but not when playing a game. Stein’s solution is to “treat the play exactly as a landscape.” The landscape, she explains, is “not moving but being always in relation, the trees to the hills the hills to the fields the trees to each other any piece of it to any sky and then any detail to any other detail, the story is only of importance if you like to tell or hear a story but the relation is there anyway.”

Is nervousness what I feel? Is it from the different tempo in the Old Navy commercial and in myself, in Zoë Kravitz donning a mask in KIMI and in myself, in Beyonce’s “Break My Soul” and in myself? And was it the absence of nervousness that I felt when I was inside the landscape of Breath of the Wild? Across Hyrule, the landscape is not moving but always being in relation. It’s Link’s movements through the world that activate it, and the story is only important if you like to tell or hear the story, which you don’t exactly have to. Zelda herself is an incarnation of the goddess who created the landscape, so, in this way, the objective of the story and the space are co-constituting. The story, like Duchamp’s game of chess, floats like an invisible alphabet.

Is this liberation from the confines of narrative or is it an escape from the pressing necessity of narrative? I’m not trying to write my way into the ideal mode of storytelling for the present, but rather just trying to understand why I’m so averse to the modes of storytelling I’ve seen so far. If the only comprehensible representation of my reality I’ve seen is a high fantasy video game and commercial product, the problem might not be with the story, but with me.



I’m back in Akkala, looking for a place called Tarrey Town. It’s supposed to be an intentional community where members of the game’s different races—Rito, Goron, Zora, Gerudo, and others—come together to build a utopian village. I look and I look, but I can’t find it. The side quest I’m supposed to complete in Tarrey Town, according to the YouTube tutorials, is a long and involved one, so it’s just as well. I appreciate the naïve sincerity of Tarrey Town, how a collective centered on trust, understanding, and care arises from an Apocalypse. It’s a welcome escape from the brutally obvious fact that usually an Apocalypse is met with more Apocalypses.

The problem, I learn, is that I need to first pay 5,000 rupees to build Link’s house and kick off the Tarrey Town side quest. I don’t have the money, and the only Apocalypse more boring and embarrassing than the pandemic is money. It’s the Apocalypse that every person I know is trying to survive. Even though inflation has made the city where I live, which was already expensive, truly unlivable, the mayor has been caught saying he doesn’t believe “anyone has a right to sleep in a public space.” That wasn’t meant to be a public comment, but it’s no surprise he feels this way given how the sweeps of camps in parks and on sidewalks have increased dramatically since he’s taken office. The new policy seems to be that not having a home is against the law. At the same time, rent in this so-called progressive city has gone up 19% since 2019 and remains almost 20% above the national average. When I say that there’s been a fascist takeover, I don’t just mean the Republicans. When I say calamity, I mean the tedious kind, too. I thought telling the story of lockdown and loneliness was impossible, but now so much as thinking about how to represent our collective financial insecurity seems absurd.

I’m a renter, but I’m also a tenured instructor at a community college. So the truth is that I’m seeing a lot of what’s unfolding from a privileged position. With the skyrocketing cost of being alive in this country, fewer students are taking out loans and going to college. This means that enrollments where I teach have gone down and I’ve lost classes because of it, but getting financially dinged like that isn’t the same as being evicted or having my home torn out of the ground. Maybe it’s because the drugs I did growing up came from the cat-in-the-hat suburbs. Maybe it’s because my parents could afford to send me to rehab. Maybe it’s because when I got caught with pot in high school, I was let off with a ticket after I snitched on the guy who sold it to me, or maybe it’s because I pass for white and the guy who sold me the dime bag was Black. Whatever the case, I can recognize my privilege while also recognizing that I’m a lot closer to the people being swept out of parks than I am to the wealthy tech workers in this city. There’s comfort in knowing I’m not the only one living with this terror, but there’s just as much anxiety in it too. I worry that we’ll eventually all get tired of being one another’s allies.



Link had to be put into a hundred-year sleep before he could do anything about the Great Calamity. Here in the middle of our own, we have to stay awake for it. It makes me queasy, traversing the scales of ongoing calamities. From the global, to the local, to the personal, I’m trying to comprehend a palimpsest of loss. I can’t blame myself for escaping to Zelda, and I can’t be surprised when the constructed fantasy resonates so clearly with the reality I’m evading. Calamity has become encompassing enough to become innocuous, and that’s the scariest part.

That’s the story of addiction too. I’ve known the terrifying smallness of a life defined by the disasters and boredom that accompany chemical dependency. It’s a life of isolation and bottomless hunger that eventually turns into numbing repetition. It’s a cycle of pursuing the high and hating the high as I spin around in a tiny circle. It’s a life of routine and routine terror: the most uninspiring story ever told. And yet recovery has been an act of storytelling. There never could have been recovery for me if I hadn’t heard the stories of others and learned to tell my own. The collective effort of representing our experience is fundamental to collective survival, and it demands endless reiteration. Paradoxically, repetition is as much a part of survival as it was a part of the thing we’re surviving. In the case of us queer ones, repetition is also how we resist being erased and assert our presence. Survival is a spiral, circling and expanding at the same time.

Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, the land art sculpture the Rist Peninsula in Akkala is modeled after, juts out into the Great Salt Lake in Utah. Soon after its creation, the water levels of the lake rose and completely submerged the artwork. It was still there, but it existed more as a conceptual piece than a physical presence. In the 2000s, a drought in Utah brought the water levels down and the jetty has been consistently visible ever since. That re-emergence helped frame the artwork as a kind of prehistoric monument. Despite its modernity, Spiral Jetty communicates this sense of having belonged to a long-eradicated civilization. It’s a myth, a trace of a past that never was. In this way, it’s like a fiction. But the jetty isn’t just an object to be looked at; it’s an environment, a space meant to be entered and experienced. The artwork is only activated when you walk on it, looping your way into and out of the center-most point and experiencing your relationship to the space and time of the landscape. It’s a game that insists you stay aware of the present and the past that brought you here.

It’s a beautiful idea, but it’s not meant to sound like hope. It’s supposed to sound like Duchamp and Cage’s chess game, the sound of an alphabet that shapes our thoughts. One of those thoughts could be hope.






Sources

Aarseth, Espen. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

Juul, Jesper. “A Clash Between Game and Narrative,” paper presented at the Digital Arts and Culture conference in Bergen, Norway, 1998.

Roy, Arundhati. “The Pandemic is a Portal,” Financial Times, 3 April 2020, 
https://www.ft.com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca.

Seigel, Jerrold. The Private World of Marcel Duchamp: Desire, Liberation, and the Self inModern Culture, University of California Press, 1997.

“Spirit Orb,” Zelda Wiki, https://zelda.fandom.com/wiki/Spirit_Orb.

Stein, Gertrude. Lectures in America, Beacon Press, 1985.

Wall-Romana, Christophe. “ ‘Cinematic Blossoming’: Duchamp, Chess, and Infraqueer
Mating, Modernism/modernity, vol. 27, no. 2, April 2020.