Trigger Happy
melodies according to which button on the controller is pressed, keyboard-style. Once you have learned certain melodies, you may cause day to turn to night, or invoke rain, or talk to your friend in the forest. The game helps the player by showing the tune on a stave, in traditional symbolic musical language, and also indexically showing, or pointing to, the particular button-symbols that will cause each note to sound. And the melodies work symbolically as a whole, in that they are just summarily agreed to be certain causal mechanisms in the gameworld.
This idea of a magical musical “language” is immensely intriguing. The Pied Piper of Hamelin, of course, had the same gift, as did Orpheus, charming the dolphins with his lyre—it is a recurring theme in folktale and myth. Zelda 64, in fact, only scrapes the surface of its possibilities, as the effective melodies are already written into the game. But there is no reason why future videogames may not, with very clever programming, develop this idea, and have the environment react organically to musical themes that the player makes up.
The ocarina is an example, at base, of a power-up. Many power-ups, like this one, take the form of physical objects in the gameworld—gadgets—but
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