What draws us into a good story? Is it an interesting setting? A compelling character?
There isn’t one clear answer; over the years, timeless stories have come in many different forms. What draws us to these narratives is as varied as we are.
Good stories draw us in, regardless of their medium. Some even transcend their origins and become essential pieces of human culture.
Some methods of storytelling are more obvious than others. Most storytellers work diligently to think about what to tell the audience, and how to tell it to them. However, there is tremendous value in choosing what not to say.
This is a story about storytelling, one which also talks about what makes a compelling video game. But at its heart, it’s about one of the most interesting ways a story can inspire our emotions.
Part I: The Medium
Video games are an interesting medium. Their depth and complexity have evolved tremendously over the last four decades as technology has improved. Their intrinsic interactivity makes them inherently immersive. However, there are many great games with little story to speak of, where all that exists is the gameplay.
Indeed, the interactive nature of games introduces new challenges for storytellers. If the plot of the game is too tightly scripted, there’s a danger that the audience will feel uninterested in its outcome. If, on the other hand, the players are given too many choices, it becomes next to impossible to craft a real dramatic arc. How can there be an emotional payoff if the player decided never to set it up?
Even with these challenges, even some of the earliest video games embraced the concept of storytelling as a way to capture their audience. By necessity, the plots of these titles were relatively thin: save the princess; destroy the bad guy; go really, really fast.
However, it didn’t take long for developers to experiment with the kind of story their games could tell. One of my favorite games as a child was Ecco the Dolphin, which allowed you to swim the oceans, jump over waves, and fight extraterrestrials with the help of a blue whale demigod using a time machine from the lost city of Atlantis…
Ecco, like many games, embraced the experimental nature of the medium, telling stories that simply wouldn’t work in any other art form. This trial-and-error approach led to a wide variety of games. Some tried to chase pop culture trends, such as the muscled heroes of Contra, whereas other games threw together whatever story the developers could use to justify the mechanics of how their game was played. Ecco seems closer to the latter.
As a legitimate storytelling medium, video games saw a Cambrian explosion in the early-to-mid aughts. Forty years prior, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band forced critics to admit that rock’n’roll was more than frivolous pop, and the games of the early 2000s made an equally strident declaration that video games were art, and they deserved to be taken seriously. 2007's Bioshock used the format itself as a story element, utilizing a common gameplay convention which most players took for granted to provide a massive narrative twist (if you’d like to learn what that is, would you kindly click here).
The next year, Braid upended the traditional damsel-in-distress plot by utilizing its unique rewinding gameplay to subvert expectations. Games like Undertale and No Man’s Sky have since offered players compelling experiences which are unable to be fully replicated in other mediums, oftentimes in ways that would’ve seemed impossible not that long ago.
Which is all to say that, at first blush, the most recent Legend of Zelda titles might not seem like they should be so impactful.
The origin of the original Legend of Zelda game is well-told: before he was the world’s most influential game designer, Shiguro Miyamoto was simply one member of Nintendo’s talent pool. Miyamoto had fond memories of growing up outside of Kyoto, exploring fields and caves. He dreamed of making a game which gave players a similar sense of exploration and adventure. Games of that era were much simpler than they are today, with blocky pixels and limited color palettes. The crude nature of these tools presented a massive challenge.
None of this deterred Miyamoto.
Even with all its limitations, the original Legend of Zelda was a smashing success. Players controlled a young hero named Link, tasked with exploring the wilderness for the dungeon strongholds of an evil creature named Ganon. This fearsome beast has captured the titular Zelda.
However, rather than offering the player one level after another, as most games of the era did, The Legend of Zelda sets players loose in world which is wide open. Link can travel in any direction. There are plenty of caves and grottos to explore. Nestled near the place where the game begins, an old man warns us: “It’s dangerous to go alone.”
The original Zelda game captured imaginations, to say nothing of its influence. However, like the pioneering early works in any medium, it can be hard to understand this by looking backwards. To modern eyes, many games of this era seem confusing, overly-difficult, and needlessly-obtuse. The original Legend of Zelda is no exception.
Thankfully, the series evolved over time, with each game different than the last. Zelda games have often introduced new methods of playing games, methods which have had far-reaching implications across the entire video game landscape. For example, 1998’s Ocarina of Time was the first Zelda game to utilize three-dimensional graphics, and its world seemed positively massive when it first came out. Players from that era describe how, upon stepping onto Hyrule Field, it felt as though the entire world was open to them.
These days, Ocarina of Time’s Hyrule feels a great deal smaller. Other game designers took up the gauntlet the game threw down and created their own new worlds for players to explore. The game hasn’t changed, but the audience has.
This is the nature of innovation. The role of trendsetter is always fleeting, a moving target which, by its very nature, is ephemeral. All of which brings us to the modern era:
Part II: Magnificent Desolation
In 2017, Nintendo was a company at a crossroads. A pioneer in its field, it had struggled to adapt to shifting tastes. The largest video game companies create console systems on which to play their games. If the system itself doesn’t sell well, it is hard to sell many games to play on it. However, without good games, it’s hard to convince people to buy the system.
Nintendo had undergone a rollercoaster ride of good and bad luck. After the Gamecube console underperformed, Nintendo shifted focus away from trying to make their systems the most powerful. Instead, the company shifted to a Blue Ocean strategy: Nintendo consoles would provide experiences which were impossible to find anywhere else. This led to the great success of the Nintendo Wii, but the massive failure of its follow-up, the Wii U.
As the company planned the launch of its next system, the Nintendo Switch, everyone knew they were taking a massive risk. Like the Wii U, the Switch was less powerful than its rivals. Instead, it was designed to be fully portable. Players wouldn’t be stuck to their TVs; they could bring the Switch with them wherever they went.
Despite Nintendo’s proven track record with portable systems like the Game Boy, this was far from a guaranteed success. The Game Boy was pocket-friendly, but this portability massively limited the kinds of games it could play.
Trying to fit a full, living-room capable console into a portable device would come with massive trade-offs. Other game makers had tried to make powerful handheld systems before, but none had survived very long. Sega’s Game Gear had failed. Atari’s Lynx was a disaster. Even Sony had struggled, with both the PlayStation Portable and the Vita failing to catch on.
If the Switch was going to be a success, Nintendo needed it to launch with a great game that would draw in players. It had to be something truly spectacular. The company decided to use the next Legend of Zelda game, which had been in development for years: Breath of the Wild.
In many ways, Breath of the Wild was a fresh start. In this version, Hyrule Kingdom is truly massive, even compared to other modern games. If scaled to real-world proportions, players had a landmass larger than the city of Kyoto to explore. Of course, size itself was not enough. Other games have had large maps. However, Breath of the Wild innovated on its large-scale world in an interesting way, one tied intricately with its story.
The game begins a century after a violent cataclysm, called “The Calamity.” The hero, Link, wakes up mostly naked in a shallow pool of glowing water. He hears a voice calling to him. He rushes outside to look out over a scenic vista, a vast kingdom stretched out before him. The game promised that there were no illusions here like in previous games. Anywhere they could see, they could travel to.
Like the player, Link doesn’t know where he is or how he got here. He has amnesia, and is forced to explore a strange, dangerous world. He must quickly gain and master new abilities, abilities which the player is being taught to control. Breath of the Wild uses Link’s amnesia as a storytelling conceit to teach players how to control their character in a way that feels organic. The player is discovering things along with Link, allowing them to share a bond and a sense of adventure. Slowly, he learns that he was a knight tasked with protecting the titular Princess Zelda. When the Calamity occurred, Link was mortally wounded while defending her. For one-hundred years, he’s been asleep in a place called the Shrine of Resurrection. Now, it’s his job (and the player’s) to finish his mission by saving what remains of the Kingdom of Hyrule.
It’s not a complicated story, but it is one which features surprising depth.
Very early on, the game guides players near several places which subtly prompt experimentation, giving players multiple different ways of figuring out how to use the tools at their disposal. There is a tremendously rewarding sense of accomplishment when a player puts the pieces together, discovering the game’s hidden mechanics. This encourages experimentation, which yields more and more discoveries. It’s possible that every person who plays Breath of the Wild discovers their way a little bit differently, yet the game ensures that everyone is taught how to navigate this mysterious new world.
Of course, while this is an example of good game design, it isn’t what makes Breath of the Wild such an interesting vehicle for storytelling. The game doesn’t really begin to show its inventiveness until Link masters his basic abilities as is allowed to leave the game’s tutorial region.
Just like the original Legend of Zelda, players are dropped into the massive world of Hyrule. This time, however, that world is truly vast, and is rendered with enough realism that it feels like a vibrant, natural world.
The game gently prods Link in the vague direction of several different objectives, but it never dictates where they must go. Indeed, players have free reign to go literally anywhere and try anything. As one early review of the game explains:
“For decades…games have been about what you can’t do as much as they are about what you can…The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, in contrast, is all about what you can do. This is a game that says “yes” to anything you ask of it.”
This sounds fun, but what does it have to do with storytelling?
Part III: Negative Space
A common technique employed by artists is called negative space. That is, rather than trying to draw a person, one instead tries to draw the space surrounding them. By changing perspective, the artist can create their subject more clearly and with a better sense of context.
Many other games with open worlds have struggled with how to fill those places. A playing field with such a large scope can feel lifeless if it isn’t filled with characters, events, and interactions for the player to encounter. There are different strategies on how to handle this: some games fill the world with lots of small, simple quests; others add showy clutter to distract from the emptiness; some leave the world relatively open and focus on getting characters to where they need to be before they notice just how empty the game’s world is.
Breath of the Wild, on the other hand, understood that exploration can be an adventure unto itself. It embraced its open world and used negative space to tell a story.
The defining story element is the Calamity, an apocalyptic event which killed off most of Hyrule’s population. A few towns and cities survived, but between them lie vast, open ranges to explore. There are snow-capped mountains, grassy fields, and deep valleys. Link can swim up towering waterfalls or struggle to endure the crushing heat of the open desert. Breath of the Wild creates large, empty spaces, but it’s never barren. Instead, it uses these places to tell a story of what happens after the apocalypse. What happens after civilization is wiped out?
There are plenty of stories that examine catastrophes and their immediate aftermath, but it’s rarer to see one that grapples with the long-term reality of loss, the emptiness of what’s left behind.
Most of the characters in Breath of the Wild grew up in the generations after the Great Calamity. They don’t remember it for themselves, nor the mighty kingdom that existed before. Instead, they’re grappling with the world they see before them: they hunt for truffles in dark forests and navigate perilous roadways besieged by monsters. They’re trying to survive. The ruins speak to the kingdom that was lost, but it’s a world these people have been forced to move on from.
Hyrule is littered with burnt-out homes, cracked foundations, and abandoned strongholds. You can find the massive fortified tower where the Hylian army made its last stand, where broken stone walls are overgrown with bright green vines. If one is brave enough, players can explore the shattered ruins of Castle Town, a massive city which burned to the ground.
In a particularly well-placed corner of an open field, one can find the long-abandoned remains of an old ranch:
Longtime Zelda players will quickly recognize this place. The layout of the ranch ruins are identical to the Lon Lon Ranch, a key location from Ocarina of Time. This was where Link made friends with a young farm girl named Malon and the place he found his faithful horse Epona. To people who played that game, the Lon Lon Ranch evokes warm memories.
In Breath of the Wild, we find something altogether different: the warmth of the previous game is replaced with a sense of loss, of sadness. Those who never played Ocarina of Time will still understand that this is one of the places devastated by the Calamity, and its burnt ruins speak to the horror of that tragedy. Yet, the ruins take on added weight for longtime fans of the series. The game uses what is not here to create feelings of loss and regret.
Breath of the Wild’s Hyrule is littered with places like this. A profound sense of melancholy pervades.
At the same time, Breath of the Wild is also staggeringly beautiful. Instead of the hyper-realistic graphics utilized by so many of its peers, Breath of the Wild uses a painterly style with lush colors and stunning views at every turn. Red-orange sunsets paint the skies. The game goes to great lengths to make Hyrule gorgeous. This isn’t merely an aesthetic choice, but a thematic one. The developers want to pair the tragedy of their story with a sense of communing with the natural world. Squirrels frolic among the ruins. Flocks of birds fly across the sky. Perhaps Hyrule is a land filled with monsters, but there’s beauty here as well.
Hyrule is a place the developers want you to fall in love with.
Scattered throughout the game, there are several places which will trigger dormant memories. When players find these, they witness a short scene from Link’s life before the Calamity. We see Link meeting friends, confronting Princess Zelda’s initial skepticism towards him, and her own private struggle live up to the obligations which have been placed upon her shoulders. Through Link’s flashbacks, we witness Zelda’s despair as she fails to prevent the catastrophe she knew was coming.
This is a wonderfully creative way to tell a story. Because the memories are merely brief snippets of the past, and because Link himself doesn’t remember everything that happened, this method of storytelling perfectly intertwines with the way players interact with the game. The memories are merely fragments, with players left to piece together what happened between them. Because of this, the order they’re discovered doesn’t matter. Players don’t need to discover these memories to complete the game, but they reward players who continue to explore.
Breath of the Wild is a meditation on loss, failure, and surviving trauma. It never minimizes the horror of the Calamity, but it also asks the player acknowledge that life must continue moving forward, even after such a terrible tragedy.
Unlike many games, Breath of the Wild doesn’t want to rush you from one place to another. Most stories live or die by their pacing, a drive which carries the audience forward. Breath of the Wild is a story that asks players to slow down, to take their time. The developers have discussed how they purposefully designed the game without straight lines between objectives. Instead, obstacles were intentionally placed to distract players from their goals, pushing them to wander. Ultimately, the greater appeal is to be lost in the wilderness. The game goes out of its way to reward the wandering eye.
By its end, Breath of the Wild allows Link to piece together enough of his memories to understand what was lost in the Calamity. The player, too, witnesses the scale of this loss while also appreciating the beauty that remains. This is still a place worth fighting for, worth saving.
Breath of the Wild tells its story largely by what’s missing. The emptiness of Hyrule becomes a vessel to be filled with thoughts and feelings, drawing the audience further in. This game tells a story that is mournful and hopeful at the same time, highlighting what’s missing to make us appreciate what we have.
The game was such an achievement, it would seem almost impossible to measure up to…
Part IV: One of These Things is Not Like the Other
In 2023, Nintendo released a sequel: Tears of the Kingdom. Unlike most long-running franchises, there are few true sequels in the Legend of Zelda. Most of its games are self-contained. Often, they take place centuries apart from one another.
Tears of the Kingdom, however, is a sequel in every sense of the word: it builds on what came before it in every conceivable way. It embraces its role as a follow-up, allowing it to explore ideas which would be impossible without the foundations of the previous game to build on.
Tears of the Kingdom takes place several years after the end of Breath of the Wild (approximately 5 to 10 years have passed, but the exact timeframe is never stated). When Link killed Calamity Ganon, he freed Hyrule from the constant threat of monsters. Everywhere he travels, there are stacks of building materials. The people of Hyrule are rebuilding. Towns which had each developed a distinct character over a hundred years of isolation are being changed by the sudden migration of people throughout the kingdom. Tourists flock to one village to see its over-the-top fashions while another is overrun with researchers who have come to inspect its mysterious ruins.
But peace never lasts for long. Those mysterious ruins arrived with a new threat called the Upheaval. As Link and Zelda explore a deep cavern beneath Hyrule castle, they discover a mysterious, desiccated corpse. Suddenly, it springs to life and nearly kills them both. Zelda vanishes in a burst of light while Link is left severely wounded and alone.
Before its release, there was some concern because Tears of the Kingdom would be using the same geography as the previous game. A considerable amount of Breath of the Wild’s enjoyment had come from exploration. How could a game using the same map possibly convey the same sense of discovery?
The beauty of Tears of the Kingdom is that it never really tries to make players feel the same way. Instead, it is seeking to create something new with. The same core ingredients are baked into a slightly altered recipe. By adding new twists onto a familiar formula, Tears of the Kingdom rewards players for being more familiar with the old game. The more closely one remembers Breath of the Wild, the more new discoveries there are to be found.
One of the ruins that existed in Breath of the Wild was an abandoned stone battlement called Fort Hateno. In that game’s story, Fort Hateno was one of the only strongholds that didn’t fall during the Calamity. It was one of the precious few places that Hyrule’s people held back the tide of destruction.
In Tears of the Kingdom, people have moved. They’re on the roads again. After the Upheaval, a newly-raised gang of monsters take refuge in Fort Hateno. The fortification transforms from a landmark of singular triumph into a place of struggle.
In Breath of the Wild, Link was the only character with the courage to stand against such creatures. Now, his actions from the previous game (and a growing sense of hope across Hyrule) have inspired the common folk to fight for themselves. If Link approaches, he will find a hodge-podge group of farmers and city-folk carrying makeshift weapons. They’ve gathered to fight off the monsters. They weren’t waiting for Link, though they’re not shy about asking for his help. This begins a combat encounter between two groups, a delightfully chaotic skirmish. The moment is fun and engaging.
Taken by itself, the fight at Fort Hateno is a nice change of pace from the largely solitary experience of Breath of the Wild. However, this also serves as a clever way of advancing the narrative. Hyrule has changed. Link helped to change it.
Another encounter finds a sleepy fishing village overrun by pirates. This village, Lurelin, was a peaceful and secluded place in the previous game. However, now that it’s been ransacked by pirates, it’s up to Link to repel the invaders. Until he does, Link will encounter refugees from Lurelin all across Hyrule.
Just as in Breath of the Wild, storylines like Lurelin Village are entirely optional. The player can abandon it giving the pirates free reign to loot without fear. However, Link can also choose to fight back. Players can send him jumping from one pirate ship to another, laying waste to these vicious marauders.
Other games might be content with that, encouraging the player to rampage with a sense of righteous violence. However, Tears of the Kingdom asks for more. It reckons with the reality of this destruction. Once the pirates are defeated, Link is asked to help the people rebuild. It’s up to the player to help gather wood and restore buildings. Only by taking the time to lend a compassionate hand will Lurelin be revived. Completing this quest finds the people of Lurelin dancing with joy along the beach.
From then on, every time Link encounters one of the displaced refugees, they’ll react with joy when they hear that he’s gotten rid of the pirates. The town will become a happy, vibrant place again.
Tears of the Kingdom doesn’t always draw attention to everything that’s changed, but it consistently rewards those who notice. Moreover, while the same map from Breath of the Wild is here, the new game doesn’t completely abandon the idea of exploration: mystical islands hover in the sky overhead. Link will need to use different methods to reach them. Once there, he’ll find new challenges, strange enemies, and novel puzzles high among the clouds.
These sky islands were featured heavily in the game’s advertising to help it stand out from its predecessor. This is in stark contrast to the other new addition, one that was purposefully obscured until the game’s release: the Depths.
Early on in the game, a character mentions a deep chasm which has opened up in a nearby field. They ask you to help one of their colleagues who has gone to research it. This is the first opportunity to explore an entirely new world of subterranean caves. No sunlight reaches down here. The Depths are pitch black, and entering them triggers a deep ominous note in the game’s music. Link has few tools to pierce the darkness. Exploration is still vital to the gameplay, but it’s far more terrifying than it was before.
The scale of the Depths is truly staggering. Rather than craft a few new caves or a small new region (though there are also new caves to explore), the Depths is an underground world that extends below the entire original map of Hyrule, effectively doubling the size of the game. While not as varied in climate or environments as the surface, the Depths are moody, atmospheric, and full of new dangers at every turn. Moreover, the Depths are littered with abandoned mines and empty temples, hints that there was once an entire civilization that thrived in the deep darkness.
The Depths are a thrilling development, and they’re far scarier to those who grew comfortable with Hyrule’s surface. New players can still enjoy them, but they carry a deeper weight to those who knew what Hyrule was like before the massive chasms emerged. This new wrinkle transforms the familiar. Whereas exploration in Breath of the Wild was designed to capture Miyamoto’s childhood sense of wonder, Tears of the Kingdom asks players to face up to the terror of the unknown and be thrilled by plunging headlong into the darkness.
It’s dangerous to go alone, but both games rewards their player for putting in the effort.
Another clever aspect of Tears of the Kingdom is that not all of the characters recognize Link. Some of them do, of course, and they’ll fondly greet their old friend.
However, to many people in Hyrule, Link is a stranger. For example, players can visit a local school during a history lesson on the Calamity. These children are skeptical that the event even happened! They demand proof, never realizing that the classroom visitor is the hero who saved the kingdom. In a world without widespread photography, why would they?
Link is able to be a hero and subsequently regain a sense of his anonymity. Just because he saved Hyrule doesn’t mean that everyone knows or respects him.
It’s notable that, by all appearances, Link seems fine with this. Breath of the Wild established that he rarely spoke because it helped him focus on his duties. This version of Link may be prone to bravery, but he has soft-spoken, even solitary disposition.
Without giving Link a voice, Tears of the Kingdom must instead reveal his personal journey with clever, sometimes enigmatic clues.
In Breath of the Wild, players could buy Link a house in one of the villages. They could decorate Link’s home with various objects found throughout the game, making it truly their own. Like most things, this was an optional side quest, but it was a fun way to make Link’s journey feel more personal.
Cut ahead to Tears of the Kingdom, and one of the first things that many players will do is return to this house. When they arrive, they’ll find that it no longer belongs to Link. Instead, everyone refers to it as…Zelda’s house! The princess has found a quiet refuge for herself nestled in a far corner of her kingdom. Going inside, one can find Zelda’s diary as well as portraits of Zelda interacting with many characters you met in the previous game. There’s even another interesting tidbit:
In both games, Link can sleep in beds to regain health. Usually, this happens inside inns or places he’s invited to sleep. However, while he can enter any home he likes, Link cannot sleep in other people’s beds.
When one returns to Zelda’s house in Tears of the Kingdom, players can climb the stairs to the second floor. Stand beside the bed and the game will ask if Link would like to rest. The implication here is that he continues to sleep in this bed. This is a clever way of revealing Link and Zelda’s romantic intimacy without being over-the-top.
There are enough clues for the player to discover the truth for themselves, and there’s a giddy thrill in piecing it all together without the game explicitly revealing it. Players imagine how this arrangement came to be for themselves, conjuring a sweetly domestic life for the two main characters.
Perhaps the best great example of Tears of the Kingdom’s storytelling can be found in a village called Tarrey Town. This was a village you helped to build in Breath of the Wild. Now, Tarrey Town is thriving.
In the previous game, players introduced the founder of Tarrey Town, Hudson, to his wife. You were even part of their wedding!
In Tears of the Kingdom, the player finds them emotionally distraught. In between the two games, Hudson and his wife had a daughter they named Mattison.
By the traditions of her mother’s culture, Mattison is expected to leave her parents so she can be educated in the far-off city of her mother’s birth.
One of the best quests in the game lets the player choose to help Hudson and Mattison overcome their fears of losing each other. You cannot change the fact that they will be separated, but you can provide some measure of catharsis.
If finished, the quest finds the entire family crowded into a small hot air balloon. Together, they watch the morning sun as it rises over the ocean. The scene is serene, even picturesque. It’s also filled with the emotional complexity that Breath of the Wild mastered so well in its melancholy emptiness.
Other video games have attempted to craft heartwarming moments like this, but many of them fall woefully short. If not handled with a delicate touch, this kind of story can feel silly or ham-fisted. Tears of the Kingdom understands that there’s power in restraint. The things you do to help Mattison and Hudson are small, but they help steer them on a path of emotional growth. There doesn’t need to be a load of overly wrought melodrama to make the audience experience the sadness here; instead, the game uses a few carefully select moments that help define the larger contours of the relationship. Hudson and Mattison’s farewell has real weight defined by using a bare minimum of details to tell the story.
Little moments like this are scattered all throughout Hyrule. They grow richer because of the relationships built up over time. Experienced players already know what this version of Hyrule is supposed to look like, and they’ve already developed an affection for its people.
This prevents what many feared: that Tears of the Kingdom would just be a disappointing retread of the previous game. Instead, the developers were careful in how much information they gave to the players. Rather than repeat the same story of loss and melancholy as its predecessor, Tears of the Kingdom speaks to how life changes, how failure and success are equally impermanent, and how life is never without struggle, but that it’s worth struggling for. Players can defeat Ganondorf, but Hyrule will never remain saved.
Nothing lasts forever.
Part V: More Than the Sum of it’s Parts
When it was released in 2017, Breath of the Wild was an instant sensation. Nintendo’s gamble to use it to launch their new system was vindicated. As of this writing, Breath of the Wild is the highest-selling game in the Legend of Zelda franchise and the Switch has become one of the best-selling consoles of all time.
Seven years later, as speculation grew that the Switch was soon to be replaced, Nintendo released Tears of the Kingdom as the highlight of a slate of high-profile games Nintendo meant to bookend the Switch’s lifespan. Like it’s predecessor, Tears of the Kingdom has been a massive success, selling 20 million copies in less than a year, second in units sold to only Breath of the Wild.
Admittedly, high sales don’t necessarily mean that a game tells a good story. Yet both titles received near-universal acclaim upon their release. Each won numerous awards and helped breathe new life into a venerable franchise that many worried was beginning to show its age.
But one needn’t be interested in video games to learn something valuable from Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. Taken together, the pair offer a rich fabric to inspire storytellers of all kinds.
The most vital lesson they offer is that there’s value in not over-explaining. Modern commercial storytelling struggles with oversaturation in almost every medium. Take Star Wars, where an endless array of comics, novels, and tie-in television shows have explored every conceivable loose thread the iconic films didn’t tie off. This might be exciting for a little while, but it’s a sugar rush method of storytelling that ultimately never really satisfies.
Take, for example, the Clone Wars. In the original Star Wars (A New Hope), the character Obi-Wan Kenobi makes an off-hand mention to fighting in this conflict, a comment which spurred countless imaginations. Years later, audiences saw the Clone Wars for themselves through a prequel trilogy of films and an animated television show. While many people enjoyed these new stories, there were just as many people left unsatisfied, or who felt as though the original stories had been robbed of a portion of the mystique.
There is value in allowing parts of a story to be ambiguous, in leaving some questions unanswered. If done well, this negative space provides a chance for reflection and imagination.
Consider a short story by Ernest Hemingway, one which is only six words long:
For sale: baby shoes, never worn.
This story is famous for its brevity. Hemingway’s ability to tell a story with such efficiency is truly remarkable, to the point that almost anyone who has taken a class on writing has probably seen it before. But there are many people who overlook an important aspect of why this story works so well. Yes, its words are carefully chosen, and yes it highlights how to use just the right details.
But more importantly, Hemingway’s Baby Shoes leads the reader to imagine the family buying these shoes in expectation along with must must have occurred later to lead to them never being used. It’s not merely that Hemingway used just the right words to convey just the right details (which he did), it’s that this story forces the reader to fill in the inherent contradiction of its ideas.
And this is where negative storytelling is at its most powerful, where it creates a sharp contrast or a palpable absence that the audience feels compelled to fill. To work properly, the audience mustn’t feel as though the author is purposefully obfuscating. Ideally, they never even realize what’s happening.
The storyteller must therefore ask themselves what kinds of questions are the right ones to ask? Which details are to be provided and which are withheld?
There’s just as much artistry required to use negative space as there is in telling the story straight. If used poorly, the audience can be left feeling confused or even angry. If they feel like they’re doing work the storyteller should have done, they’re unlikely to enjoy the experience. However, when used correctly, negative space becomes invisible and the bond between the audience and the narrative will be even stronger.
In the end, negative space is just another tool that can be used to craft a compelling story.
However, by its very nature, it’s a tool which is harder to recognize and is considerably underappreciated. Ultimately, the most effective storytellers don’t spoon-feed their audiences answers. In doing so, they leave us thirsty for more.
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