Pleasure - Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games - page 37

stuck. In fact, text adventures have given rise to “interactive fi ction” which is alive
and well as we write these words (Montfort, 2005). There is a real story here: It is
possible to have generic pleasures 1, 2, and 3.
You are not who you really are, nor are you where you would normally be. You
are on a classic quest and you are the hero willing to risk your life— many times —
in order to save the princess. You are transformed. Additionally, there are people,
grues and other creatures and monsters. Co-presence is a primary aesthetic pleasure
of Zork.
It is well documented how absorbed people have become interacting with Zork
and the illusion generated in players' minds is far better maintained because of the
consistency of the text and players' own creative imaginings of the landscape,
castles, and so on. Of course, none of these were “before their very eyes” but rather
behind their very eyes, in their minds. Zork is a classic and you should think back
to the observations we made in Chapter 2, on genre theory. The text adventure game
may have disappeared but the adventure genre continues to this day in a variety of
modes, yet it is still basically the same genre as it was all those years ago. You can
see its infl uence on console action adventure games such as The Legend of
Zelda and in latter day 3D games such as Thief and the whole range of stealth
games in general.
Why was it so successful? Zork is highly procedural, with the landscape, build-
ings, doorways, objects, and so on all defi ned procedurally. In addition, there is a
procedural defi nition of syntax and grammar so that Zork can recognize and respond
appropriately to commands. Zork does not do any great analysis of your input
phrases. It simply looks for appropriate words to respond to. Although participation
is restricted to keyboard commands there is a lot for the user to do and keyboard
commands can be analogues for dramatic actions such as sword fi ghts.
Zork is spatial in that there is a conceptual landscape players can explore by
entering commands to go north, south, east, and so on. It is also spatial in the sense
that there are rooms behind closed doors. Zork is not spatial as Doom is in a visual
sense; it is more akin to a complex website with many interwoven links and levels.
You have to imagine the spaces because you cannot see them.
Zork is a large environment that takes time and effort to map out in your mind.
We doubt if most people have anything like a complete map of Zork even after many
hours of playing it. The fact that you can only “see” exactly what is directly in front
of you helps in this respect. In fact, most players would use pencil and paper to
record where they had been, what their current inventory was, and so on.
Despite the fact that Zork is purely text-based, it was in its day a highly reward-
ing aesthetic experience. Even today people still play MUDs and MOOs , which are
the text adventure's networked descendants. In those days universities had main-
frame computers with tens or hundreds of “dumb terminals” connected up to them.
These dumb terminals only had basic command prompts and when you hit “enter,”
a request was sent off to the main processor on the mainframe which did the calcula-
tion and sent back the result to be displayed on the command prompt of your console.
That was the kind of network that early MUDs were played on. MMORPGs , well
MMOAdventures , go right back to the early days of computer games.