Searching for Imaginative Space? Apply From Within.

The recent excitement, and subsequent furor, over the new Legends of Zork browser-based online roleplaying game inspired me to think about how much we have changed as a gamer culture since the days of text-based adventure games.

For many of us, Zork hangs among our earliest memories of computer games. In many ways the series’ massive fanbase – in its entire gamut of casual and hardcore and obsessive players – is our miniature equivalent of the Star Wars fanbase: it is rabid.. it demands quality.. it cannot tolerate any deviation from canon.

So designing a new game based on the Zork franchise was a dicey and dangerous decision, especially considering the close ties the series has with the history of video games in general (it was among the first games derived from Colossal Cave Adventure). Stakes were high for everyone involved.

Yet, for every aging gamer out there worried about how the latest instalment of the Zork series would fare, there are 1000 more that did not grow up with text adventures. They did not get eaten by grues. They did not integrate the bizarre and off-kilter humor of The Great Underground Empire into their jargon. They are not used to directing a game’s action through computer-parsed language. They do not have to imagine themselves into a world constituted by text.

A Short Review

Here are a few comments selected from the aforementioned thread:

“That is my main and only complaint about the game: it’s absolutely passive. It’s the exact contrary of every other Zork game, where it was your wits and skills that saved the say rather than an automatic dice roll.”

“I like it and I’m playing it(played some beta aswell). I never played the original and frankly; I don’t wanna play text based rpg in this day and age.”

“I have a workmate who did grow up with the Zork originals and I pointed him in the direction of LoZ. His reaction is quite the opposite than John Biggs’ whereby he moans at me there aren’t enough action points in the new one (suggesting he wants to keep playing) but when he tried out the Flash based originals again, he was, like I was, simply frustrated by the continuous ‘I do not understand that word’ type of comments, and not knowing what phrases are actually accepted by the game.”

“Point and click/graphical games always will pale to each of our individual Zork experiences — at least for those of us who played the original text games. LoZ is the same. It isn’t much for “Zorkiness” as it’s a totally different style of game. But I really enjoy it.”

“Legends of Zork is the kind of game that you play for 10-15 minutes in the morning, between checking your e-mail and reading the news. It’s an entertaining diversion.”

These mixed reactions provide an interesting cross-section what happens when people have to make sense of a twist in the path. As several of the commenters point out, Legends of Zork is a turn-based lightweight RPG that is very reminiscent of the BBS door game Legend of the Red Dragon: you walk from town into the forest, kill monsters, return to town with loot, and rest when your hit points are low. In many ways, it is a browser-based incarnation of Diablo, sans a coherent storyline. All battles are decided through visible statistics: an encounter with an enemy plays back a script that describes hit percentages, chances of winning, experiences points gained, HPs lost, and zorkmids won. All and all, the game is a fantastic reinterpretation of hack’n’slash games, repackaged with an eye for 15-minute casual gaming. The artwork comprising the interface reminds me of both Professor Layton and the Curious Village, as well as The Curse of Monkey Island, and seems to do the trick.

Living with Cultural Change

Yet, if I may summarize the collective reaction, it goes something like this: “It’s a fun, cute, game. I can see some people liking it. But it’s no Zork.”

Beyond the pessimism of nostalgia, I think gamers have recognized that something is indeed missing in the formula. Sure, the writing might not be as humorous. Sure, the art style might not suit some people. Sure, going into statistical battles ain’t too much fun after a while. But I think something deeper, more dangerous, lies at the heart of the issue.

The problem is that Legends of Zork is the distant echo of a death knell that rang out in the 1990s when text adventures lost their sheen, and were replaced by clumsy graphical interpretations. Soon afterwards, graphical adventure games themselves were tossed in favour of real-time tactical and FPS games. A rift in our way of living, as gamers, has opened up between the 1980s and the present. Legends of Zork, while a noble attempt at bridging the gap between these alienated gaming eras, has only shown us just how wide the gap is.

The Dialectics of the Imagination and the Game

When I sit down to Zork I: The Great Underground Empire, I am greeted by a stark black space. I hit return – the space fills with white text against the black space – words! My eyes skim across the white-on-black space: I do not see words, I imagine places. I see things. I am located somewhere. The world opens up around me.

I am standing west of the white house. I imagine the texture of the boarded front door: When I was a young boy, there was an abandoned home down the street that I used to sneak into, and steal utensils from its dusty kitchen. The window was boarded up with rough spruce plywood, with a dark knot nestled into the top right corner. It is that rough piece of plywood that I imagine on the front door of the white house. The fear and excitement of the abandoned home is sparked in me for a moment – I do not consciously remember the abandoned home as I play – but the feelings it evokes persist.

I look over at the mailbox. The mailbox is the standard issue grey American mailbox that stands at the end of one’s yard. I recognize it from a scene in Stand By Me in which a group of hooligans drives around smashing mailboxes with a baseball bat. While I do not consciously remember the scene, my limited experience with Americana is stirred for a second.

Curious of the mailbox, my fingers dance over the keys on the keyboard – my eyes fixed on the screen. I do not consciously notice the keys clacking under my fingertips, but my intentions – my whole imagination – leans toward the mailbox.

I smirk a bit realizing how silly my action was – the world resists my clumsy intentions. I try again. This time my hands know exactly what to do. My fingers walk me to the mailbox.

It is one of the leaflets that I stuffed into people’s mailboxes in 1988, when I helped my mother distribute advertisements for a friend of hers who was running in a local election. I was nine years old. The leaflets were a bright orange, filled with text about the “New Democratic Party”. A large dog chased me from one of the yards, and I ran back to our Ford Econoline van, screaming and crying. It is that orange leaflet that I find in the mailbox, but I do not consciously recall the childhood memory of the leaflet – I am only filled with a sense of foreboding sparked by the terrifying dog. A call to adventure. I pick up the leaflet and read it.

I laugh and the tension is relieved. There is something strange about this place – a world that is part fictional world and part my world. I should be writing my dissertation, and the thought of it provokes guilt in me, but I want to play along. I want to be in the Great Underground Empire, just for a little while.

Imagination Lost

Legends of Zork is neither a bad game, nor is it a trivialization of the Zork series. It is the expression of the generational gap we find ourselves in today.

When I stare at the map of the Great Underground Empire as the creators of LoZ imagine it, my eyes take in the gorgeously drawn map – not the places themselves – but the world as seen from a bird’s eye view. I do not walk through the world. My fingers do not dance over the keyboard and do the walking for me. I point with my cursor, and the cursor – the computer and its algorithms – transports me to another place. I magically re-appear in front of the white house. But this is not the abandoned white house of my youth. It is not the house that I stole a rusted swiss-army knife from. It is a white house that corresponds to a popular modern children’s art style. It evokes nothing for me.

I click on the Dark Forest just as I would click on a news link or an RSS feed. The page reloads, and I am presented with a cute illustration of a forest and troll. I am about to choose whether I should run away or fight, but an AJAX script instead takes over and plays back the results of the battle – I do nothing. To the left of the adventure window is a menu that allows me to read a FAQ, change my account settings, or read posts over at the forums.

After a while, my interest wanes. I realize that the game is, for all intents and purposes, a wonderful thing in its own right. It is a game crafted for my 13-year-old cousin who spends most of his day on Facebook. It is crafted for him and his generation, because sitting in front of a black-and-white screen and walking through the world using his fingertips is not possible anymore. He does not imagine himself as a part of the Great Underground Empire, nor is he beckoned by the mailbox. He wants action and he wants cute illustration and he wants it now. He will use up his fifteen minutes of “action points” today and come back to the game tomorrow, nestled in between Twittering and posting his Facebook status. If I ask him, the art style will likely remind him of a handful of Miyazaki films that he’s seen. But it is not a part of his life – it is a part of his day.

Finding the Bridgeheads

We are likely to see more games like Legends of Zork in the future, and I welcome them. These kinds of games will come to define the basis for meaning for an entire generation of gamers that are coming into their own now, just as some of us did in the 1980s. No doubt some of those gamers will eventually come to reflect, not without a touch of sadness, that the games they played and loved as children are gone too.

I do not mourn the loss of text-adventure games; after all, I suspect that more text adventures are being crafted in the homes of indie game designers than ever were created back in the day. What I mourn is the loss of a way of life. Gamer culture has changed so much that a new Zork adventure game no longer would make sense to us. And we know it ourselves: one commenter said that he was “simply frustrated by the continuous ‘I do not understand that word’ type of comments, and not knowing what phrases are actually accepted by the game.”

I am fragmented inside. Part of who I am – my identity as a gamer – still lives in a world where my fingertips walked me through the Great Underground Empire like little feet in a vast geography. The GUE is world that lives only in my fingertips and my mind; the game itself is only a focus for my imagination. But it is the past, and I can only look back it over a great distance. 

Another part of me lives in the present. I walk in the Fallout 3 world by holding down the ‘W’ key. Every detail of that world – from the shapes of the mountains to the kinds of needles on the trees, has been provided for me. When I reach out to open a mailbox, I never fail. I hit the ‘E’ key. I cannot fail at opening the mailbox for a computer algorithm opens the mailbox for me. The mailbox opens without the help of my imagination.

Bridging the gap between these two estranged worlds requires something more than a translation of Zork for a new audience. It requires that we, as gamers, discover new ways of using our imaginations in a world that all but prevents us from doing so. It requires that we, as developers, discover ways of expressing subtlety and nuance using whatever tools we have. It requires that we, as an older generation, find common ground with younger gamers and share in new gaming experiences with them. The outrage levied at Legends of Zork is in many ways unfounded; it is a projection of anger stemming from our social anomie.

Until we locate those bridgeheads and begin building common experiences between them, I think that we will find ourselves constantly disappointed with anything new.