Seven Lions

I’m digging through the Zork source code for mysterious purposes to be revealed later, but I figure I can share some of the more interesting bits with the world at large.  I’m one of those people for whom Zork was a seminal childhood experience, and I’d place it along with Seven Cities of Gold and Hero’s Quest (Later called Quest for Glory) from Sierra.  Not that Breach II and Zaxxon didn’t show up, but there was an emergent narrative character to these three games that has always stuck with me.

From a scholarly perspective, the multiple interpretations of the world presented by the software of Zork–which only exists as a series of rooms, objects and limited vocabulary in its original form–is the most interesting.  Mapped out, the caves, white house and Flood Control Dam #3 and of Zork look something like this:

A hand drawn map made by a Zork player

But taken in the form of interactive fictional narrative, the story and experience of Zork looks less like a linear text and more like a mode of explanation (Mashed up throughout the Internet, until the existence of Grues and all their habits have been analyzed and documented by a team of amateur zoologists).  There’s a vastness to these earlier games that defies translation.  And there’s also a goofy ludological ludicrousness that becomes even more apparent when we examine the code itself.

400    I=192                    ! assume inedible.
IF(PRSO.EQ.GARLI) I=193            ! garlic is joke.
450    CALL RSPEAK(I)                ! disdain it.
RETURN
C

As a text, Zork makes for a rather poor novel.  As an interactive gamespace, it pales in comparison even to the simplest sandbox games available today.  As an example of code, it is valuable in its historical quality.  But as an experience, it somehow becomes greater than its parts, and influences not only the individual through exposure to interactive fiction but an entire society in its strange internal logic and conventions, far beyond the effect of World of Warcraft and Grand Theft Auto.  Perhaps a vast majority of this effect is based on its foundational aspect, but there is a classical nature to this work that goes beyond its existence as one of the first computer games.

Considered as simply a computer-assisted choose-your-own adventure, Zork doesn’t seem so special, but the medium itself hides the existence and clues to the “right” or “more fulfilling” adventures and as such leaves to viewer/reader/experiental agent in doubt of their own fulfilment of possible narratives.  For myself, it wasn’t until years after my first exposure to Zork that I went back, guided by one of the countless walkthroughs all over the Internet, and “successfully” completed it (Having no idea that in all the times I’d played it that those were not “successful” in their own rights).

California, that teetering, bankrupt, furlough-doling entity that was once the swaggering bully of these United States…

I have it on good authority that the California Arts Council so badly wanted a hokey, hipster, digital art piece for their California Arts Day Poster competition, that they’ve decided to eschew traditional art as too stodgy and not have any poster at all.  It’s hard to find the original call, but it had such warning signs as the use of the word “mash up”.