I’ve been replaying Breath of the Wild pretty consistently since the start of December, in preparation for the Champions’ Ballad DLC drop and in actually playing said DLC. It was great as expected and much better than the Trials of the Sword DLC 1. I loved it but I love everything about BOTW. That’s not why I’m writing this though.

The first time I played the game, it was in the weeks after it came out, before there was any backlash or really any spoilers out there (not that they particularly matter for this game with its relatively small storyline). It was as pure an experience of playing a game I’d had, from running around aimlessly to seeing puzzles for the first time in places I didn’t expect. Neat!

When I heard that the Champions’ Ballad was coming out by the end of 2017, though, I figured I might as well go ahead and start playing through again since I’d want to be reminded of the game and story before I jumped right into backstory on the game’s already existing story.

Before I did this though, I checked the Switch subreddit and other gaming subreddits to see if people had any tips or cool stuff figured out I could try or fancy, off the beaten path places I’d missed in my first hundred plus hours.

I did find those kinds of things, but because I’m extremely online, I kept digging deeper and found those who preferred games like Skyrim and Horizon Zero Dawn. I hadn’t played much of either but I found this preposterous! BOTW was the best thing I’ve played since The Witcher 3 and it wasn’t particularly close.

The comments said things about how the world was completely empty and there weren’t things to keep you constantly engaged. There were only a few lines of dialogue per character, no big overarching story outside of the main quest cities and Link showed no emotion with his zero (0) lines of dialogue. They missed all the little things the game could reward them for doing in Skyrim or wherever. They’d be told they could do X, so they did X, to get Y.

I’m a stubborn 29 year old boy and took this as an attack on my favorite thing released in 2017 (not that it was a particularly uh great year for anyone). I had no problem being completely occupied for over a hundred hours! But I thought about it more and more and realized why I was so engrossed in it.

Zelda: BOTW embodied the real world, in a way the other games couldn’t, in an almost utopian sort of way. Maybe more idealistic than utopian.

In the real world, you’re not given tasks that get you from A to B to C with any certainty. You often have to go from A to * to Q to 9 to C. You have to take chances to get anywhere and the more adventurous you are, the more fun you’ll have and the more memorable the experience even if going straight down the straight and narrow road would be just as likely to get you to point C.

This doesn’t really manifest itself in the main quest line of BOTW. That’s fairly straightforward: you go to the city marked on your map, solve some problems laid out by the chief or whoever and then follow their directions to get inside the Divine Beast. Then you solve classic Zelda puzzles. Fun! Those aren’t the reasons I loved the game though or thought it was more realistic than nearly any gritty game I’ve played.

Often in the world, you’re bored and have to make your own fun. You don’t know where you’re going or what you’re going to do next. You just kind of wake up and take it as it comes. Especially with younger people being more financially precarious in this day and age, you can’t have a long term plan of how you’re going to get from A to C. You can influence it to some degree and some paths are more clearly laid out than others, but most of us have no idea what we’re doing.

And for all the times I was off the main quest line in BOTW, I had no idea what I was doing or where I was going. You just see something in the distance and decide “oh that’d be interesting.” There’s no plan for once you’re there or anything you’re looking for in particular; it’s just something interesting to do.

You might make some great memories along the way. You might run into a fancy new store to shop around in or see an old friend randomly or find a hidden treasure others have seemingly missed. Video games are obviously more forgiving than real life in this area as, just probability wise, there’s more interesting stuff per square mile in a game world than the real world, but you might find nothing.

There might just be a patch of trees. You might get some fruit or spend some free time in that area while the weather passes, but there’s no greater purpose; the purpose was the journey. You spend time exploring, not knowing where you’re going and just kind of end up somewhere before you realize you ended up there.

An hour before, you were in Death Mountain. If you told me I’d be shooting the horn off a dragon later that same in game day, I’d think you were crazy. In 2014, I was interning in a law office in New York. If you told me 2 years later I’d be living in suburban Wisconsin in healthcare, I uh would’ve been pretty confused to say the least.

But that’s what life is and that’s why I love BOTW more and more the more I think about it. I never thought I’d be a lawyer but an opportunity presented itself. I never thought I’d be riding a moose as Link dressed as a woman, but hey why not. I stayed close to home for college and ended up in Ohio for grad school. In BOTW you can jump off one end of the Great Plateau when you get your paraglider and end up in Guardian City in one direction or be completely safe in another.

You can go straight to the boss and fight your way to the top straight on, or take a more measured approach. I can work slowly on job applications or just apply to everything straight on without changing myself. There’s not really a particularly bad path to take either way.

BOTW is all about taking the opportunities that are in front of you and capitalizing on them as they come. You don’t go hunting for anything specifically; you just take it as it comes. That’s been my philosophy in life and it’s taken me to some weird places. I’ve almost gotten beaten up by an Aussie at 2am in San Francisco and have run a charity film festival in Ohio.

Weird stuff happens when you let it, whether it be finding a giant in a forest there was no reason to go into or drinking wine with a homeless guy watching the Golden State Warriors.

I feel like I’m sort of rambling at this point, but I really do think that if you let things happen to you instead of letting someone, whether an NPC in Skyrim or those around you, tell you what to do, you appreciate the journey in a more meaningful way.

My parents told me not to go to Ohio but I did because it was a really good opportunity. I had no intention of moving to Wisconsin, but a great company offered me a job. How many can say they lived in suburban Wisconsin? I took a three week trip around the U.S. by myself just because I wanted to visit those places. It would’ve been wiser to save my money or take a more guided trip to places everyone else goes, but staying in a non-air conditioned house in Portland built a bond with people I never would’ve met otherwise.

The point of this whole article, I think, is to let things come to you instead of letting people tell you what to do. It makes things more meaningful and a lot more weird and memorable stuff tends to happen to you that way.

Marketing and The Legend of Zelda: BOTW!

I also thought of the game in terms of marketing, since hey that’s what I went to school for and that’s what I’m trying to get back into in moving back to NYC.

The game really showed me how having things more spaced out can make them more memorable and influential. I’ll care a lot more about a Royal Claymore when you don’t have them in every area of the map from the start. If you give me great weapons or weapons that don’t break from the start, I’d just stick with one and not have to experiment. I wouldn’t go on the journeys to find new things, which I then remember moreso because of those journeys.

Instead of thinking, as you do in more conventional games, wow that’s my fourth broadsword, in BOTW, you treasure each rare thing you come to because they’re so fleeting.

I know this will never happen because marketing and ad placement is well past the point of saturation where this would be even remotely possible, but what if ads around you were just so much less saturated than they currently are?

Would you remember them much more because of how rare they are? To know what to buy, you’d really have to go searching to learn about products and then what you do find would leave a much more lasting impression.

Of course, with how connected we are, we’re never going to go in a complete reverse direction until Skynet takes over.

But that got me thinking about the flipside: are we reaching a point where we’re so connected and so used to ads, product placement and video that none of it will register anymore? I barely notice when using a browser without AdBlock anymore. It all just is part of the environment. It’s just the scenery. White noise.

Do we get to a point where current monetization is useless because people just aren’t paying attention to ads? I think the millennnials aren’t to that point because we did grow up in an era without that, at least to some degree, so we still notice it somewhat.

The Jake and Logan Paul and PewDiePie fans are the ones that I’m interested in here though. People like my 15 year old cousin who started playing PS3 when they were 4 in 2006. Severe product placement, at least as far as I can remember, predates that, and has been present in every form of media they consume. The YouTube videos are insane for younger generations but aren’t exactly Citizen Kane for their age group either.

All they know is ads ads ads ads ads. Everywhere. Are they going to be even more desensitized to ads than millennials? What happens to monetization then? Where do places advertise? As people get more and more connected, will there be fewer and fewer places to advertise? Will ad space become limited to the point where it becomes so expensive that only big companies like P&G can advertise and survive?

Is media as we know it done for in that case? They’re already having trouble monetizing with pivots to video (that aren’t going to hold advertising dollars forever since too many people will flock to sites with words before the money dries up); what’s going to happen if people completely tune out the ads on those pages?

I wonder. Will only large places like the New York Times survive and only then based on a subscription base? Will subscription models like the Athletic be the only way for independent media to survive?

It’ll be harder for Silicon Valley companies to “disrupt” current ones as advertising costs go up with fewer places to advertise. They have a lot of venture capital but they’re not going to be able to compete with places like Nestle unless they’re already Facebook sized. Those companies are already deeply in debt (hey, Netflix), so you’re asking them to compete by spending even more?

We could be losing mass innovation, independent media and even entertainment as product placements fail to register.

And once we’re all so connected that even our product consumption isn’t influenced by ads, do we lose even more of a connection with the rest of society? I’d be rich if I knew.

What a time to be alive.