Thank you for that quote. I’ve spent a few years trying to raise the level of discourse surrounding Majora’s Mask. For too long all it seemed people would talk about were the Fierce Deity and whether Termina is an alternate universe.

A lot of the time people say I’m looking too deeply, that the designers never intended the stuff I see in the game. I hate when people try to put an end to the discussion that way. The point isn’t whether or not we’re right so much as it is what we can learn by studying the game and its incredible themes and messages.

I’ve thought quite a bit about the type of depository you’ve mentioned. On one hand I fear any of these articles being lost not only to time, but to the collapse of sites overtime. But it’s also very hard to remove something from its organic evolution and place it in a more sterile environment, even with the best intentions - doubly hard to decide which writers have their work placed in such a database and which ones don’t.

However, the more net savvy we become, the more we might appreciate the way a piece of writing at one site might lead to a dozen others in a natural state. I don’t have anything close to a definitive answer on it all, and it merits much more thought and discussion.

I’ve actually been spending a lot of time thinking about achademia and how it has formed as a culture within a sphere of essays, responses and so forth.

It really happens in that sort of organic space for each industry, art, science or what have you, and video games should be no exception. After spending so many hours in class, doing readings and writing essays for my BA, I’ve been tempted to write short essays myself but I may have to wait until after graduation.

I guess what I’d like to see until then is a sort of reservoir or database where various essay-like articles about the industry could be found. I mean, its nice to have links between sites, but these articles tend to be lost when they are forced off of the main page of their respective sites. Any chance we could get some sort of site together to that effect?

I don’t think that Link is necessarily “all-pure”. Heroic certainly, but for the most part his private thoughts are largely removed from the narrative. Like Mario, he’s more of a place-holder than a person. If a gamer projects particular values onto the character, then they become true for that gamer. In my case, I play Link like a lunatic and a thief. I barge into people’s homes, smash their pots and take the money I find inside.

They bring this problem up in OOT and WW. OOT has a scene where a resident questions why you just stormed into their house uninvited (Kakariko village) and WW has a delightful segment in the rich man’s home where he demands you return the money you stole from breaking his pots.

Do these acts make him a villain? No. But they certainly don’t make Link out to be a perfect white knight either. I’d call petty theft and breaking and entering to be a moral shade of grey.

This essay is exactly the kind of essay writing that video game journalism needs - a New York Review of Books equivalent for video games.

So well done Jamie, you’ve just proved to me that truly thoughtful criticism of game material exists.

The idea of retelling is a continually exciting one as well. On one hand it is comparable to the DJ’s ability to remix new from old, and also it’s important to consider the ways of seeing we bring to each different telling as well. In fact just the various and different comments that have spawned in response to Greg’s piece really make me appreciate how many different ways there are to see a particular story.