ABSTRACT
In Majora’s Mask, players interact with a world where notions of fear, mystery, and anxiety manifest as ludic elements. These elements act on players from virtual spaces through the hauntological. As interactive media and its consumptive practices shift, we can understand such changes by examining narrative, myth, and memory interaction with audiences. I argue that MM employs hauntological elements of time, moon(s), memory, and masks, and to present a modern-day myth of apocalyptic fantasy-horror. Hauntology and Mythology form complementary concepts that sit both within and beyond the worlds of videogame screens, occupying an ideological area where the ultimate form of control over the virtual space of the game (winning) is juxtaposed by the ultimate loss of control (losing). When we look at storytelling more broadly the relationship between the hauntological and mythological extends to the communities drawn to stories and the specters they bring with them, where notions of fear manifest by user-generated content such as ghost stories, invoking terror through making the game object at the center of these stories, completely uncontrollable.
