Over-thinking Zelda: The Economy of Ocarina of Time, Part One

At first glance, the relationship between

Hyrule Castle Town and Kakariko Village is a simple one: they each represent a different way of life. The residents of Castle Town actively engage in commerce and trade, while those in Kakariko express a feeling of simplicity. The differences between these two communities are obvious; unless we unnecessarily over-think the basic facts of these settings’ economies, we won’t find many significant insights.

Well, over-thinking it is what I do best. So let’s take a look at what context

Ocarina of Time gives us on economy and production, and begin by looking at just how much Hyrule Castle Town reveals about class, money, and society.

Hyrule Castle Town

Hyrule Castle Town: the kingdom’s capital and its largest settlement.

When Link takes his first steps onto the paved roads of Hyrule Castle Town, a castle guard personally welcomes him to this “peaceful, prosperous town.” By simply walking around the town square, we can believe in the city’s prosperity; the buildings are large, the streets are densely populated, and everyone seems to be relatively well-to-do. We are expected, at first glance, to notice the town’s economic good-fortune and social affluence. Everyone and their wallets seem fine and dandy in Hyrule Castle Town.

But let’s take a closer look. If one is to accurately examine the economy of

Hyrule Castle Town (or any community for that matter), one needs to first look at the goods / services its people trade. We need to look at how people buy and sell things. How else are we supposed to know what kind of economy these people operate in?

When looking at the people scattered around the town square, we can conclude that most people make and spend money in the marketplace. A shop can be found at every street corner, groups of rowdy customers crowd the market stands, and people run around tirelessly because they are late “for a very important date!” Stupid Alice in Wonderland references aside, this town’s entire economy seems to be based around the activities of the marketplace.

Marketplaces are a common center of commerce for many different economic systems, and have been since ancient times. The term market simply implies that goods / services are being bought, sold, or traded in some way or another, and the people were smart enough to designate a place for all this trading to go down. So, we can’t necessarily conclude anything from just the presence of a marketplace.

Well, we can conclude that the king and people of Hyrule understand the convenience of a centralized marketplace; no need to walk too far if the Bazaar is a block away.

A System of Rupees

If we can’t identify

Hyrule Castle Town’s economy on the marketplace alone, we sure can identify it with the way the marketplace works. Obviously, the marketplace’s primary currency is rupees, as is the case in any Zelda game. Hyrule uses rupees like many civilizations use money, to buy and sell goods. There’s a reason Zelda‘s rupee shares a name with a common currency around the world. I’m lookin’ at you, India.

We’re expected to think of rupees in the same we think about real-world currency.

The mere fact that currency exists says a lot about Hyrule’s economy. We can conclude that Hyrule

does not run on a barter-like system, where people trade one good for another. Instead the rupees act as a “medium of exchange,” or a quantifiable item that can intermediate between different trade items. People trade money for items, not items for items.

Old school economist William Stanley Jevons would say that a society that didn’t use money needed a “coincidence of wants” to trade goods effectively. That meant that if two people wanted to trade widely different items (like bombs and cuccoos, for example), they’d need to share the same levels of want for those items at the same time.

With rupees, we’ll never have to bother with trying to trade bombs for cuccoos. That would be complicated, and ridiculous.

So no barter-system, right? Rupees mean we have a pretty standard exchange of goods in Hyrule Castle Town. People exchange goods and services at standard prices, with rupees as the mediating currency. What does that mean? Well, we can’t really put our finger on a specific economic system, but we can identify a thing or two. For one, we can safely say that with rupee-based trade, the people of Hyrule Castle Town understand one thing: wealth.

A Fascination with Wealth

Most of us know what wealth means; it means to have an abundance of valuable resources or material possessions. In Hyrule, having a lot of rupees is a form of wealth.

And having rupees is

super important to the people in Hyrule Castle Town.

Several Hyrulians in the town square endlessly spout off about money, purchases, and prices. The crowds at the market stands already look to be competing fiercely for a hot item or bargain, and their words support a desired monetary advancement. A customer will sometimes ask, “C’mon, can’t you make it any cheaper?” Not only does this question show how the customer wants to save a handful of rupees on the proposed transaction, it implies that the merchant set a steep price for his or her wares. The buyers

and sellers in Hyrule Castle Town want all the rupees in their pockets.

Even a certain sweet, old woman has been dragged into the pursuit of wealth. When Link first speaks to her, she will shout about how she “made a lot of money!” As if making “a lot” of rupees wasn’t enough for her, she will then say, “Maybe I should look for more things to sell!” It would seem that the hunger for rupees is insatiable in

Hyrule Castle Town; everyone wants more, even if they already have quite a bit. And so begins Ocarina of Time‘s warnings about the obsession of wealth, and societies that function around that obsession.

Much of

Hyrule Castle Town obviously works around money and wealth. While not bad on its own, this economic system becomes problematic in the way it affects Hyrule’s citizens. For example, the people at the market stands — the same people who frequently push for the best deal — are rather rude to each other. One person will say, “”Hey, let go! It’s mine!” and another will say, “I found it first!”

Even Link, the pure, selfless boy from the forest, is dragged into these people’s money-hungry frenzy. If our hero ventures too close to the unruly mob, someone will shout, “Huh? What? Shoo, kid! Shoo!” Good job. You shouted at a nine-year-old. Want to tell him his parents are dead too?

The behavior of the Hyrulian citizens reveals a degree of selfishness as they actively seek their own self-advancement. The more heated their desire for wealth becomes, the more likely they disregard and disrespect the feelings of others. This attitude — the extreme desire for one’s own wealth — sounds a bit like something called

greed.

A Beginning to Greed

Greed has been identified as a moral problem for centuries, for a variety of complicated ideological reasons. Greed, for many, acts as a signal of society’s moral degradation. I’m not going to go into specific moral theories, but I will simply conclude that Ocarina of Time presents a general example of societal greed through Hyrule Castle Town.

On a surface level, the citizens of the town show a desire for wealth, and thus reveal the beginnings of greed. The selfishness, the penny-pinching, and the blatant disregard for others are clues to greater moral problems stemming from greed and the pursuit of wealth.

Ocarina is therefore expressing a small but significant disapproval toward wealth, as it serves as the path to moral deficiencies in a community.

Hyrule Castle Town warns us about wealth, because the resulting greed destroys society.

But pulling a moral agenda from a fictional society may not be a substantial argument on its own. Let’s step away from the moral stuff and move more toward the physical problems facing

Hyrule Castle Town.

By looking at the different people — the different walks of life around the town — it becomes obvious that there is, to whatever extent, a class system in Hyrule. There are those in the upper-class (the Royal Family, wealthy traders, etc.), those in the middle class (shop owners, entertainers, journeymen, etc.), and those of the “common” lower-class (farmers, beggers, etc.). I’m sure just by reading that list, you can categorize those in Hyrule by their social status.

A pretty convincing example of this class disparity comes in the form of a character referred to by fans as “The Beggar.” The Beggar is a man that spends all day on his knees, slapping his hands up and down for attention. If Link speaks to him, this beggar will request our hero “sell [him] something,” with a reference to the Nintendo 64’s abstracted control scheme no less.

The fanbase has somehow come to the conclusion that this character is a beggar, an implied poor citizen desperate for a way to earn money. Some may argue that he has a large sum of rupees at his disposal if Link holds to him something he wants; but his desperate demeanor and physical posture close to the ground implies visually that this man is of the lower class. Even if he does have some kind wealth hidden away in his grungy, green tunic, the way he looks makes the player think he is a poor, penniless man. The Beggar serves as a symbol for

Hyrule Castle Town’s fairly defined class system.

A Collection of Classes

So how did these class differences even start?

Well according to philosopher and economist Karl Marx (some may call him “the Communist guy”), class differences in an economic system always come back to the “modes of production,” or how commodities and objects are produced and sold. In other words, it’s based on what you make and what job you do.

Let’s use a Hylian shield as an example. Let’s say a blacksmith produces Hylian shields, and he is employed by the Bazaar owner to do so. Even though he made the dang things, the blacksmith does not end up owning the modes of production. The Bazaar owner controls and owns the modes of production because he’s selling the shields, taking all the credit, and making all the money. Did you ever really think this guy made the Hylian shield?

So, if items are produced by a craftsman and then sold independently by someone else for a surplus, meaning mass produced for maximum profit, the seller ends up owning the modes of production. The poor blacksmith — who Link never even sees — is confined to a lower class because he lacks that production control. Therefore, the modes of production ultimately spread the classes apart based on who controls them.

I’m not jumping to conclusions, but if this is truly the way things work in Hyrule, and people’s classes are dependant on their relationship to modes of production, class differences are not out of the question. But before we go there, we need more proof that Hyrule exists in such a system. And to do that, we need to look at who produces what.

In

Castle Town, the main outlets that Link shops at are the aforementioned Bazaar, the Bombchu Shop, Medicine Shop, and Happy Mask Shop. Like I said before, the Bazaar owner does not look like the kind of guy that makes all of his merchandise. In addition to the weaponry and equipment that Link can purchase, the Bazaar also seems to sell tools, household equipment, and other such knickknacks. These are way too many things for one guy to produce and sell, especially as workers from Medieval periods and antiquity generally had only one craft. If anything, this guy gets his wares in surplus from a bunch of lowly workers and sells them at a large profit.

The Medicine Shop is also not a place that produces all its items. I see some stoves in the back there, so the owner might produce potions or food on his own; but I can’t accept that this man is also a fisherman, bug collector, and ghost hunter in his free time.

The Bombchu Shop owner has the possibility of producing his own merchandise. The items are specialized enough and he definitely looks like a guy who loves his bombs.

But DEAR GOD look at the extravagant set-up he’s got there. If this guy produced and sold his own bombchus, I doubt he’d afford cushioned seats and neon lights. Maybe he’s got some shady agreement with the Bombchu Bowling Alley.

With all these shops owned and operated separately from the unseen craftsmen, I’d conclude that class differences exist in

Hyrule Castle Town. For every wealthy shop owner, there is a poor laborer working away in the shadows.

And then there’s the Happy Mask Shop. And we all know the Happy Mask Salesmen is not a humble craftsman. He is known to employ children, steal, and collect dubious masks with demonic, ominous powers. The perfect capitalist.

So what consequences arise when social classes are separated in such a way? Well, as some sourceless sayings go, “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.” As the Bazaar owner continues to make more money on the items he did not craft himself, the Beggar outside continues to grow more desperate.

If this process continues to escalate and classes become more separated, certain social issues begin to arise. For example, economic philosophers like Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels diagnosed certain social problems that emerge from an unrestrained class system, like economic inequality, labor exploitation, class conflict, crime, lowered living conditions, disease, and even death. The horror! With a divide in rich and poor becoming more noticeable, such problems are likely to appear.

As I mentioned above, all these consequences are forms of societal degradation.

“Are these things really seen in

Hyrule Castle Town?” you ask. Well no, at least not to this extent. However, we do see how the town eventually exists seven years after Link’s first visit.

A Terrible Fate

Seeing the destruction of

Hyrule Castle Town for the first time — especially with the word “Market” labeled over it — was an emotionally significant moment for players. When we saw how a once-great city was brought to utter ruin, full of monsters and death, we were left shocked. I say with certainty that this affect was intended by the developers. We are meant to feel a strong emotional response when we see the ruins of Castle Town. We recognize that the riches, affluence, and good-fortune that were once with this place are now gone, destroyed, purged.

Of course, this destruction is all

literally Ganondorf’s doing; but the way adult Link sees the “market” after years of “prosperity” serves as a visual representation, at least in part, of the social collapse caused by wealth and greed. Link’s childhood experiences in Hyrule Castle Town are meant to show prosperity and wealthiness; whereas Adult Link’s confrontation with the town shows the destruction of those things.

Still think that

Hyrule Castle Town’s destruction is unrelated to its economy? Well, consider this: Hyrule Castle Town is still operating as a site of commerce for at least one person.

The Poe Collector appears as a character profiting from

Hyrule Castle Town’s decline. Despite the city’s downfall for many, the Poe Collector still manages to keep business moving forward. But if the city imploded in on itself because of its economy, why did this guy survive? He survived because he recognizes — and supports — the effects of a successful market economy.

He just hopes “the world gets worse.” He speaks the truth in this sense; the world really did get worse, even after Hyrule Castle’s citizens were so prosperous. The Poe Collector accepts that if unrestrained wealth is part of the picture, the world will get worse eventually. If he really wants to make money without a guilty conscious, he just needs the world to degrade more and more. This is what separates the Poe Collector from the old residents of Hyrule Castle Town.

The people who once lived in the city were generally well-meaning people. They had a peaceful monarch in King Hyrule, they had sense of law in the royal guard, and they had some kind of religious foundation through the

Temple of Time. They most likely had generally good moral values. Even though they indirectly caused societal decay through their pursuit of wealth, they still valued morality.

This is why they died or fled away.

The people of

Hyrule Castle Town, despite buying into wealth and a bit of greed, would not necessarily choose the “worse” world that the Poe Collector longs for. In this way, they represent a contradictory process; they are bringing about a worse world even though they seek the opposite. They want to better themselves with more money and happier lives, but through the process they are slowly destroying the pillars of society. Because they exist in this contradictory status, the destroyed society eventually pushed them away.

But not the Poe Collector. This shop keep accepts what the world becomes when it desires wealth, and he’s perfectly okay with it. With the pursuit of wealth and accumulation of greed, eventual social collapse is a completely logical end to this Poe Collector’s “worse” world. This is why he exists and everyone else is gone.

The lifespan of

Hyrule Castle Town acts as an outline for society’s pursuit of wealth. The people desire “a lot of money,” so they act to gain more and more. While “prosperous” results are seen at first, classes form and social issues appear. If left alone — such as by a green-clad hero — the city, left to its own greedy devices eventually destroys itself to utter ruin. The market is destroyed, and only those profiting as “the world gets worse” are left to thrive.

Wow, that was a complete downer.

It’s a pretty bleak picture I’m leaving you with. But rest assured, hope is found in other places within

Ocarina of Time. Maybe a small village to the east of Hyrule Castle Town has answers to all these problems.

• Rupee .gif by sagezlo
• Beggar caption image from Reddit