Twilight Princess and the Dangers of Wii-mersion

My roommate finally tracked down a Wii over the weekend and me and him played through most of The Legends of Zelda: Twilight Princess. The series is one of the biggest epics in video games - it is known for sweeping visuals and fantastic dungeons. This game, along with perhaps Final Fantasy (which has become steadily more of a steam-punk work over time) are fantasies greatest examples in the field of video games.

Twilight Princess was originally planned for Nintendo's GameCube but was moved to the Wii to push to new console. It worked, as the Wii has become the fastest selling console ever. However, The Wii has never quite sat well with me. I played it over the weekend and found all the elements of past Zelda games, yet something was different. When I stopped playing I realized what it was: the Wii's highly touted "immersion" was ruining the game!

Let's take a quick detour to Berlin in 1930. Bertolt Brecht, one of the greatest playwrights in history responsible for such masterpieces of opera as Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny and Threepenny Opera (which most of you will recognize as the original vehicle for the song "The Ballad of Mack the Knife" later redone by Bobby Darin). In the notes to the former Brecht included an essay, "The Modern Theater is the Epic Theater". In this essay Brecht differentiates his works, which he calls Epic Theater, from the Dramatic Theater - descended from Aristotle and Sophocles. He claimed that while the Dramatic Theater was "culinary" and superficial Epic Theater was designed to focus on narrative and theme rather than on plot. The primary difference that he sets forward is a reformulation of ostranenie as the "alienation effect" (Verfremdungseffekt).

In other words, while most other theatrical efforts had been to make the spectator identify with the characters Brecht sought to distance the spectator from the characters (thus the idea has become known as Brechtian distanciation). This device is aimed at turning the spectator into an observer but arousing his capacity for action. The idea is to keep the spectator from being caught up in the plot and focused on the themes and ideas behind the work. The spectator does not get swept away by a good story but instead can see the nuts and bolts of the piece. Maybe the greatest film director of all time, Jean-Luc Godard, used this theory in his New Wave films which redefined what a film could be.

Now back to Zelda. The idea behind the Wii is that the player be put in a position where he feels the character on the screen to be an extension of himself. The Wii is the exact opposite of Brecht's argument. The player is not allowed to see the nuts and bolts of the game, they cannot separate the narrative from the plot and the game acts as a suggestion rather than an argument. While it is true that games are still a very immature medium and few people have stepped up and contributed a video game worthy of any sort of artistic consideration (at least very few commercially successful games) the potential for that artistic depth is there. However, with the Wii the industry has taken a step backwards, rather than an artful jump-cut or ironic anti-cinematic device we are presented with the 21st century version of 3-d glasses.

Is Zelda fun? Of course it is, but shouldn't video games be something more than that by now? Sartre said that "one is not a writer because one has chosen to say certain things, but because one has chosen to say them in a certain way." If the Wii becomes the success it looks like it will be, then why should people care about the way a message is conveyed, they are too busy swinging a remote. Maybe, I am afraid of new things but I fear that a generation will grow up with the Wii, unable to make that crucial separation of narrative and plot and this will spread to other mediums.