Uncharted: Drake's Fortune

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Through the Lens of Italo Calvino's Memo on "Lightness"

Patrick Fiorilli's paper applies Italo Calvino's first of six posthumously published lectures, "Lightness" from Six Memos for the Next Millennium, to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017).

• Patrick Fiorilli applies Italo Calvino's lecture "Lightness" from Six Memos for the Next Millennium to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017), arguing that Calvino's ideas give games criticism a useful vocabulary.
• The paper argues the game's climbing mechanic embodies lightness in three ways: as a verb operating across the game's systems, as a highly abstracted link between player input and in-game action, and as a symbolic visual image.
• Breath of the Wild lets Link climb nearly any surface at the player's direction, limited mainly by a depleting stamina meter, unlike the naturalistic, designer-scripted climbing of Assassin's Creed (2007) and Uncharted: Drake's Fortune (2007), which frame climbing as a puzzle about the designer's intended route.