“The River Speaks: Gaming is Everywhere” is the academic gaming conference that took place today in Texas and was hosted by Tarrant County College. The event featured local and international speakers.
While there was a slew of excellent talks given on gender, education, and design in gaming, the talk we’d like to highlight was that by Dr. Andrew Latham, where he focused specifically on The Ocarina of Time.
Dr. Latham’s presentation was entitled “Blind Runs: Exploring Ludoludo Harmony and Dissonance in the Audiovisual Rhetoric of The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time.”
“Ludology” is the term given to the study of gaming. The presentation explored how we “read” visual game environments and learn from the specific repeated cues throughout the games. You see a crack in the wall, you place a bomb, and it blows up, revealing a tunnel.
He explained that the Zelda series has its own specific visual and narrative motifs that the player responds to again and again, to the point where they can’t even explain why they may do a certain action. They are simply reading the cues and responding, having learned this gaming behavior along the way.
Crucially, Dr. Latham presented the idea that while Ocarina of Time was not designed with blind gamers in mind, blind gamers have used the same framework that seeing players use to play games and applied them to the audio aspect of the game rather than the visual.
However, though the audio of Ocarina of Time may help a blind gamer play, the visual element is still crucial to gameplay, particularly for aiming the Hookshot or shooting arrows at specific enemies.
While this is true, Dr. Latham also mentioned the idea that the sword is an analog for a cane, as a player can hit it off objects to find their way around. Again, this was not a specifically designed feature but one that has been adopted by those who need it in absence of additional support.
All of this was described in the context of one particular speedrunner, Jordan Verner, who is a blind gamer and asked for support from the speedrunner community in order to complete the game.
He also argued that games such as those in the Zelda series are texts that are perfect for analysis. He states that games are hypertexts and that you, as the player, take on an authorial role as you navigate the story and pick your path through it.
The whole talk was fascinating and covered more ideas than I’ve detailed here, so I encourage you to check it out the recording of the presentation.
