Back in the year 2000, my brother loaned me his unused Nintendo 64 game console, and a copy of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. I was twenty-six at the time, and this was the first video game I had played since the old days of the original Super Mario Bros. He assured me, when he passed it on, that video games had come a long way since I had seen them last, and that I would absolutely love the Ocarina of Time.
My brother knew me well, and his prediction proved prescient. To this day Ocarina of Time still stands in my mind as one of the greatest fantasy adventures of all time (though, admittedly, I have not yet played Breath of the Wild, which, by all reports, blows even Ocarina out of the water for sheer epic awesomeness).
I logged untold hours exploring the richly detailed, beautifully 3-D world of Hyrule, enjoying every nook and cranny. Enjoying it all, that is, until I found the nook and/or cranny that housed the infamous Water Temple of Hyrule. If you’ve never heard of the Water Temple before, you can bone up on the details at the “Water Temple (Ocarina of Time)” Wikipedia page. The fact that this one level in the game has it's own dedicated Wikipedia page perhaps says it all. The Water Temple is considered, by various gaming critics, to be the all-time best, or the all-time hardest (or sometimes both at once) level in the greatest video game ever.
I’ll let the aficionados duke it out over that grandiose claim. In the meantime, I want to focus down just on the factor that has made completing the Water Temple such a fabled rite of passage in gaming lore. I’m talking here about its difficulty level. Anyone who has attempted the Water Temple unaided would agree, I hope, that even if you can’t rate it the best level of all, you'd concede that it is one of the hardest puzzles ever to grace the screen of a Nintendo adventure.
Certainly when I came at it for the first time, it had me stumped for the better part of a month. Granted I had recently become a young father and a new high school teacher at the same time in those days, so I wasn’t playing Zelda non-stop over the course of that month; but even so, I repeatedly flung down the control in despair of ever figuring it out. Keep in mind that this was in the days before the solution to every video game known to man could be found online, with a nice, neat tutorial video on Youtube to walk you through it. Back in my day you slogged your way through, trail-and-error, mis-step by mis-step, with nothing but your wits and a bit of luck to guide you. Kids these days have no clue how easy they have it.
But I digress. The point of all of this is that, however tough the going got with the Water Temple, I never “got going.” That is to say, I stuck it out. I kept coming back at it. Even when my frustration with the puzzle was visceral and my reaction to yet one more failed attempt was physical, still I kept on, hoping against hope to crack the nut at last. As one of the best levels in one of the best video games ever, the Water Temple awoke in me what all the best video games awake in their players, a deep down desire to solve an intractable problem.
In his book Homo Problematis Solvendis – Problem-Solving Man: A History of Human Creativity, David Cropley traces the history of modern human innovation through a close examination of the solutions to basic human problems that our species have developed over time. He argues that a defining characteristic of modern human beings is our fundamental ability to solve problems. Besides opposable thumbs, what sets us apart from the rest of the creatures on God’s green earth is this innate desire we seem to have to solve a problem. Other creatures problem-solve too, I’m sure. I’ve seen our family dog do it trying to get a pound of cooked bacon left lying out to cool on the counter. But unlike any other animal, the human creature seems to go looking for the problem, and seems to delight in solving it for its own sake.
Video games tap in to this desire, I think. It’s part of their appeal. But they also reveal something underlying that desire. Because back in my Ocarina of Time days, you could have laid a big exercise book full of random math problems in front of me, and I would not have tackled them with anywhere near the same verve and dedication as I did the Water Temple. There was something unique about that puzzle in particular that drove me relentlessly to tackle it.
I want to suggest that the “something unique” that makes video games so irresistible is the teleological nature of the problem solving they present us with. Unlike the math exercises in the illustration above, which are all random, self-contained puzzles that don’t seem to have any real purpose, the puzzles we encounter in the best video games are problems with an end in mind. That is to say, the puzzles themselves serve the purpose of advancing the story, solving the quest, defeating the villain, saving the world.
In fancy theological terms, we would say that when something is moving towards a very clear, and especially a very meaningful “end”—when things happen for a purpose and that purpose moves things towards an ultimate resolution—we would say that it’s “teleological.” In Greek, telos means end or purpose; and something is teleological when it begins with an end in mind.
In Christian creation theology, for instance, the real question is not “did the world evolve or was it created in 144 hours.” The real question is: is the universe teleological, or not? Was it created for a purpose, or was it a meaningless accident?
In Christian theodicy (the theological explanation for suffering), the problem of evil is not resolved by mere logical arguments, but by teleological arguments. Roughly speaking, a Christian theodicy would say that there is a higher purpose in our suffering that allows us to transcend it as we go through it.
And in Christian Video Game Theology (a new field I’m developing), the importance of video games is that they reveal—not just that we like solving problems—but that we want the problems we solve to be teleological. That is to say: we have this deep-down desire to tackle problems especially that move us towards an ultimate end as we solve them.
I’m drawing this connection because all Water Temples aside, the world is brimming these days with problems to be solved. Thirty seconds on my Facebook feed would probably be enough to convince you of that: the planet’s getting warmer, time-honored political structures are devolving into junior high shenanigans, gross injustices against people of color are being brought to light, pandemics are raging, locusts are swarming, and people are hurting. It’s easy, and perhaps tempting, to approach all these problems like so many math sums in an exercise book, a bunch of disconnected and especially non-telelogical difficulties that don’t have any meaning beyond simply the discomfort and consternation they cause us.
Of course, if I’m on to anything in my analysis of Zelda’s Ocarina of Time, approaching the really big problems of this world atelelogically won’t give us the resolve or the resources we need really to solve them well, not when the going gets really tough we won’t.
A Christian, by contrast, should tackle the big problems of our world something like how a dedicated gamer would tackle the Water Temple: by trusting that each problem we face feeds into a bigger, single challenge—the problem of sin in the world—and that there is an underlying purpose for us in tackling this this problem faithfully, a real reason to do it well.
I say this because, from a Christian point of view, we are all moving to an ultimate end. According to the Apostle Paul’s Gospel, we will all stand before the judgment seat of Christ on the last day, to receive our due “for the things done in the body, whether good or bad” (2 Corinthians 5:10). And on that day, he says elsewhere, we will all give our account (Romans 14:12). Surely what we did or didn’t do to be a healing presence in the creation, how we did or didn’t offer a cold drink of water to the parched and starving, how we strove to be peacemakers in a warring world, how we lived as ambassadors of Christ's reconciliation—surely these “good or bad things” will be included in that reckoning on that day.
What if I tackled the problem of evil in the world with the same tenacity and determination I poured into trying to figure out how to get the water levels in the Water Temple raised and lowered just so, so that I could advance to the Room of Illusion and defeat Dark Link, my alter ego in the game? There would probably be a lot less hurt in the world if I did, and more likely than not, when the ultimate quest of life was finally complete, I would have the reward of hearing the Divine Designer of the Game say to me, as he will say to all of us who tackle sin with the end in mind: “Well done, good and faithful servant.”
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