Do You Really Need 197 Pieces of Meat?
Healing Poverty Brain through Tears of the Kingdom
I realized poverty brain had invaded my time in video games when my partner stood in front of me holding the 164 Amiibo cards I’d amassed to get free resources in Tears of the Kingdom.
“Do you really need 197 pieces of meat?” She asked me, looking at my inventory screen in my paused game.
“Yes,” I said, without realizing what she was really asking, “I might run out.”
“Huh,” she says, knowing from her own experience in the game that I do not, in fact, need 197 pieces of meat. “Perhaps a topic for therapy then.”
See, I’d learned a trick a couple weeks prior that allowed me to duplicate items in my inventory endlessly with just the press of a few buttons in quick succession. In that, for the first time, my time in this game felt comfortable.
Tears of the Kingdom, like its predecessor, Breath of the Wild, has a theme of impermanence, scarcity. You begin your time fighting with a tree branch that breaks after three hits in both games, slowly collecting better weapons as you play. But even those break eventually and if you haven’t collected adequately, you run the risk of being in a dangerous world without a weapon.
