https://artreview.com/the-glitch-art-of-zelda-tears-of-the-kingdom/
In this context of speed and avatar movement, it’s fitting that the word glitch should derive from German or Yiddish words meaning ‘to slide’ or ‘to slip’. It was subsequently popularised in the 1950s and 60s by employees at NASA, coming to mean ‘a spike or change in voltage in an electrical circuit’. And now in video games and other digital media, glitches tend to produce moments of horror, disruption and incongruence, by virtue of interrupting whatever reality principle has been established. This is partly why the similarly hyped but bug-ridden Cyberpunk 2077 was panned by some critics and players at the time of its 2020 release. Nathan Wainstein, writing in the LA Review of Books, described Cyberpunk’s glitches as ‘bald’ in two distinct ways: ‘in their transparently unintended nature’ and also their ‘surreal puncturing of reality itself’. They broke immersion in a game that was intended to represent the apex of modern graphical prowess. By leaning into stylised, decidedly cartoonish graphics and animations, Nintendo’s game operates according to a different reality principle, one that is ultimately more forgiving.
Where Breath of the Wild was rooted in the pastoral, Romantic tradition of a lone warrior wandering a mythic landscape, Tears of the Kingdom asks you to mine its natural resources in order to construct machines. The game is partly about mastering such a place, of bringing it under your dominion, thus pulling Zelda into the age of reason.
