One's a cheerful cartoon adventure. One's a murder simulator featuring grotesque acts of torture. What new feature could The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD and Grand Theft Auto V possibly have in common? Does Link finally lose it and clamp jumper cables onto Ganon's nipples?
No. (They are saving that for if Nintendo's balance sheet gets even worse.) The answer is: selfies.
Let me explain what those are if you don't know. You see, a few years ago you suddenly didn't need to take your "film" to get "developed" at the "drugstore" (sorry for all the old-timey lingo). This meant a few things all at once: You were free to take as many photos as you wanted without having to pay money every time, and you were spared the indignity of having other people look at those pictures. So almost immediately, human beings flipped their cameras around. Too long had these devices been pointed out at the world around them. Now they could point inwards, towards what really mattered.
We already had the word "self-portrait," but apparently this was just too old-sounding a concept, just like "film" or "drugstore" or "privacy." So "selfie" was born. (It was added to Oxford Dictionaries Online last month along with key important concepts like "twerking" and "bitcoin.")
It took videogames, like the dictionary, a while to catch on. You could take pictures in the original 2003 version of Wind Waker, but only in the old, now-obsolete fashion. Similarly, the Grand Theft Auto series also added a camera function around that time. But it did not let you do this:
As far as I can tell, Wind Waker actually goes a step beyond GTA because it lets you play with Link's emotions; you can choose different facial expressions to put on for each picture. Once you take your selfie (or boring old photo, not that you would do that) you can send it as a message in a virtual bottle, to wash up on the shore of someone else's game.
Grand Theft Auto V gives you the more mundane option of letting you share your photos via the Rockstar Social Club website.
Besides being a commentary on the changing ways that people are using videogames today, selfies inject a great deal of humor into both Wind Waker and GTA V. Taking photographs during other games never felt like something the character was doing. It always felt like hitting Alt-PrtSc; you were pausing the game for a moment to capture a screenshot. It was no more a player action than scrolling through the options in the pause menu. Yes, it was implied that the character in the game was holding a camera, but because of the nature of the photo interface we never saw that – just a first-person look through the viewfinder.
But the selfie changes everything. Seeing the character actually taking the photograph reinforces that it's something they're doing – taking a break from shooting orcs with arrows and/or shooting police officers with sniper rifles to snap a quick pic of the scene, for posterity. But more than that, they're taking a selfie. So they're approaching their life-or-death battles with the approximate mentality of a teenage girl in her bathroom.
Videogame developers, you know what you have to do now.
Duck lips.
