The Psychology of the Legend of Zelda
Red Green from “The Red Green Show”
This academic year has been hectic for me. I’m typically used to presenting at a few conferences and publishing one or two articles during the school year. It seems that this term has been different. This change is due to the “Legend of Zelda” series.
My first presentation of the year was at PAX West in Seattle. Speaking in front of more than 800 people in the Sheraton Seattle Hotel was a trip. Anthony Bean, Rachel Kowert, Stephen Daniel, and Sarah Hays were pros at this as they already spoke at PAX East in April. I felt the pressure ease as I got to play the “Title Screen” theme from the original game in front of the crowd and talk about the psychological influences present in the music of the series.
NCA 2018 continued the focus of gaming as the convention theme was “Communication at Play.” I didn’t submit any of my research as I was working on other projects. There were various panels and presentation that examined the impact of gaming in the communication classroom. It reminded me of the pre-conference that the Game Studies interest division hosted in 2015 in Las Vegas. It also inspired me to finish up turning my presentation from that pre-conference into an academic article.
I am pleased to announce that my article “Winning through deception: A pedagogical case study on using social deception games to teach small group communication theory” was accepted for publication by SAGE Open. The focus of this article was to share my analysis of a lesson plan I used to teach small group communication theory by using “Are You a Werewolf?” One of the areas traditionally left out of the pedagogy literature as it relates to ludagogical studies is the seeming lack of assessment protocols within the body of work. I wanted to balance between the theoretical, the praxis, and the pedagogical. I hope this article acts as a springboard from other communication scholars to combine pedagogy with ludology. Usually, this alone would be big news.
However, that is not the case.
The Freed Center for the Performing Arts will be hosting a book release party for the “Psychology of the Legend of Zelda” on the 19th at 6pm. This event is a huge deal as I’ve never had the pleasure of hosting a party around my research. I plan on talking a little bit about the process of writing my chapter and working on the book. The hope is by the end of the night that we had a nice discussion about what makes a game like “The Legend of Zelda” still compelling almost 25 years after its original release on the Nintendo Entertainment System.
The next two conferences that I’ll be attending after the party will allow me to play in quasi-”Academic Cover Band” as we’ll be discussing the book at SxSW Gaming in Austin and shifting to Final Fantasy for PAX East in Boston. It’s going to be the first time in my nearly two decades long scholarly career that I’ll be covering the same topic for more than one conference. Too often it feels like I jump from topic to topic like a kitten chasing a red laser dot. I think it will give us an excellent chance to riff off of the various issues from that we would otherwise not be able to do.