Pleasure - Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games - page 36

>pick up lantern
Taken.
>pick up sword
Taken.
>move rug
With a great effort, the rug is moved to one side of the room,
revealing the dusty cover of a closed trap door.
>open trap door
The door reluctantly opens to reveal a rickety staircase
descending into darkness.
> go down
You have moved into a dark place.
The trap door crashes shut, and you hear someone barring it.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
>fight grue
What do you want to fight the grue with?
>sword
It's too dark to see!
>go south
Oh, no! A lurking grue slithered into the room and devoured you!
**** You have died ****
Now, let's take a look here ... Well, you probably deserve
another chance. I can't quite fix you up completely, but you
can't have everything.
You know what is coming so we won't bother with the lists; a strong sense of
agency. You have to choose which direction you want to go in and are rewarded
with information about the consequences of your choice. You also have choices as
to what actions to take and objects to pick up and use. The consequences are not
always what you would want. For instance, trying to fi ght the grue with the sword
results in your being told it is too dark unless you lit the brass lantern before entering
the basement. There are some 150 different command combinations that Zork rec-
ognizes. If you try something out that is not recognized you get a simple message
to tell you so. You do not always get what you want and that is one of the real
pleasures of this game. You have time to sort out your intentions and to consider
their perceivable consequences. You have to plan ahead.
In terms of narrative potential, you can certainly build up your own stories of
how you eventually completed the quest. There is no single route through the
quest—in fact there are thousands of them—so most people's stories will be differ-
ent, perhaps dramatically so. It's also highly unlikely that you will complete the
game at one sitting but instead will have to make many saves and restarts, thus
adding to narrative potential. There is so much narrative potential, in fact, that to
this day you can still download crib sheets from the web to help you out if you get