“It’s Dangerous to Go Alone!” Teaching The Legend of Zelda in Liberal Arts
Our Liberal Arts and Design Studies departments recently collaborated with Warwick’s Nintendo Society to deliver a unique, immersive, and interactive learning experience for students enrolled on our ‘The Quest I: Departures and Heroic Journeys’ module, led by Dr. Bryan Brazeau.
As part of the module, students deconstruct the concept of heroic journeys, thinking about agency in video games from a variety of perspectives. They discuss the multiple modes of player identification, the affordances that video games offer – particularly in terms of gendered performance, and the way that the gamer and the game mutually shape each other’s narratives and concepts of heroism. While “The Legend of Zelda: A Link to The Past” has always been part of the module, this year, we examined the full Zelda series from “The Legend of Zelda” (NES, 1986) to “Echoes of Wisdom” (Switch, 2024).
The event, which was held in our new Design Studio, aimed to demonstrate how we can think about critical questions across a multi-decade game franchise through an immersive experience shaped by critical questions; showing what can be done in Games Studies at Warwick. The event was made possible by the generosity and kindness of the Warwick Nintendo Society, who kindly lent their equipment and their time to make it happen.
Students on the module had access to a range of The Legend of Zelda games from across its 38-year history. While playing, they were able to participate in discussions about heroic journeys, storylines, narrative, repetition, and difference across the series.
They also considered the wide range of emotional impacts that games have. Through this event, students were able to engage with the problem of whether the series has truly moved on from a Campbellian model of the “Hero’s Journey” in its earlier iterations to featuring a female heroine in the most recent “Echoes of Wisdom” game. Moreover, they were able to think together about how different games in the franchise invite different forms of identification between player and avatar (following Luca Papale’s model).