Who is Link?   A few weeks ago I was particularly bored and began daydreaming. Somehow, as my thought-pattern meandered through the regular milestones of love, wealth and success, I arrived at an unfamiliar destination; the question, "who is Link?" Who is the elf-like protagonist of what is arguably the world's most important gaming franchise? In other premier story-driven games like Grand Theft Auto and Final Fantasy, we have a clear idea of who the playable character, our exploratory tool for the game world, actually is; what his motives are, what he's thinking, how he reacts to different things, simply because in those games the characters are allowed to interact with NPCs through speech. In The Legend of Zelda our playable character is a mute. To draw a comparison with Half Life, a series that takes a similar approach to storytelling, a main criticism of Half Life 2 Episode One is that the NPC characterisation is so rich that players now feel like they have less interaction with the game because of the technical limitations and emotional restrictions placed on player and avatar respectively. As games become more realistic, the Half Life and Zelda approach to storytelling becomes increasingly jarring. Considering the character of Link raises questions as to the validity of this dumb approach in a time when user interface and artificial intelligence limitations determine the extent of our interaction with the game. So, Link then. Inconveniently, there are more than one "Links", or Heroes, and the only real connection between the them is that they're all destined to possess the Triforce of Courage. As the first Link chronologically, the first to show facial expression, and the first with a truly complicated life, the Hero of Time set many standards for a lead Zelda character, and so I'll give a quick run-through of his journey in Ocarina of Time to see what personality traits we can glean from events. Link spent his first eleven years growing up as a bit of an outcast, subject to forest bully Mido's insults. Somehow, everyone knew he was different to the other Kokiri, and it didn't help that he was the only one without a fairy. The day he finally receives a fairy guide, is the day he's informed that the Great Deku Tree, surrogate parent and protector, has been cursed and will die unless Link saves him. After the eleven year-old slaughters the infecting parasite Gohma, the Deku Tree dies anyway, but not before enlightening Link of the world's imminent destruction and his responsibility to prevent it. In order to do so, he must leave the protective realm of Kokiri Forest, despite the promise to all Kokiri that such a course of action will lead to death. After an arduous adventure through a dangerous cavern and the electric guts of a sacred fish, Link's very own nightmares are presented to him as reality. The terrifying scene that plagued his dreams in the weeks leading up to his adventure was played out with terrifying lucidity. Then, after pulling the Master Sword from its pedestal, Link finds himself seven years in the future, a child trapped inside an adult's body. Leaving the Temple of Time, Link finds his kingdom in ruins, towns destroyed, mountains on fire, monsters ravaging the land, and is told he has to defeat the man responsible for this wanton destruction. He then learns that the reason he felt different from the other Kokiri, and why he was able to grow, is that he's actually a Hylian whose mother entrusted him to the Deku Tree as she fled dying from the Hylian War. After battling through five temples to restore Hyrule and awaken the sages needed to kill Ganondorf, Link infiltrates the Evil King's fortress for a final showdown. When Link murders the man who tore apart a country, he and Princess Zelda flee the crumbling fortress while it gives way under their feet, and as they think they have reached safety, a 15-ft monster bursts from the wreckage. No wonder this guy's a mute. Now, we're told that Link is courageous, but we're never given more than that. Certainly, his bravery in the face of such overwhelming tragedy, and his determination to complete his quest, are traits that make him perfect to bear the mark of the Triforce of Courage, but we don't see much in the way of real interaction that shows the subtleties of the character. For someone so courageous, Link is short on opinion - he often feels like a mindless solider sent into battle whenever Hyrule calls for it, so we miss the story of the emotional journey he must endure. Nintendo's official line is that the idea of "Link" is one already formed in the minds of gamers, and if they were to make him speak differently to preconceived notions they'd be shattering that image. Without Link talking, the only personality quirks we can glean from his actions are that he doesn't want to marry a Zora, and that he's scared of Goron hugs. In fact, he seems to have a hard time showing any kind of real feeling towards others, as evidenced by the ending where a heartbroken Zelda has to send a gormless Link back to his own time in an otherwise emotional scene where Link loses his Ocarina. My point is, these are really traumatic events, but as players who aren't completely immersed in the gameworld (and will continue to be detached until we're all running around Holodecks), we will never show the same emotional reactions as Link could. When Link defeats Ganondorf in The Wind Waker, he's visibly shaken, but what else does he feel?  What does he have to say about it? As players, it was surely exciting, but we're missing the fear that can only be experienced by being there in that stormy scene. There are some truly moving scenes in that game, and while many people feel they fall flat because of pure-text speech, I think they fall flat because our avatar can't completely interact with them, just as we can't. Until we can, Link should. Just like in novels and books, scenes in games are made to provoke particular emotions, and the school of thought in games like Zelda and Half Life is that as we're the main character, we should play that part in our imaginations. That approach simply isn't feasible at this time; as graphical technology advances, so too should other parts of the puzzle. 8-bit MIDIs would sound out of place in Twilight Princess, just as jerky animation on realistic-looking models breaks the suspension of disbelief. No-one could complain that the original Link had just two frames of walking animation or blippy-bloopy music, because adventurers 20-years ago spent the game in their imaginations. But as scripts complicate and narrative expands, Link looks increasingly ostracised as a non-participant. A character who is visually gaining identity should be able to express that verbally. When pixellated old men were telling a faceless Link that "DODONGO DISLIKES SMOKE", I can't imagine the game suffered when Link failed to reply with a witty musing about broken Hylian. But when you find out that you and your friend are the incarnations of the legendary Hero and the Princess Zelda, and your messenger happens to be the long lost King of Hyrule who has remained buried under a sea for hundreds of years, well, you'd probably have something to say. I've mentioned Half Life a couple of times, because that series uses more extreme techniques to pull you into the part of Gordon Freeman. For instance, you never see his face, and rather than using cut-scenes, story set-pieces take place around you. Voice acting is a necessity to continue dialogue while you play through cut-scenes as text would be unwieldy, but the most recent 3D Zelda, The Wind Waker, uses character's facial expressions to portray feelings, while text boxes are used for everyone but Link to exchange dialogue, thanks to the non-immediate nature of its cut-scenes. This isn't acceptable any more. As facets of the game design advance, it isn't just the character of Link that is being held back by the lack of speech - the reliance on text is archaic and robs many powerful scenes of the needed emotion inherent in the human voice. The common objection is that people would rather imagine the text being spoken, which is quite peculiar given that so much of the game is fully-realised, and this one alteration would be the final step towards true cinematic storytelling. While AoL's tiled landscape needed a powerful imagination to decipher, and LA's basic speech left little room for intimacy, the lack of voice acting is quickly becoming the missing link in a series that now lets you physically hold your bow. In such an interactive situation, a lack of voice acting is perhaps worse than watching a Hollywood blockbuster like The Lord of the Rings that employs the narrative techniques of a Charlie Chaplin short. When graphical and UI advancements pull the minimum audio requirements ever-higher, the matter of Link talking becomes an increasingly isolated hindrance in realising Hyrule, and will only continue to grow as a problem over the next few years. Who is Link? Link is a courageous young man at the centre of a new debate that reflects the unpredictable growing pains of the video game medium. He's a blank canvas for players to project themselves upon, but he's also a character struggling to break free of his arbitrary disabilities. He's the progression of Nintendo personified, and he's the key to their future. They've been pushing the Zelda series in a certain direction, that of epic storytelling and adventuring. With an internal push towards more casual games, Zelda represents classic Nintendo, but also a changing Nintendo. As a company that fell out with Silicon Knights over disagreements over the future of development team sizes, it seems almost ironic that they're readying to release one of the biggest, most expensive projects of all time. However, if they're to pursue this direction, they need to start making hard decisions about how best to portray Link, otherwise the disparity between game elements will begin to crack the series.