Project Description

In The Legend of Zelda (1986), there are two in-game locations that explicitly defy Cartesian cartography: the Lost Woods and the Lost Hills. When traveling through these single-screen mazes, Link finds himself endlessly looping, temporarily arrested by a classic gaming trope. Like Asteroids (1979) and Pacman (1980), if the player’s avatar crosses the edge of the screen, it appears immediately on the opposite side as if teleported instantly from one side of the level to the other. This looping effect is initially counterintuitive because of the morphology of the flat, two-dimensional screen but becomes more and more comfortable as player’s adjust their spatial expectations to the particularities of each game-space.

The logic of each maze in The Legend of Zelda is relatively straightforward to program. A series of conditional "if" statements dictate which sequence of directions lead Link out of each repeating landscape. Yet, the mathematical certainty and programmatic simplicity of the Lost Woods and Lost Hills generates complex and sometimes paradoxical topologies. Were a player to attempt to map the twists and turns traversed while rambling through the woods or hills, she would find the geometry of each maze does not cohere with the map of Hyrule. In this case, procedural and haptic logics defining the game-space do not render coherent visual schema. Whether the player realizes it or not, each looping space maps not to the flattened grid on which the rest of Hyrule is mapped, but instead to the topology of a three-dimensional torus.

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