Abstract
More than mere entertainment, video games can be studied as cultural texts, relevant for the interpretation and understanding of the public imaginary relating to crime. Drawing on ideas of Gothic and popular criminology and using a critical lens of hauntology, this study aims to explore themes of carcerality in the video game The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. By constructing the text of Majora’s Mask as a horror game, and a cultural text ‘in distress’, encompassing a crypt incorporating a phantom of past trauma, this paper identifies themes of carceral violence within the text as symptomatic of a deep, haunting disillusionment of carceral justice. Relating back to the culture and context in which the game was created, we argue that this cultural text is ‘haunted’ by the trauma of lost ideals in relation to punishment; a deep disillusionment towards a carceral machinery producing the socially dead instead of rehabilitating them.
Highlights
The 2000 action-adventure video game The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask is a significant departure from the traditional formula found in The Legend of Zelda franchise
This, relating back to popular criminology (Rafter, 2007), allows for the critical study of video games as cultural texts relevant for public policy as well as the public imaginary of crime; the set of values, symbols and understandings of crime held by the larger public to understand their social whole
Interactivity does not always equate identification (Shaw, 2014), video games as a medium in the least allows for the identification and empathy with avatars and characters, meaning that feelings such as confinement and entrapment experienced within the game does affect the protagonist, but by extension, the players themselves
Summary
The 2000 action-adventure video game The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask is a significant departure from the traditional formula found in The Legend of Zelda franchise. This involves the examination of autobiographical prison literature, demonstrating how patriarchal anxieties regarding punishment is part of the gothic prison imaginary (Fredriksson, 2019), the representations of incarceration, crime and madness in the video games Batman: Arkham Asylum (2009) and Batman: Arkham City (2011) (Fawcett & Kohm, 2019) and the exploration of carcerality as public imaginary in the horror video game series Silent Hill (Steinmetz, 2018) This body of previous research demonstrates the relevance of examining the representations of carcerality and confinement in cultural texts in their own right in order to gain a deeper, critical understanding of these concepts as they may be understood by the public. Immersion and empathy of the protagonist varies between games, Shaw (2014) interestingly observed that many of the gamers she interviewed playing Legend of Zelda games did identify with the protagonist’s story and position in these games
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