I had a complicated relationship with video games when I was a teenager. I had straightforwardly, wholeheartedly loved the Nintendo games that I’d grown up with, tumbling around primary-coloured dreamscapes in Super Mario 64 and having the time of my life. But as I grew into a pretentious young adult in the early 00s, I started to want more from games, and I wasn’t finding it. So many of them were mindless, or juvenile, or needlessly violent. So few seemed to have anything to say. I started to wonder whether games might really be a waste of time, like the judgy adults in my life kept telling me.

My response to this was to relentlessly intellectualise the games I played, in order to justify the time and attention I was expending on them. I mainlined highbrow gaming magazines and wrote grandiose blogs about serious adult themes in Deus Ex and Metal Gear Solid and the ancient Fallout computer games. My childhood love of Nintendo, with its bright hues and unselfconscious approach to play, felt embarrassing. Then I switched on The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, and had a realisation about the nature and importance of play that would shape my life.

The Wind Waker had come out in 2003, just before my 15th birthday – but I did not play it then, because I had judged it to be childish. I had based this purely on its art style. Where the blocky, early-3D Zelda games of my childhood, Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask, had gone for a semi-serious fantasy look, Wind Waker was unveiled as a living cartoon. Link, the series’ boy hero, had gigantic eyes and adorably diminutive stature; the menacing monsters he fought had been transformed into slapstick visual punchlines. At this time, there was a shift towards graphical realism and mature themes in games: ‘“grimdark” titles such as Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto were Xbox and PlayStation flagships. Nintendo’s boisterous cartoon inspired ridicule from self-declared serious gamers.

So I dismissed it, with the misguided certainty only a teenager is capable of. But then I came back to it, when I was 17 and really in the depths of my existential crisis about video games, seriously considering abandoning them along with my burgeoning career as a games journalist to do something more supposedly worthwhile with my life. And what I found in Wind Waker was a route back to joy. This cartoon Link, with his extraordinarily expressive face and his dinky sword, felt like a manifestation of childlike curiosity. Zelda is a game all about exploration: it’s designed to reward your purest playful impulses. Embodying this character, I felt free to just … play. To swish my sword at tufts of grass, sail the seas in a bright red talking boat, chase little pigs around on the beach, set a course towards distant islands and look for secrets. For the first time in a few years, I was totally absorbed in a game. Not overthinking it, just enjoying it.

Wind Waker prompted a fundamental change in my relationship to games, in the realisation that childlike doesn’t mean childish. Play is important in and of itself, not only permissible but essential. It’s not something that you outgrow or intellectualise away. I have nurtured and cherished my innate playfulness ever since. A keen sense of fun has guided me through life: it has helped me recognise when jobs and relationships have not been working for me; been a coping mechanism for more than my fair share of grief; and made me a better parent. It has made me open-minded and curious, unafraid of new things. Fun is not a bad thing to organise your life around.

In adulthood, especially for women, there is a constant sense that anything you do must be productive or self-bettering. You read books not for pure enjoyment but for edification. If you work out, it’s framed as improving your maxes or preserving bone density rather than enjoying moving your body. A hobby isn’t just for fun, it’s a side hustle. Everything that we do is framed through capitalist thinking and this abstract sense of worthiness.

There remains even today a pervasive idea that playing games is juvenile, a waste of time, or somehow shameful. But it is vital – humans are playful animals, one of only a few that plays past childhood. Keeping space and time in your life and your heart for play is a survival strategy against a world that wants to squeeze you for all you’ve got.