I consider myself, at my core, to be a servant. It’s the reason I was drawn to education, to volunteering, to advocacy. However, I think it is fair to say that of all the causes that have captured my heart over the years, there has been one constant, one that seems tied to the beating of that heart itself, one that has earned an unmatched devotion of my hours, investment of my emotions, and expenditure of my blood, sweat, and tears.
I speak, of course, of my long and unwavering service to the kingdom of Hyrule.
It’s not that I’m a video game person, exactly. It’s just that the portion of my life I’ve spent playing The Legend of Zelda series, across two and a half decades and four video game platforms, certainly nudges me toward that circle on the Venn diagram. I mean I’ve played a few other games here and there–you know, a bit of Goldeneye, a smattering of MarioKart, a few hundred hours with a a highly cultivated Mulder-Scully family dynasty in The Sims–but none of them were more than a disposable bit of entertainment, really. I could set down the controller and move on with the off-cartridge business of my life.
By contrast, I have at numerous times, as both a student and a grown woman teacher, entered a school building at 7:00 AM and spent the next six hours thinking mostly about when I could get back home to play Zelda.
I understand the gravity of that statement. Don’t get me wrong; I’m a big fan of school and being present in general, and I have always felt that it’s my purpose to show up and serve my students. Heart of a servant and such. It’s just that I have also felt, on occasion, that my actions on this mortal plane are fairly insignificant compared to what I might accomplish with the Master Sword and a pocket full of rupees.
So, it is with considerable empathy that I have watched my children become little Zelda-addicted gremlins since we’ve been home. I’d tried to introduce them to Breath of the Wild a couple of times before, but just as the teacher appears when the student is ready, my children needed two months of looming quarantine before they could muster the fortitude to seek the Triforce. And just like their mother, now they can’t stop.
It’s a single player game, so every fifteen minutes they alternate between playing the game and watching the game over the other’s shoulder, and by “watching” I mean “offering encouragement,” and by “encouragement” I mean “scathing criticism.” And despite an indisputably clear, previously agreed upon turn limit, neither of them will relinquish the controller without a full display of clinical withdrawal symptoms. Bargaining. Pleading. Aggression. Weeping. Gnashing of teeth. I’ve already imposed three separate Zelda detoxes, which they’ve passed by standing in front of the console for hours, gazes unfocused and yearning, absently scratching their empty joystick thumbs.
Well, it had to happen at some point. Social osmosis had already introduced my seven year old to the idea of Fortnite, and I’ll be wearing a fresh pair of Crocs every day before that game crosses the threshold of this house. The good news is that the kids rightfully regard me as some kind of Zelda goddess, skilled as I am at gathering mushrooms and avoiding hand to hand combat whenever possible, so my 10,000 hours of practice is finally yielding the fame and recognition Malcolm Gladwell promised me.
