/lit/ - Literature

>Fourth-year student Adrien Robertson kicked off the English Society’s first colloquium of the year recently by presenting his paper, “The Legend of Zelda: Technology and Textuality."

>Similar to a Choose Your Own Adventure book, Zelda not only directs dialogue at the player, but also encourages the person reading the story to take control of it. “There are infinite possibilities with narrative and character,” says Mr. Robertson. Many people may own a copy of Zelda, but a new sequence of events and a new version of the protagonist are created every time a game is played. However the creators of the game have still imposed an over-arching narrative and the player is “bound by the medium,” Mr. Robertson adds.

>Mr. Robertson suggests the closest literary equivalent of Zelda would be any author who responds to fan fiction and alters their work accordingly.

>In a world with ever-evolving mediums of story-telling, Mr. Robertson’s paper reminds us that “when boundaries collapse, revitalized modes of reading across genre become necessary.” When the reader becomes co-creator, methods of analysis and criticism must be restructured.

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