A Link to the Fan: Remixing and Randomizing Video Games

Michael Lee

Link explores a dungeon in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past | Nintendo

Produce;Consume

Video games, like most forms of entertainment produced as part of the culture industry, have a set producer/consumer relationship. A studio makes the game, it is sent to consumers who play it. The desire or need for more is created in the consumer, and the studio repeats the process, delivering another game to the market in short order.  While this unidirectional flow of content has gone largely unchallenged, players are finding ways to disrupt the gaming industry and take the reins of production themselves through the art of remixing.

Nintendo’s highly regarded The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past [ALttP] released in 1992 for the Super Nintendo, is a well-paced action adventure game, where our plucky hero, Link, must travel the world of Hyrule acquiring the knowledge and tools necessary to defeat Ganon, the King of Evil, and restore balance to the Light and Dark Worlds. The progression is straightforward, with Link acquiring items at specific points in the game’s logic, that serve to help our hero advance to the next dungeon, eventually becoming strong enough to defeat the final boss. Without these items, acquired in their specific order, Link cannot progress through the game. For example, the Hammer, which Link normally finds in the Palace of Darkness dungeon, is used to flatten pegs or whack-a-mole style enemies that block Link’s way in certain dungeons and areas of the world map. Without this key item, he will be unable to move on and attain other items needed to keep the adventure going. There are several items that serve a similar purpose, gatekeeping the progression of the player.  

In late 2016, a group of fans decided to take this classic game from their childhood and started tinkering with it. By manipulating the game’s code, they were able to create a completely new experience for players to enjoy. What this modified version of ALttP does is randomly distributes the items Link needs to complete his quest, which often results in progression that does not follow the original developer’s intended logic for the game. This scrambling of the game’s logic means that every time you play, it is essentially like playing a new game, never before seen by anyone before.

The “Randomizer” as it is affectionately known, exists as an infinitely remixable version of the original video game. It challenges the fixedness of media objects created for consumption and takes aim at the long-standing dichotomy of producer and consumer.

The Remix

To understand how a remixed version of a video game has gained footing and challenged traditional producer/consumer relations, we must first understand the history of remixes, by looking to the foundation of mechanical reproduction and sampling. Media theorists, like Eduardo Navas, have identified three well defined stages of evolution that lead us to the remix, the first being the foundation of photography, first established in the early 19th century. In these early days, capturing a moment in time to be reproduced in print was the cutting edge. Nicéphore Niépce and Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre refined Niépce’s protracted process of heliography, the first process by which capturing a moment in time became possible. It was extremely slow, which somewhat defeated the purpose of capturing a “moment in time” and as such, work was put in to refine heliography.  The result was the Daguerrotype process. Reducing the time needed to capture an image from hours to minutes made the sampling of life attainable by average consumers. This is the first flash point where consumers actively challenged one-way communication, as anyone with the right equipment could use the medium for private use. With this advancement in technology, the producer and consumer could now potentially be one and the same.

From there, photography led to the advent of film, the best medium through which to explain the second stage of sampling. Two commands that nearly every computer user know by heart were at the forefront of this stage of sampling, cut and paste. Before they were commands in graphical user interface environments, they were part of the analog world and ushered in a new conception of how moments of time captured in print could be manipulated.  Film served to capture sequential moments, brought together to create a moving picture, which adds the dimension of time to media objects. The moving pictures captured by the camera make up scenes, which are then cut and pieced together to form the larger narrative of the film. When other elements such as text and sound are added to the mix, the composition created is a relatively complex media object that could be seen as a type of collage.

The third stage comes to be in the digital era, when altering code allows for near infinite manipulation of media objects. The cut and paste is joined by all manner of tools that can stretch, pinch, reorganize, loop, sharpen and posterize an object in a fully digital environment. A veritable orchestra of instruments at play, under the command of the consumer’s baton, er, mouse.  A simple example is how Photoshop can be used to eliminate red eye in a photo, by adjusting the color of the pixels in the digital image, assigning them a new hex code changes the glaring red of #e50000 to the more palatable grey-blue of #5b87a9. A more complex example is patching the code of a video game to change the location of items needed to complete said game, like the ALttP Randomizer.  

The Third Stage and The Digital Age

The remix has risen to prominence in this third phase due to the convergence of the historical trajectories of both computer and media technologies.  The computer’s evolution into a hyper-efficient machine performing endless calculations on numerical data, and media’s turn from analog methods of storage to digitally encoded files (mathematical in nature) has created an environment where people with knowledge of editing software or programming language can now apply that knowledge directly to the manipulation of media objects. Media scholar Lev Manovich has dubbed these media objects that can be manipulated in this way, “new media objects.”

Manovich has described this emergent culture of remixing as one of “modularization” wherein single [traditional] media objects can be broken down into blocks to be consumed in smaller chunks. Manovich’s (now dated) example of a CD being broken down into the individual tracks, recompiled as a mix or playlist, and enjoyed as a new media object attempts to explain how modularization has come to be a dominant trait of media consumption.

Manovich sees these modular media elements as including any number of categories, including images, sounds, shapes, and behaviors, represented as collections of discrete samples (pixels, polygons, voxels, characters, scripts). These elements are then assembled into larger objects but continue to maintain their separate identities.

With regard to the ALttP Randomizer, Manovich’s concept of modularity applies to the way the game has been manipulated to create the random item placement.

For instance, each item that our hero, Link, collects in the game has a unique identifier within the video game’s code. The item known as the “Quake Medallion” can be found in the 65816 Super Nintendo Entertainment System [SNES] code language under the designation “LDA.b #$11  :  STA $0D90.” Much like the CD track example Manovich uses, each one of the items Link needs to find in his quest has a similar identifying piece of code that can be plucked individually and reordered, creating a new playlist of items for the player.  Manovich writes that during the production process of a new media object “elements retain their separate identities and, therefore, can be easily modified, substituted or deleted. When the object is complete, it can be ‘output’ as a single ‘stream’ in which the separate elements are no longer accessible.”

The fact that video games store these elements independently in their memory banks, allow them to be modified without having to change the entire game. Which is true of the ALttP Randomizer. The vast majority of the game’s code remains untouched, and doesn’t need to be manipulated, but the specific elements targeted by the Randomizer’s programmers, namely the items and the treasure chests in which they are found, can be isolated in the game’s code, run through the sorting algorithm, and replaced in new locations in the game world.

The programmers of the Randomizer apply limits to the sorting algorithm that allow the game to remain playable whenever a randomized version of the game (known in the community as a ‘seed’) is created. To ensure that certain items don’t end up in places inaccessible to the player, the code is tweaked and modified until each seed generated is guaranteed to be free of any bugs that would stop the player. Once the sorting algorithm is set, near infinite seeds can be generated.  Each seed produced is a fully realized new media object, having gone through the production process described by Manovich, and exists as the ‘single stream output’ where the elements composing the Randomized seed are no longer accessible for modification. This act of deconstruction and compositing is a key operation of postmodernist, computer-based authorship.

Thinking Inside the Box

The SNES represents an ideal platform for this kind of remix culture, as media theorist Brenda Laurel explains that:

“a system in which people are encouraged to do whatever they want will probably not produce pleasant experiences. When a person is asked to “be creative” with no direction or constraints whatever, the result is, according to [Rollo] May, often a sense of powerlessness —or even complete paralysis of the imagination. Limitations —constraints that focus creative efforts— paradoxically increase our imaginative power by reducing the number of open possibilities… generally speaking, people know that things work better when they respect the limits of a mimetic world as indicated by its structure and affordances”

The limitations of the SNES hardware force remixers to get creative in how they manipulate the game. Too much freedom might lead them to change too much of the game, potentially detracting from game’s original charm, something the Randomizer’s creators have managed to avoid. Eduardo Navas, in his book Remix Theory, expresses the importance of that connection to a historical origin by way of Craig Owens’ theories on postmodernism, arguing that “The contemporary artwork, as well as any media product, is a conceptual and formal collage of previous ideologies, critical philosophies, and formal artistic investigations extended to new media." And that “something that should always be prevalent in any remix is that connection to the original work’s history… The remix when extended as a cultural practice, as a form of discourse, is a second mix of something pre-existent. The material must be recognized, otherwise it could be misunderstood as something new, and it would become plagiarism.”

The use of the word “new” here is somewhat problematic considering we have built our working definition of a remix using Manovich’s definition of what constitutes a “new” media object. This disagreement around how to define “new” likely results from the two scholars’ differing interpretations of postmodernism, technology, and copyright law. Navas ultimately sees the remix in postmodernity as a form of expression in which a referent to a preexisting piece of media must be made and acknowledged. The authorship of that original media object must remain intact and respected by the remixing artist. Thus, if something is remixed it can’t ultimately be seen as “new”. Navas’ interpretation of a nebulous concept like postmodernism leans towards a definition that focuses on postmodernity’s collapse of history and the general recycling of established cultural forms plucked specifically for their affective quality, relying on nostalgia and familiarity without necessarily producing anything truly “new”. Manovich, on the other hand, draws on how postmodernity, and the parallel development of technology that allows for media manipulation, creates the conditions for freedom to remix and for remixers to claim authorship of “new” media objects. The software programs that are used to manipulate media objects have cut and paste commands built into them, which Manovich sees as legitimizing the act of remix as one of creation, through which new authorship can be claimed. The team behind the ALttP Randomizer straddles the line between these two interpretations of remix, simultaneously acknowledging the origin of ALttP and its legacy, whilst taking ownership of their remix as a new creation.

Owning and encouraging remix creation has the potential to open doors for would-be producer/consumers if we are looking for an avenue to escape from the banality and endlessly cyclical culture industry. However, a handful of hardworking ROM hackers doesn’t equate to a movement looking for new ways to interact with media objects.  Where the ALttP Randomizer shows its strength as something more is in its active community of fans.

It’s Dangerous to Go Alone

The old adage of “strength in numbers” holds for any movement trying to challenge the status quo, and while the ALttP Randomizer community may not have intended to do anything subversive with their creation, the fandom around the Randomizer has elevated the remixed game into the spotlight and challenged normative consumption. Their engagement plays an equally important role in the Randomizer having any kind of impact in the cultural zeitgeist. It gives the Randomizer legitimacy as a standalone media object. And only through their participation and labor efforts will a cultural object like this be able to lay any claim to the challenge against producer/consumer dichotomies.  

Despite the need for active participation to bolster any movement against cultural hegemonies, it is becoming more difficult for media theorists to define participation in a cultural world increasingly controlled by corporate interest. Initially, people like Henry Jenkins described participatory culture as fan groups coming together, writing fanfics, sharing art based on their favorite media properties, and sharing in a hobby or other particular fascination as a collective.  How participation is seen now becomes clouded in the social media landscape where everyone is asked to contribute (whether we realize it or not), but to what ends?

With data mining and algorithmic ad placement lurking not-so-secretly behind the scenes, participation in culture requires the consumer to do work. In this age, we offer up information, put our own labor into the system by sharing on social networks, liking, following, or even by broadcasting ourselves playing video games on a service like Twitch or YouTube. The work put in may come back to the consumer, but in most cases, this free labor goes directly into corporate pockets and databases, used to tailor cultural experiences and further optimize targeted advertising and maximize potential profits. Something I would call particifauxtory culture.

Theodor Adorno, in his essay “The Culture Industry” from the 1944 book, Dialectic of Enlightenment, could see that the forces behind popular culture would abuse the labor of consumers to reinforce their own standing and importance. His fatalist view presented an industry that would only further entrench itself, and as it did, produce, control, and discipline consumers in “a cycle of manipulation and retroactive need.” The only thing that may have changed since Adorno’s time, is that the culture industry has become so good at its own game, that the disciplined consumers not only have the ‘retroactive need’ Adorno saw as so disheartening, but have also fashioned a ‘proactive need’ where consumers, through their datamined media interactions, provide companies with the invaluable information they need to anticipate need, and continue applying the pressure. Not only do they sell you something you don’t need, but they get you to tell them what the next thing you don’t need is.

What remix culture, and the ALttP Randomizer, do is work to disrupt the one-way flow of media objects, and redirect the labor of consumers from submissively reinforcing the media industrial complex to actively engaging with production. Participation in fandom that extends into the production of new media objects remixed from preexisting cultural artifacts.

Media theorist Henry Jenkins describes the fandom in a participatory culture, such as the ALttP community, as having “a clear and (largely) shared understanding of what they are participating in, and how their production and circulation of media content contributed to their shared well-being. “ Which Jenkins sees as leading to a “clear tension between their culture and the commercial industries from which they take their raw materials.” By choosing to produce a new media object, like the ALttP Randomizer, the fan community challenges Nintendo’s position of power, and resists the culture industry’s attempts to control, manipulate, and subjugate consumers.  

The [Culture] Empire Strikes Back

Nintendo, in particular, is a company known for aggressively protecting their intellectual properties and puts a great deal of time and effort into controlling how their products are consumed. By shutting down fan-made projects they send the message that they are in control of how their media objects should be consumed. The ALttP Randomizer has avoided Nintendo’s reach by existing in a somewhat grey area online. The Randomizer itself works as a patch, which must be applied to a “legally-owned" ROM of the Japanese version of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, uploaded to the Randomizer website by the user. As the patch does not contain any of the actual game code, instead only serving to manipulate the code already present in the user-supplied ROM, the development team behind the Randomizer is not in violation of copyright laws. This fact in and of itself could warrant its own article, as copyright law becomes increasingly murky in digital spaces. Despite the Randomizer appearing to use all of the assets from Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, none of the assets of the game have been used in the writing of the patch that randomizes the item locations in the ALttP Randomizer. Using this to their advantage, the development team is able to challenge Nintendo’s control over how their products are consumed.

The Randomizer should be seen as an example of creating tension between producer and consumer, but danah boyd points out that much of the writing about participatory culture was written before new media companies began to capitalize directly on people’s participation. This is true even of the ALttP Randomizer community, with many who play the game streaming it on Twitch, a website that wholly relies on consumers to produce content for them. Jenkins himself admits that in the Web 2.0 environment, companies like Twitch seek to “aggressively protect the rights of copyright holders, and their very limited grasp of fair use practices constrains the grassroots production of culture.” Kneeling to advertisers, data-miners, and venture capitalists, feeding a rhetoric of participation meant to disguise the mechanisms of regulation and control lurking underneath. Twitch was purchased by Amazon in early 2016 for a princely $970 million dollars, so it is clear, they see profit to be had in a platform where consumers contribute their labor to it.

While this undermines the movement towards true participatory culture, to counter that point, Mizuki Ito says that participatory culture revolves around “being a part of shared social practices, not just engaging with an online platform or piece of content.” And that by looking through this lens, “participation doesn’t just mean being active, it is also about being part of a shared practice or culture.”  This culture is able to grow through platforms like Twitch, or the communication app Discord, where a large community of ALttP Randomizer fans interact with one another and participate in the fandom, to varying degrees. Fans don’t merely interact with a platform like Twitch or Discord, they use it as a relay point through which the shared cultural norms and practices of the community can be acted out.

Fight the Power

Ultimately, the ALttP Randomizer community is a tiny speck in the endless universe that is the internet. If you never played The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past or visited Twitch before, you would probably not be aware of its existence at all. But, what we see here is a direct challenge to traditional flows of cultural production. Adorno foresaw a cultural landscape where consumers would be trapped with “nothing left to classify, since the classification has already been preempted by the schematism of production.” Left to suffer through endless songs, films and television shows which conform to types recurring cyclically as rigid invariants, powerless to find alternatives. He decries the culture industry as a wasteland of mechanical reproduction, which is why the remix might be the escape route we’ve been looking for.  Or at the very least, a release valve to help us deal with the monotony.  With particular regard to the ALttP Randomizer, while at it’s core it is still the same game, as we alluded to earlier with both Remix making acknowledgement of the history of the original property and the Randomizer developers wanting to keep the game close to the original, the ALttP Randomizer is never the same thing twice. A rough crunch of the numbers puts the unique seeds that the Randomizer can produce in the range of 10^178 to 10^182, numbers that can hardly be fathomed rationally. The power in this is that we can take media objects given to us by the cultural industry, and endlessly transform them through our own creative efforts, creating less reliance on an industry that coerces the public into habitual consumption.

Digital media theorist, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun presents two competing views of our current postmodern era, in a chapter of her book Programmed Visions. First looking at Frederic Jameson’s less optimistic view of the world wherein postmodernity creates confusion and the “consumption of sheer commodification as process.” We lose any grounding to truth and the real and “to Jameson, postmodernism or the logic of late capitalism, ‘is what you get when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good. It is a more fully human world, but one in which ‘culture’ has become ‘second nature.’” This is the world that Adorno envisioned. One where the culture industry becomes so pervasive, so ingrained in our daily fabric, that to challenge it seems to be an insurmountable task, so instead we submit to it, we do the work needed to reinforce it.  Francois Lyotard, on the other hand, sees the postmodern dilemma as hardly a dilemma at all. He sees it as “positive because it fundamentally undermines totalitarianism and fosters creative engagement, for all actors know that legitimation —truth and justice— springs from their own creative linguistic acts.” The confusion and instability, that might be present, create conditions where power is more up for grabs. We have the power to take what the culture industry give us, dismantle it, and rebuild it in our own image. The creative act of remixing a video game, like the ALttP Randomizer, is an action that wrests power away from the culture industry, and with the support of a participatory culture of fandom, is given legitimacy. Undermining the totalitarian force of the culture industry. The ALttP Randomizer is subversion, and it’s also a heck of a lot of fun to play.

 Michael Lee is the Editor of KOSATEN, and is currently pursuing research on Japanese fandom, with a particular focus on doujinshi and other fan-created media.