20150915.0600

As has happened before, I have returned to playing The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, which my wonderful wife bought me some years ago, now. I justify it to myself as entertaining my daughter; Ms. 8 will sit and watch me swing around a pretend sword for quite a while, enjoying it immensely. Whether she watches the game or laughs about watching her father make a fool of himself (short trip, I know) is unclear, but that she appreciates it is clear, and I am pleased to be able to get her to stay still and at ease for a time. And I do like to play a video game now and again.

Much of what I wrote in late 2012 about the game remains true. The racist and sexist overtones identified in my little essay remain in place, and I have to worry that there are other statements being made in the game that I am missing even now, with more years to develop my faculties and consider what I see in the world around me. But identifying and explicating such things is not what I purpose to do today. Instead, I mean to comment about the essay itself, for I have been busy with it these past years; it is not one of the many things I post in this webspace and then neglect. Instead, I have used it with some success as a teaching tool.

The essay, exclusive of the contextualizing paragraph in which I lay out the absurdity of my writing it when I wrote it but including the footnotes, runs to 1,261 words. Assuming a 350-word page--which, in the formatting I request of my students, is normal--it comes to just over three and a half pages, making it a short piece, indeed. (For comparison, the shortest essay I ask of my students this semester is 1,300 words, and that through an error for which I refuse to punish my students.) Even so, it is of such length that it could be published, did journals such as The Explicator accept such submissions (pop culture topics tend not to play well in it, I think), and it could be expanded easily with recourse to theoretical background or, perhaps, by pointing up the sexist overtones present in the game and hinted at in the footnotes. And its short length lends itself to presenting the essay in the classroom as a text to read on the spot and discuss. It is in such a way that the piece has found itself in my teaching before, used (with a bit of emendation to suit the medium) as an example of the kind of writing I ask my students to do on particular assignments and as a springboard for discussion.

The latter works particularly well. Many students, particularly those in first-year classes, are surprised to see argument turned to pop culture items; the idea that the tools developed through formal study can be applied to the things they encounter rarely occurs to them, and I am glad to be among those who make such introductions. They also find much of interest in the discussion--or did, when the game was more current and more of my students were likely to have played it; the console hosting the game has been supplanted, so the typically novelty-crazed youth are less apt to have played Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. I recall one class in which goggles attracted no small amount of commentary--and laughter.

One of the things that working with a pop culture item allows is openness to feel about what is being treated. For reasons others such as Lawrence Levine (Highbrow/Lowbrow) and Timothy L. Carens ("Serpents in the Garden") explicate, there is a sense of reverence associated with approaching the "literary" or "high culture," and that reverence tends to foreclose discussion and engagement among novice students. Video games do not evoke such reverence, and so they do not close down discussion and freedom to approach the topic. That, I think, is why I have been able to use the essay with as much success as I have in the past--and why I look to write a similar piece about another game in the future.