Nintendo's Spectacular Art of Scoring the Mundane

A Shortcut to (Hylian) Mushrooms

After falling off a cliff while fighting a horde of monsters, I find myself in a common situation in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017): my player-character Link is low on hearts and I need to find him something to eat. Wandering through the fields of Hyrule, I forage for mushrooms, carry them to a cooking pot, and prepare a simple Mushroom Skewer (see the Video Example below). When I select the meal in the game menu, Link scarfs it down, pats his belly, and recovers a few hearts. This sequence—injury, foraging, cooking, navigating the menu, eating—is routine. It is not remarkable in terms of the game’s broader narrative, nor is it very complex mechanically. It is, however, a necessary and frequently repeated gameplay aspect of Breath of the Wild.

Cooking meals and concocting potions are everyday practices in Breath of the Wild, required for maintaining Link’s health and safely traveling through harsh conditions in the game world. From the initial forage to the final feast, every action is accompanied by musical cues and sound effects. A short neighbor-tone jingle plays when gathering mushrooms and other common materials. An ensemble of metallic objects (suggestive of spoons and other cooking utensils) performs as Link prepares his meal. When the food is finally eaten, a soft, bubbling sound effect signals the restoration of health.

These sounds fulfill a primary function of game audio: conveying information about and affirming changes in game state.1 In this sense, the sonic design of cooking in Breath of the Wild parallels many everyday sounds in the “real” world. A bell on a coffee shop door signals a caffeine-addicted customer’s arrival. A Samsung washing machine playing Franz Schubert’s “Die Forelle” (“The Trout”) announces the end of a wash cycle. In both cases, music does more than communicate information and reframes the mundane activities it accompanies (entering a shop or doing laundry) as moments of charm and whimsy. In this essay, I argue that the sound design of Breath of the Wild likewise introduces a layer of spectacle to the everyday practice of cooking some ‘shrooms. By adding fanfare to moments of average mundanity, game composers transform ordinary practices into significant gameplay.

Strategies and Tactics: The Practice of the Everyday

To understand how everyday gameplay operates, it will help first to look at theories of the everyday in the “real” world. For phenomenologist Martin Heidegger, the everyday (Alltäglichkeit) is the base mode of being-in-the-world (Dasein).2 Stephan Käufer points to everydayness as “a movement away from exceptionality and toward the usual, a tendency . . . to reinforce routines.”3 For Heidegger, this everydayness is dictated in part by a “subjection to Others” (das Man).4 In other words, the practice of the everyday is that which we do normally and is formed by average public norms.5

A concern with public norms is also noted by Michel de Certeau, whose own definition of the everyday involves a distinction between what he calls strategies and tactics. Strategies are enacted by those who inhabit “proper” places in society from which an environment can be organized, surveyed, and controlled.6 De Certeau illustrates strategy as the view from the 110th floor of the original World Trade Center, in which Manhattan becomes a “theoretical simulacrum,” separate from the practices of those below and legible like an urban planner’s map.7 Tactics, on the other hand, are the everyday practices of those without such a position of power, ordinary people who move through spaces they do not control.8 Pedestrians walking in Manhattan enact these tactics, reappropriating strategy-defined spaces by taking improvised paths and shortcuts.9 Put simply, strategies are the ways in which institutions design spaces; tactics are the ways in which ordinary people move through those spaces.

Everyday Listening: Ubiquitous Listening and Background Music

Anahid Kassabian’s concept of “ubiquitous listening” closely aligns with de Certeau’s everyday. Following Joseph Lanza and Jonathon Sterne’s examinations of the Muzak corporation and easy-listening practices,10 Kassabian describes ways in which companies like Starbucks exert control over the music played in their stores. With music piped into nearly every commercial space:

Those of us living in industrialized settings (at least) have developed, from the omnipresence of music in our daily lives, a mode of listening dissociated from specific generic characteristics of the music. In this mode, we listen ‘alongside,’ or simultaneous with, other activities.11

In these consumer settings, music acts as “a form of architecture—a way of organizing space[.]”12 Starbucks customers, who do not have power over the musical choices in public spaces, navigate these designed soundscapes through their own everyday listening practices.

Michel Kamp extends this understanding to video games, noting that background music in video games takes on a very similar role to Kassabian’s ubiquitous music. Background music, for the most part, is insignificant. It barely registers on one’s consciousness, but does the work of mood management (what Kamp equates to Heidegger’s “equipment”) and “functions alongside other elements of video games to structure the way in which we perceive possibilities for action[.]"13 Just as the design of a grocery store structures the way in which one shops,14 background music acts as the ground that structures the sonic character of a video game.15 It shapes perception while typically receding from conscious attention, functioning as a strategic layer imposed by designers. The ways in which players hear. listen, and respond to background music is then part of the everyday tactics of playing a video game.

Rules and Gameplay: The Everyday of Games

The sorts of activities that constitute the everyday in the “real” world—commuting, preparing and eating meals, brushing teeth—do not necessarily equate to the everyday in video games. This is because, as a general design strategy, video games often avoid such mundane tasks. If they appear at all, these activities are typically seen in cutscenes and not experienced in moments of gameplay. Rather, the everyday of video games may best be understood in the Certeauian sense. In fact, de Certeau’s division between strategy and tactics is very similar to Jesper Juul’s division between game rules and gameplay tactics.16 Like institutional strategies, game rules are imposed by designers from the top down. They act as “absolute commands” that limit the activity of players.17 Gameplay, by contrast, emerges as a “consequence of the game rules.”18 Players develop gameplay tactics that allow them both to satisfy the rules of a game and make the most efficient use of its mechanics. As Juul writes, gameplay is “the way the game is actually played.”19 The everyday of video games, thus, is not the representation of the real-world everyday, but involves all those things that constitute how a game is “actually played”: movement through the game world, menu navigation, use of the controller, and so forth. Elements imposed by designers—such as narrative cutscenes, music and sound design, and mechanics—function as the strategic structures that shape the everyday practices of gameplay.

Everyday Gameplay and Spectacular Music in Breath of the Wild

As mentioned above, cooking is one of these everyday gameplay practices in Breath of the Wild, done in response to structurally imposed game rules. It is a routine practice alongside and involving other ordinary activities such as world exploration and menu navigation, and is enacted frequently in response to injury and environmental conditions. Meals and potions are necessary for replenishing Link’s health and granting him temporary status effects such as greater movement speed and resistance to freezing temperatures.

The mechanics of cooking in Breath of the Wild foreground the player’s ability to improvise recipes. Within the cooking system, players may combine up to five ingredients per dish, with the resulting meal’s efficacy determined by the properties of those ingredients. Cooking together multiple ingredients with the “Hearty” descriptor, for instance, yields a meal with enhanced healing effects. On the other hand, combining foodstuffs with monster parts or insects produces a dish labeled “Dubious Food,” which restores only a few hearts, provides no special effects, and visibly disgusts Link. Cooking thus aligns with ordinary Certeauian “ways of operating,” improvised and situational responses to the constraints of game rules.

Musically, however, cooking is not represented as an everyday practice. Rather than background or ubiquitous music, the music that accompanies cooking responds directly to the player’s actions. This kind of reactive music is defined by Karen Collins as “interactive audio.”20 Instigated by the player, interactive audio comments on and provides feedback regarding player actions.21 This feedback may be positive or negative. When cooking a meal with enhanced effects, for example, a marimba is layered onto the regular metallic percussion and mimics the Zelda series’s recurring “Item Get” fanfare. Upon cooking Dubious Food, by contrast, the ensemble falls apart, reflecting the failed meal. By simply picking up a mushroom and triggering sound effects, routine participation in the game world allows the player to contribute to the greater musical architecture.22 I have written elsewhere about this kind of musical participation in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (2002), where normal battles are transformed into dynamic musical compositions based on gameplay tactics.23 While enacting those everyday practices that constitute gameplay on the one hand, the player is also actively participating in the spectacle of the accompanying music on the other.

By conveying meaning and allowing the playful participation of the player, the music of cooking functions simultaneously as semiotic and ludic music, bringing it out of the everydayness of background music. In doing so, Breath of the Wild transforms the practice of routine gameplay into moments of musical spectacle.

The Spectacular Mundanity of Nintendo

The playful music juxtaposed against the mundanity of cooking follows Nintendo’s longstanding design strategy, summarized (if somewhat problematically) by Reggie Fils-Aimé in 2017: “If it’s not fun, why bother?” Walking across a large, relatively empty field in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998) is not scored by atmospheric music that may otherwise affirm its mundanity. That, of course, may not read as “fun.” On the contrary, “epic” and heroic music cues reframe pedestrian activity as grand adventure in the fantastical game world.24

A similar aestheticization of everyday play occurs in the Animal Crossing series (2001–), a franchise structured around monotonous gameplay enacted in real time. The amount of progress a player can make in any given day is deliberately limited: only a small number of fossils may be uncovered and donated to the museum each day, shops operate on fixed schedules, and village improvements unfold slowly through repeated labor. In the early stages of an Animal Crossing game, players may spend hours catching fish and insects to sell and repay their extensive (and predatory) home loans. Despite the tedium of such repetition—catching sea bass after sea bass—player success is always marked by a brief fanfare and a punny notification message like that shown in the example below. Instead of signifying exceptional gameplay or narrative significance, this fanfare celebrates everyday participation with the game’s design. As in Breath of the Wild, music in the Animal Crossing games transforms mundane gameplay into spectacle.

Fantastical Realism and Everyday Gameplay as Indicators of Genre

As realism continues to be an aesthetic goal for game developers, games increasingly incorporate institutional strategies and ordinary tactics from the real world. In a discussion of EverQuest II (2004), Joshua Zimmerman points to the inclusion of “existing social systems” in the game design and how games “re-configure and re-enact those systems for their own purposes.”25 Within the magical world of EverQuest II, for instance, players have the opportunity to organize their own simulated home. According to Zimmerman, the mundanity of domestic life enables the game to maintain its fantastical setting by juxtaposition.26

Realism and the inclusion of everyday practices have only grown in the gaming industry over the last two decades. With a greater focus on real-world structures than any previous Legend of Zelda game, Breath of the Wild incorporates real-world everydayness—cooking and eating, adapting to weather conditions, breaking tools, and so forth—into its core gameplay loop. Yet Nintendo consistently resists allowing these existing systems to fall into average mundanity. Instead, through playful music and sound design, the game reframes everydayness as a site of spectacle and invites the player to have fun with ordinary tasks.

An additional area for research is how ludic and musical everydayness (or lack thereof) communicate genre. In flagship 2D platformers such as those in the Super Mario Bros. series (1985–) and Mega Man series (1987–), dynamic level designs yield fast-paced and exciting gameplay tactics. Music in these series generally affirms the genre’s everyday intensity with energetic, playful music. As in Breath of the Wild’s cooking sequences, everydayness may be subverted, when a mismatch emerges between genre-defined expectations and musical spectacle. In Donkey Kong Country (DKC; 1994), for instance, the sonic background consists primarily of ambient music. Where the dance tunes of Super Mario Bros. recede into the gameplay mundane, DKC juxtaposes its intense strategies and tactics against contemplative music. This unexpected music strategy urges the player to shift their attention from fast-paced platforming to a more calculated approach.

Bibliography

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• Blauvelt, Andrew. “Strangely Familiar: Design and Everyday Life.” In Strangely Familiar: Design and Everyday Life, edited by Andrew Blauvelt, 14–37. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2003.
• Collins, Karen. Game Sound: An Introduction to the History, Theory, and Practice of Video Game Music and Sound Design. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.
• De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984.
• Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell, 1962.
• Juul, Jesper. Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005.
• Kamp, Michiel. Four Ways of Hearing Video Game Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024.
• Kassabian, Anahid. Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention, and Distributed Subjectivity. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2013.
• Käufer, Stephan. “Everydayness (Alltäglichkeit).” In The Cambridge Heidegger Lexicon, edited by Mark A. Wrathall, 293–6. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.
• Lanza, Joseph. Elevator Music: A Surreal History of Muzak, Easy-Listening, and Other Moodsong. New York: Picador, 1994.
• Nelson, William. “Link’s Sword is Mightier than the Pen: Composing and Performing in the Super Mario and Legend of Zelda Series.” Venture: The University of Mississippi Undergraduate Research Journal 6 (2024): 108–24.
• Sterne, Jonathan. “Sounds like the Mall of America: Programmed Music and the Architectonics of Commercial Space.” Ethnomusicology 41, no. 1 (1997): 22–50.
• Stevens, Richard. “The Inherent Conflicts of Musical Interactivity in Video Games.” In The Cambridge Companion to Video Game Music, edited by Melanie Fritsch and Tim Summers, 74–93. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.
• Summers, Tim. “Epic Texturing in the First-Person Shooter: The Aesthetics of Video Game Music.” The Soundtrack 5, no. 2 (2012): 131–51.
• ———. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time: A Game Music Companion. Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2020.
• ———. Understanding Video Game Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
• Zimmerman, Joshua. “Really Fake: The Magic Circle, the Mundane Circle, and the Everyday.” Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture 4, no. 2 (2010): 237–51.

Ludography

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• Capcom. Mega Man. Nintendo Entertainment System. Music by Manami Matsumae. Osaka: Capcom, 1987.
• Daybreak Game Company. EverQuest II. Windows. Music by Laura Karpman and Inon Zur. San Diego: Daybreak Game Company; Saint-Mandé, FR: Ubisoft; Tokyo: Square Enix, 2004.
• Nintendo EAD. Animal Crossing. GameCube. Music by Kazumi Totaka, Kenta Nagata, Toru Minegishi, and Shinobu Tanaka. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2001.
• ———. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Nintendo 64. Music by Koji Kondo. Kyoto: Nintendo, 1998.
• ———. The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. GameCube. Music by Kenta Nagata, Hajime Wakai, Toru Minegishi, and Koji Kondo. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2002.
• Nintendo EPD. Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Nintendo Switch. Music by Kazumi Totaka, Yasuaki Iwata, Yumi Takahashi, Shinobu Nagata, Sayako Doi, and Masato Ohashi. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2020.
• ———. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Wii U and Nintendo Switch. Music by Manaka Kataoka, Yasuaki Iwata, and Hajime Wakai. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2017.
• Nintendo R&D4. Super Mario Bros. Nintendo Entertainment System. Music by Koji Kondo. Kyoto: Nintendo, 1985.
• Rare. Donkey Kong Country. Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Music by David Wise, Eveline Fischer Novakovic, and Robin Beanland. Kyoto: Nintendo, 1994.