Trigger Happy
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melodies according to which button on the controller is
pressed, keyboard-style. Once you have learned certain
melodies, you may cause day to turn to night, or invoke
rain, or talk to your friend in the forest. The game helps
the player by showing the tune on a stave, in traditional
symbolic musical language, and also indexically
showing, or pointing to, the particular button-symbols
that will cause each note to sound. And the melodies
work symbolically as a whole, in that they are just
summarily agreed to be certain causal mechanisms in
the gameworld.
This idea of a magical musical “language” is
immensely intriguing. The Pied Piper of Hamelin, of
course, had the same gift, as did Orpheus, charming the
dolphins with his lyre—it is a recurring theme in
folktale and myth. Zelda 64, in fact, only scrapes the
surface of its possibilities, as the effective melodies are
already written into the game. But there is no reason
why future videogames may not, with very clever
programming, develop this idea, and have the
environment react organically to musical themes that
the player makes up.
The ocarina is an example, at base, of a power-up.
Many power-ups, like this one, take the form of
physical objects in the gameworld—gadgets—but
