ABSTRACT
Videogames offer an experience that is deeply intromersive (beyond immersive) and personal, and they accomplish this through literary mechanisms that are absent in the films and novels that precede them. Studies of videogames such as the Zelda series can benefit from scholars looking more deeply into historical literary interpretative heuristics to explain how games such as these create a deeply personal experience in which the reader comes to identify closely with the protagonist. This process of identification in gameplay occurs as much through moments of isolation, silence, boredom, inactivity as it does in moments of action, characterization, and conflict. These quiet moments result in an extrapolative silence that bring the reader and Link, even in those moments when he seems ‘bored,’ in a closer alignment than happens in many other traditional forms of literature.
