31: The Girdle and the Bottle: Exploring Ludoludo Harmony in Sir Gawain and Ocarina of Time

Andrew S. Latham, @LathamPhD, Midland College, Midland, Texas

In this thread, I argue that, in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the girdle represents Gawain attaining ludoludo harmony in the Knight’s beheading game, subverting prior suggestions that Gawain’s use of the girdle represents him cheating in the Knight’s game. But what is ludoludo harmony? When a player reconciles their ludological practices with a game’s intended ludology, they achieve ludoludo harmony. It occurs in a hypertext where a player manipulates domesticated glitches and navigable hyperlinks to achieve harmony.

When the Knight reveals his identity, he argues that Gawain lacks “loyalty” because “[he] loved [his] life,” though the Knight “blame[s] [him] less than he would a womanizer (Armitage 179). Gawain, ashamed, blames his weakness on “womanly guile” (Armitage 181). However, the girdle should not be thought of as weakness. Rethinking the girdle and the Lady as Gawain attaining ludoludo harmony shifts away from the rampant misogyny of the original text. The Lady’s heroics offer Gawain a new way to navigate the Knight’s game. To consider how this ludoludo harmony is achieved, look at players of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (OoT). In OoT, there is a domesticated glitch (Boyle, 2015) called the Ganondoor skip, where a humble bottle becomes the most powerful item in the game. Ganondoor is used to travel from the Deku Tree, the game’s first dungeon, to the Tower Escape cutscene at the end of the game. Bolux and Lemieux (2017) explained how a bottle can trick the game into making the player character, Link, pull out his Ocarina instead. This skip confuses the game, leading to it loading the escape cutscene at the end of the game’s narrative. In essence, the player uses the bottle to bypass almost everything intended by the game’s makers and skip to the finale. The bottle becomes the most important item because it allows the player to access a new series of hyperlinks to beat OoT, achieving ludoludo harmony. The bottle gives the player the ability to sequence the values that govern where the game sends the player next.

Comparing, then, the bottle and the girdle leads to a new interpretation of Gawain’s actions during the epic. Instead of considering the Lady’s actions a temptation, why not consider her heroic for allowing Gawain to achieve ludoludo harmony in the Knight’s game? The ludoludo harmony achieved by both Gawain and Link should feel self-affirming. Both navigate outside the boundaries set by the game makers to achieve their harmony, but why is this action considered cheating? Their games do not explicitly forbid their actions. Rather than being shamed, Gawain should feel vindicated for identifying his hero, the Lady, and receiving aid. Doing so would require Gawain to demand acknowledgement of his player agency, which he does not do. Instead, he submits at the end to the Knight’s intent. The Lady’s subversion of the game’s rules are heroic, enabling Gawain to achieve ludoludo harmony. In the future, the bottle and the girdle should not be treated as cheating. Instead, these exploits should be hailed as examples of players seizing their own agency.

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