Zork1

Image by vnoel via FlickrPlaying Zork highlighted to me just how much computer games have evolved and how much the way I play games has evolved. When I was very, very young, my dad showed me how to play another text based game called Adventure. Even though I was a child and my dad had to help me play(keyboard? what's a keyboard?), I was able to remember enough to form a comparison between how I used to play this type of game, and how I play the game now.

I remember my overall obstacle to success in Adventure was vocabulary. Although I now know many more words, verbs in particular, that didn't necessarily help me play Zork. The syntax required is fairly strict for these games, and there is no obvious help. I still struggled with finding the right to way to go upstairs in the house or to take the water bottle from the table.

Making it into the house was easy enough. Once I was in the house, I managed to get myself killed by a grue fairly quickly by traipsing upstairs without a light. Although the game allowed me a 2nd chance at life, it dumped me someplace I didn't recognize. At this point, I used ctrl-c and restarted the game. The purpose of the house is obviously to supply the user with some needed artifacts. I ended up taking a bottle of water, bag of peppers, elvish sword, "nasty" knife and most importantly, rope and a lantern.

After acquiring these items, I began my futile attempt to tie the rope to something. My thinking was that if I tied the rope to something, I could throw the rope down the chimney and climb down. I tried to tie that rope to anything and everything in the house. When I couldn't tie the rope to anything in the house, I jumped out the window and went to a tree. When I typed in the command for tying the rope, the program said to me, "you can't tie rope to that." This constitutes game failure for me, because I am a caver, and I've tied ropes to trees, descended and ascended plenty of times. Whatever...

I noticed that I played this game much differently than I did as a child. The first thing I did even before I started playing the game was to print out the few commands listed in the readme file. I knew that this would not be the "end all, be all" list of commands, but would get me started. Once I started the game, I began drawing a map which was very helpful for going back and forth. I'm so used to having access to maps in games that I play. As a child, I would never have started by looking for commands to use or drawing a map. It was all about guessing.

Zork was an ok game for 30 minutes, but I would probably need to find a few more commands if I intended to play it any longer. The lack of graphics didn't bother me as much as the lack of help. For instance, I got a description of the kitchen the first time I entered it, but there was no obvious way to see the description again once it had scrolled upwards. It seemed to me that this was intended to be part of the game play. It's really amazing what I've come to expect from the games that I play.