Last weekend, I booted up my Switch and finished Breath of the Wild - a task that has been somewhere my to-do list for significantly over a year. I don't think it was so much a chore on the backburner as much as a reminder to take all my other errands less seriously, that somewhere, among all the other things I have to do, is an impeccably crafted world that after nearly a hundred hours, I have yet to uncover the greatest secret of, and once I do the more mundane real-world responsibilities, I can discover it.
But as I gathered my roommates around the television to commemorate this historic moment, I found myself stuttering - how could I communicate the great importance of this battle with Calamity Gannon? Sure, the boss was bound to be challenging, but deriving the importance from Gannon's difficulty or the visual effects seemed to be blatantly incorrect. The battle was sure to be epic, but the combat promised to be similar to the other four scrounges in the Divine Beasts, which my roomamates had already seen my complete. Gannon's calamity form was bound to be a crazy mix of malice and Shika technology, but elements of this art style are already seen all over the map. How could I explain to these onlookers that, at this time, in this game, both of these makes this battle more important, and not less?
The discussion we had last week on labor's relation to content has given me new words to consider what I couldn't say. While I found myself swallowing my sentences in a similar way when explaining to my parents that I put down hundreds of dollars to buy a new console just to play this one game, the only weapon in my arsenal was pulling up the game and showing them the size of the map. "Look! Don't you see!". Breath of the Wild is BIG - in some way, and the closest representation I had was a topographical analysis of it, or even standing on the edge of the Great Plateau to show just the sheer distance I could view.
But the bigness isn't the number of hours you can spend on side quests or how far you can run before the game tells you explicitly to go back. Open world games provide coherent worlds with immaculate detail with characters that promise you so much to do, partially for you to digest it, but the wonderfulness of it is not derivable from that, which is why none of it accurately describes the game. The wonder comes from showing others it's too much to digest. Its coherence on such a grand scale makes it valuable, at least to me. My relationship to the game cannot be the same as the relationship to a task because it it no longer becomes a task, or even a series of them. Instead, the perfect, platonic open world game is something so big, in every scene, that no matter how I try I can never understand what was put into it. This is what I try to say to my roommates, and to my parents.
The relation of open world games to labor is not a byproduct of how games are made - rather, it is the knowledge from me, the player, that games are made with finite labor that directly leads to this core characteristic. If we want to analyze a game by what it does, open world games will always fail in this discourse because of this. Because taking massive amounts of human labor and using them to generate something incomprehensible is something we already fetishise, purchasing this game is like buying a monument - or at least a ticket to go visit it.
And this is why the battle means what it does. This final battle, in the center of the map, is the center of the vastness - and it's the excuse used to call this colossus a game. Defeating Gannon will never "complete" Breath of the Wild, because it combines its labor to no longer strive to be a 'game' - in the sense of something completable and digestible in its entirety. Instead, it's a memento to the days when defeating Gannon would mean that.