"I'd rather be Zorking"
Sep. 16th, 2008 04:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerI'm still indulging myself by working my way through works of interactive fiction... although for my latest endeavour, it might be more accurate to say "playing a text adventure." I managed to make my way through the original "Zork," the game programmed by several MIT students in the late 1970s and named more or less by default that got split up, rearranged, and squeezed into the confines of turn-of-the-decade floppy disk-equipped personal computers to make up the "Zork trilogy" and found Infocom. To be honest, for all that I've played my way through all three games of the Zork trilogy before, I used a walkthrough and a pre-made map this time around. (The original Zork had a heavy weight of "right-angled passages," links that keep you from being able to go back the exact way you came and make drawing your own map more of a chore.) Being given solutions might have made them seem a bit arbitrary the way working them out by trial and error (or "restoring" an awful lot) might not, but I suppose I was willing to accept the tradeoff rather than get frustrated for who knows how long.
When the Infocom games first came out, being able to type in full sentences rather than two-word commands seems to have been a considerable selling point. Nowadays, though, it's easy to give just about any work of interactive fiction a proper "parser," and as a result even a modern port of Zork may be influenced by a different context of its times. In my readings about interactive fiction, I've seen references to a great many adventures programmed in computer labs in the 1970s directly influenced by the absolute original "Adventure," which flowed from a fantasy-flavoured simulation of a genuine cave system to still more fantastic outcroppings. Some of these references now seem to sum up Zork as programmed in imitation and a patchwork of joking fantasy references (including more than one dash of Lewis Carroll, and later laden down with a backstory in the manuals and sequels that still don't seem to affect the game that much itself) which may not have quite the same "sense of place," no matter how memorable individual locations seem to have become for me and for others. Still, I was willing to consider a point I had seen made not that long ago, that tramping from one side of the map to another, even if just noticing the "room names" like stops on a subway, does give the work at least a sort of immersiveness. It was interesting in any case to recognise what locations, puzzles, and treasures got kept in "Zork I" and what got moved to "Zork II" or even "Zork III," all together at last. Too, just as getting a chance to experience "Adventure" as it first was lends a more satisfying perspective to "Adventure" as it is now, even knowing that "Zork's" "endgame" is the same as "Zork III's" doesn't keep it from having a somehow different complexion than the revision.
When the Infocom games first came out, being able to type in full sentences rather than two-word commands seems to have been a considerable selling point. Nowadays, though, it's easy to give just about any work of interactive fiction a proper "parser," and as a result even a modern port of Zork may be influenced by a different context of its times. In my readings about interactive fiction, I've seen references to a great many adventures programmed in computer labs in the 1970s directly influenced by the absolute original "Adventure," which flowed from a fantasy-flavoured simulation of a genuine cave system to still more fantastic outcroppings. Some of these references now seem to sum up Zork as programmed in imitation and a patchwork of joking fantasy references (including more than one dash of Lewis Carroll, and later laden down with a backstory in the manuals and sequels that still don't seem to affect the game that much itself) which may not have quite the same "sense of place," no matter how memorable individual locations seem to have become for me and for others. Still, I was willing to consider a point I had seen made not that long ago, that tramping from one side of the map to another, even if just noticing the "room names" like stops on a subway, does give the work at least a sort of immersiveness. It was interesting in any case to recognise what locations, puzzles, and treasures got kept in "Zork I" and what got moved to "Zork II" or even "Zork III," all together at last. Too, just as getting a chance to experience "Adventure" as it first was lends a more satisfying perspective to "Adventure" as it is now, even knowing that "Zork's" "endgame" is the same as "Zork III's" doesn't keep it from having a somehow different complexion than the revision.