The Psychology of Zelda: Linking Our World to the Legend of Zelda Series

by Anthony Bean (Editor)

Overview

It's dangerous to go alone! Take this (book).

For more than 30 years, The Legend of Zelda—which immerses players in a courageous struggle against the shadowy forces of evil in a world of high fantasy—has spanned more than 30 different installments, selling over 75 million copies. Today, it is one of the most beloved video game franchises around the globe. 

Video game sales as a whole have continued to grow, now raking in twice as much money per year as the entire film industry, and countless psychologists have turned their attention to the effects gaming has on us: our confidence, our identity, and our personal growth. The Psychology of Zelda applies the latest psychological findings, plus insights from classic psychology theory, to Link, Zelda, Hyrule, and the players who choose to wield the Master Sword. 

In The Psychology of Zelda, psychologists who love the games ask: 

   • How do Link's battles in Ocarina of Time against Dark Link, his monstrous doppelganger, mirror the difficulty of confronting our personal demons and the tendency to be our own worst enemies?
   • What lessons about pursuing life's greater meaning can we take away from Link's quests through Hyrule and beyond the stereotypical video game scenario of rescuing a Princess (Zelda)?
   • What do we experience as players when we hear that familiar royal lullaby on the ocarina, Saria's spirited melody in the Lost Woods, or the iconic main theme on the title screen?
   • How do the obstacles throughout Majora's Mask represent the Five Stages of Grief?
   • What can Link's journey to overcome the loss of the fairy Navi teach us about understanding our own grief and depression?
   • Why are we psychologically drawn to the game each and every time a new version becomes available even when they all have a similar storyline? 

Think you've completed the quest? The Psychology of Zelda gives you new,  thrilling dungeons to explore and even more puzzles to solve.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781946885340
Publisher:	BenBella Books, Inc.
Publication date:	02/19/2019
Pages:	264
Sales rank:	95,356
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Dr. Anthony Bean specializes in video games, children & adolescents, and the virtual worlds played in by all ages.  He is considered an expert in this growing field, has been published extensively in the discipline.  He works with children, adolescents, and adults who  play video games and their families to better understand the immersive psychological effects video games have upon the individual and resulting family dynamics. Dr. Bean utilizes video game character identification techniques and other archetypal experiences to understand and develop intrinsic motivations for playing, personal identity, and discovering conscious and unconscious conflicts, cognitions, and behaviors. He has worked with children, adolescents, and adults on discovering their own symbolic transformations through the playing of video games and dealing with depression, trauma, anxiety, social isolation, and other common diagnoses to great success.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

EMBODYING THE VIRTUAL HERO

A LINK TO THE SELF

JONATHAN ERICKSON

"A sword wields no strength unless the hand that holds it has courage."

— Hero's Shade, Twilight Princess (2006)

Anyone who loves the Legend of Zelda series has likely, at some point, known the experience of truly becoming the hero, Link. Even if only for a few precious moments, your complicated human life was forgotten as you came to identify totally with this young man of humble origins, growing in strength and skill as he journeyed through the imaginal kingdom of Hyrule to face and thwart the forces that would destroy it. In the earliest of the game's incarnations, this salvation of the realm was tied to rescuing a kidnapped and helpless Zelda, princess of the kingdom, though as the mythos has developed in the three decades since, Zelda has gradually become a partner rather than a victim, an incarnation and descendant of the Goddess Hylia, who, with the hero's help, could seal away the demon Ganon, restoring peace to the realm. As the eons have passed, this cycle has happened again and again; each time, when the moment came, Link rose to serve the princess and face the darkness. And each time a human player picks up a new game in the Zelda series, this is the invitation: to take up the mantle of the hero once more; to become the unlikeliest of heroes, a boy named Link.

Psychology has much to say about this experience of the player becoming Link. One promising place to start is the concept of projection, whereby an individual projects certain psychological aspects of themselves outward onto something in the world — or in this case, the virtual world of Hyrule. Behavioral research into avatars and identity offers another piece to the puzzle, particularly when considered in tandem with the concept of theory of mind from cognitive psychology, which seeks to understand how the mind understands and imagines other minds apart from itself.

Of course, there are many games that make use of these three principles to invite the player to identify with the protagonist, but the Legend of Zelda was one of the first to do so — and is still one of the most effective.

THE VOICELESS HERO

It has been a consistent feature across the thirty years of Legend of Zelda games that Link is a decidedly silent protagonist. In the decade of the earliest Zelda games, long before voice acting became commonplace in video games, the protagonist's "voice" was largely a moot point. However, as technology has progressed and characters in video games have started talking, Link's continued silence is more strongly felt. It is especially apparent in the most recent incarnation, Breath of the Wild (2017), in which a fully voiced Zelda carries on long "conversations" with Link while he responds with resolutely stoic silence (and it is a testament to the game creators' skill that these scenes remain emotionally resonant). This silence on the part of the hero is a very deliberate choice by the designers. Series creator Shigiro Miyamoto has said that he wants the players to feel as if they are Link, and that introducing a voice actor or even scripted text would interfere with this identification. In essence, without a voice, Link becomes a semiblank slate that the player can psychologically project onto.

In psychology, the concept of projection refers, broadly speaking, to the phenomenon of an individual projecting an aspect of their personality, self, or inner world outward onto an external person or object, usually without conscious awareness. The concept originated in early twentieth-century depth psychology, a branch of psychology that focuses on the relationship between the conscious and unconscious mind. Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, who is widely regarded as the father of depth psychology, originally viewed projection in a mostly negative light, as a process whereby an individual's disowned thoughts and feelings were attributed to others. So, for example, an unconsciously selfish person might accuse others around him of being selfish. Or a person who cannot tolerate feeling weak and helpless might react with hostility to even the smallest sign of weakness in her friends.

Freud's protégé and later rival Carl Jung, a psychoanalyst best known for his theory of archetypes and the collective unconscious, developed a more expansive concept of projection. Jung suggested that projection is ubiquitous in human life: "All the contents of our unconscious are constantly being projected onto our surroundings." (He noted also that, "Unless we are possessed of an unusual degree of self-awareness we shall never see through our projections.") That is to say, our unconscious ideas about ourselves and even the world are constantly being projected outward to meet us in external form. For Jung, projection was a kind of bridge between the inner and outer worlds, allowing us to enrich our mundane lives with inner meaning. Incidentally, this bridge between worlds is also implied in the name Link: he exists as a connecting bridge, a link between the players' inner world and the imaginal Kingdom of Hyrule.

In the Jungian conception, projection can be beneficial or destructive. Because we project all the time, all human relationships begin with a significant amount of projection. Jungian analyst Marie-Louise von Franz went so far as to say that deep relationships could never begin without projection as their starting point: "At first, one has to project, or there is no contact . . . philosophically speaking, you cannot relate without projection." The secret to navigating this initial state of projection in relationships, in Jungian theory at least, is that with time, we must all learn to withdraw our projections — to claim what we were once projecting outward as an aspect of the self, not of the other. In this way, we eventually truly get to know our friends and partners, as well as come to have a deeper awareness of ourselves.

Strange as it might sound, something similar occurs when a video game player has the experience of becoming Link. The player takes their own questing inner hero and projects it outward into the interactive story of the game. The silent protagonist holds the projection, and as the player travels and explores the virtual kingdom of Hyrule, battling enemies and growing stronger, they experience their own heroic nature coming to fruition. This experience is one of the principal joys of the game, and this sense of connection through projection is part of what makes the Zelda series innately meaningful for so many of its players.

As thrilling as it may be to enter so fully into a fictional character, Jungian psychology suggests there is something even more important going on in the act of projection: an opportunity for psychological growth. When all is said and done — when the hero is victorious and the player puts down the controller and walks away — the player has the opportunity to take a little piece of that heroic journey back out into the world. By withdrawing the projection when the story ends, the player reclaims the hero as a part of the self, by remembering what it feels like to embody heroism, agency, and victory. The game begins with the player projecting a bit of their self onto the hero, and in the end, the hero Link becomes a part of who they are.

This means a virtual trip to Hyrule can provide players with growth opportunities that the physical world might not. Most people will experience, at some points in their lives, periods when they do not feel able to face the challenges before them. Whether it is a child being bullied on a playground or a business owner facing steep competition, sometimes life presents challenges that seem beyond what we are equipped to handle. Time spent embodying the virtual hero can open a space for new possibilities to emerge, preventing us from becoming emotionally stuck in the present-time narrative of difficult conditions. By playing the role of the hero, one gains a small bit of familiarity with what it is like to live into those more courageous and assertive possibilities. Confidence, perseverance, and triumph become lived experiences, rather than distant impossibilities.

THEORY OF MIND AND VIRTUAL BODIES

Theory of mind, which was mentioned briefly above, is a technical term in cognitive psychology that refers to the ability of one's mind to recognize that other minds exist — the ability to look at another person and be able to ascribe to them thoughts, feelings, experiences, and motivations different from one's own. While this ability might seem obvious to most of us, theory of mind emerges as a unique cognitive capacity when one considers circumstances in which its function is diminished, as in some cases of schizophrenia, autism, or brain damage. Very young children initially have difficulty identifying and distinguishing other minds, and gaining the ability to do so is a developmental milestone.

Theory of mind doesn't just apply to other human beings. It can also be used to attribute "minds" to nonhumans: animals, computers, or even fictional characters. Literary scholar Lisa Zunshine argues that one of the chief purposes of literature is to stimulate our capacities in this respect. One can easily see the parallels between books and video games: As readers engage and get to know imaginary characters and observe them relating to each other, those readers are strengthening their ability to understand minds other than their own. Zunshine writes, "On some level our evolved cognitive architecture indeed does not fully distinguish between real and fictional people." Of course, other parts of the brain are quite good at discerning real persons from fictitious ones, but insofar as an individual allows themselves to become absorbed in a fictional world, they begin to experience its characters as if they were real.

Thus, when in Breath of the Wild the player watches Zelda express her doubts that she is truly the heir to the power that will contain the darkness, their theory of mind system is at work, figuring out who she is and what she wants. This is even more the case when Link responds to Zelda's concerns with attentive but stoic silence. These same brain systems presume that he is thinking something, and allow the player to imagine what he is thinking. Zelda tells us her thoughts outright; in Link's case the player is invited to fill his silence with whatever they imagine Link's thought process would be. For the most part, this projection happens implicitly. The natural tendency is to imagine that Link is thinking whatever the player is thinking as he or she listens to the tormented princess's words.

But it is one thing to imagine the thoughts of a silent character, and quite another to feel that one has become that character. This is where the question of identification with virtual bodies comes into play. Unlike a movie or a novel, video games allow individuals to physically and psychically take control of characters as the story proceeds. At the simplest level this means making choices about what those characters do next.

As games have grown more sophisticated, video gamers have gained increasingly more nuanced and complex control over characters' bodies. In the original Legend of Zelda, Link's movements are quite limited: walk in one of four directions, thrust the sword, shoot an arrow, place a bomb, and so on. Thirty years later, Link's movements are too numerous to list as he runs, crawls, climbs, swims, and glides through a three-dimensional world, wielding different weapons with different ranges, speeds, and movement styles. Mastering the use of Link's body and weapons requires a learning process similar to learning to play the piano or ride a bicycle. Players' existing brain maps for taking action in the real world gradually become linked to new actions in the virtual world. Through practice, new activities recruit more sophisticated neural networks; the experience of playing the game becomes more nuanced, and the experience of becoming Link grows more real to the player. By playing long enough and deep enough, players may even begin to form new brain maps to more fully embody this digital figure.

Around the time the original Legend of Zelda was released, virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier was conducting experiments on humans learning to control nonhuman bodies in immersive virtual environments. He found that with training, a human could learn to effectively operate a body as alien and complex as an eight-limbed lobster. Since then, a large body of evidence has emerged that shows the degree to which humans can come to identify with virtual avatars through repeated use. It should be noted that in these studies, the term identification is used differently from the way it is used in literary or film studies. In the latter, we might say we identify with a character in a film or novel if their words, actions, or circumstances remind us of ourselves. When researchers talk about identification with a virtual body, they mean it more literally: as coming to experience the virtual body as one's own, an extension of the self in real time. The more time someone spends learning to control a lobster body, the more they come to think of that body as an extended part of their self.

Although the Legend of Zelda games to date do not take place in the kind of fully immersive virtual reality that Lanier's experiments did, the same basic principles of virtual body identification are at work in the player's experience with Link. Virtual reality exists on a spectrum of player immersion and engagement, and Breath of the Wild, for example, certainly ranks among the most immersive worlds available to players today, even without a VR headset and haptic gloves. Immersion might be best understood as becoming completely absorbed into a world, and it can happen in a variety of ways. Certainly, blocking out sensory stimulation from the external world helps to do this. Moving one's head in all directions while wearing a VR headset and experiencing the field of vision change in response is also a powerful tool to create this immersion. But these are only two of many different ways of creating immersion. Traveling through an expansive digital world full of varied terrain and realistic physics is another means of immersion, even if it occurs on a flat screen. Furthermore, the more deeply we come to master the movement and actions of the avatar we have been given within that digital world, the more likely we are to experience ourselves as immersed in it.

This kind of deep embodied immersion in the game environment is an example of the experience of flow. Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, who first coined the term as a psychological concept in his 1990 book Flow, describes flow as a state of optimal experience where one becomes gracefully and effortlessly absorbed in a task. This is the state whereby expert athletes become completely immersed in their sport, taking intuitive action in the moment without conscious evaluation or abstract thought, or in which a musician is completely immersed in the activity of creating music. So too can this state be experienced by the video game player once they have learned to effortlessly make Link run, jump, climb, aim and shoot arrows, attack, and defend. In fact, this plethora of refinable actions sets the stage for immersive flow. In a recent study, psychologist Alistair Soutter and video game researcher Michael Hitchens found that video game players' experience of flow states directly correlated with their sense of identification with the game characters. The more deeply the player is able to "get into" the game through controlling a character's actions and choices, the more mastery they achieve in moving the virtual body, the more likely a sense of identification with that character will occur.

At the intersection of theory of mind and identification with the virtual body, we find the old depth-psychological concept of projection resurgent. The imagined mind of the fictional hero Link becomes identified with the player's self through the player's ability to control Link's complex embodied actions. The more deeply the player becomes immersed in the game, the more likely they are to experience flow states where the time spent learning to take effective action as Link translates into implicit mastery. The flow state, in turn, reinforces character identification. But the player does not merely identify with certain aspects of Link, as they would if they encountered him in a novel or film. In video games they can go even deeper and become the character, both physically and psychologically, through immersion in his dexterous virtual body.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Psychology of Zeld"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Anthony Bean.
Excerpted by permission of BenBella Books, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Embodying the Virtual Hero: A Link to the Self

Jonathan Erickson

It’s Dangerous to Go Alone: The Hero’s Journey in the Legend of Zelda

Stephen F. Kuniak

The Nocturne of (Personal) Shadow

Louise Grann

The Archetypal Attraction

Anthony M. Bean

Unmasking Grief: Applying the Kübler-Ross Five Stages of Grief Model to The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask

Larisa A. Garski, F. Cary Shepard, and Emory S. Daniel

The Protective Power of Destiny: Posttraumatic Growth in the Legend of Zelda

Larissa A. Garski and Justine Mastin

The Quest for Meaning in the Legend of Zelda

Kelsey Klatka and Louise Grann

The Song of the Ritos: The Psychology of the Music within the Legend of Zelda Series

Shane Tilton

Triforce Heroes and Heroines: Transcending the Opposites Through the Golden Power

Angie Branham Mullins

The Legend Herself: From Damsel in Distress to Princess of Power

Melissa Huntley and Wind Goodfriend

Acknowledgments

About the Editor