A few days ago, I finished The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time for around the tenth time. This time, I was paying a lot of attention to the overarching structure of the piece, in the interest of eventually writing a comprehensive review. For the most part, the intent behind the structure was very clear. But I was completely baffled by the final dungeon. It followed the spirit of the structure so loosely, that I was sure there was a mistake. The very next day in school (obviously not coincidentally), my Music History teacher gave me the answer I was looking for. We had just started Israeli music, and she mentioned in passing that with every new language, new ideology, new structure, the first few works are more of a "proof of concept" than artistic achievements. They follow their concepts precisely, trying to prove that they work. As such, they are rarely played, because once the novelty has worn out (as it should if the composition is successful in paving the way for other works) there's not a whole lot to care about in them. Miyamoto's genius lies in the fact that he takes his steps forward for granted. The last dungeon of OoT creates a new dimension to the Zelda structure which was not present previously, and yet it is largely ignored. Why? Because it doesn't fit in with Miyamoto's artistic vision for this particular composition. It is art first, and proof of concept second. Any lesser gamist would have been satisfied with the innovation, and produced something not worthy of remembering. We see that it is important to be willing to break out of the structure, even as you are working in it.
Today I have been trying to change the layout of this blog to better serve my posts. Everything I say is assuming that you have read my previous posts and understand as much as you need to know at that point of my strange, convoluted style of writing, my over-inflated ego, my lack of interest in the Real World, my philosophies regarding videogames, etc. Everything I write will be developed later on. So it makes not much sense to have the first thing a new Imaginary reader sees when he visits be the latest post. What I wanted to do was an interface that only shows you one post at a time, starting from the beginning, but lets you quickly and easily cycle through the posts. The site would use cookies to remember what the most recent post you read was, so you wouldn't need to go through all of them each time. In my mind, I was already working out all the finer details when my train of thought crashed into the Reality of Blogger. Everything is managed by Blogger without the user's intervention, so there's no way to even do something so simple as change the order that the posts are presented in, much less what I was planning. All it lets you do is modify the basic appearance of the blog, as if that really matters, not anything more important. At least I was able to improve the way comments are handled, but even many Imaginary Friends of mine will not be interested by my site the way it is currently laid out, because unless they've been following my blog from the beginning, they won't see the posts in their proper order.
But nothing on the internet can compare to the pesky rigidity of most of the Real World. If a person cannot cope with the unforgiving and arbitrary rules of capitalism, why can't they "quit the program"? It should be a basic human right for all societies to have at least one alternative to capitalism! But the architects of this structure, and all others like it for that matter, were not interested in serving the people, but imprisoning them. If you don't like this jail, you're free to commit suicide. Oh, right, I forgot, that's not a respected option! Society will try with every means at their disposal to stop you. That's the Real World. Lovely, ain't it?
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