I'll be the first person to tell you that I'm something of a dork. When everyone else was playing MMOs like World of Warcraft or EverQuest, I was playing MUDs. Not just because they're free, but rather because they just allowed more freedom. Believe it or not, as primitive as the concept of the MUD is, it really allowed the player to do more than modern online games do. I was also pretty damn good at them, so that kind of kept me around longer than it should have.
Anyway, where I'm going wtih this is that it's refreshing to play a game like Zork when we're all so caught up in the Playstation 3/Xbox 360/Wii hype of today. There aren't really any bells or whistles when it comes to zork, as there are no graphics or sound. Zork does, however, force you to put yourself into the game. Consider, for example, if you're playing a game on your flashy PS3, and you run through an area, say, a cave. You don't really spend any time looking at the scenery, you just see the texture and lack of light and say "okay, this is a cave." Zork forces you to read where you are, and in doing so, provides a much greater amount of detail than modern games can give, despite all their fancy pixel shading and anti-aliasing. You don't just get "You are in a cave," but rather "You are in a cave, far away you hear x, you smell y, you feel z".
It's just refreshing to see that the human mind can still go beyond the scope of the next-gen console.
On a side note, when one winds up in Hades after dying, is there any way to get out of there, or do I just have to keep dilligently saving and restoring?
4 comments:
I really agree with the theme of your latest blog entry.
I believe that the reason Zork is more refreshing than a Halo or Resident Evil game is because it is comparable to a book than any other medium. Like you said, "Zork forces you to read where you are, and in doing so, provides a much greater amount of detail than modern games." In Zork, you read the text and you create the visualizations yourself inside your mind, arguably much more graphically enhanced than an image on a screen. I know a few other people have talked about this before, but it is true that your imagination takes a bigger role in games like Zork.
The way Zork forces you to use your imagination is much more intellectually liberating than the high tech, pixilated world of so many video games. Video games are supposed to let you live a different life, but often times they capture your mind inside its constructed images.
For the past decade or so, graphics in video games have improved in quality exponentially. With this improvement, some cynics/realists have always been saying there was a cap on this improvement and that it was rapidly approaching. With all the problems with the PS3 console, one begins to wonder if they have hit that limit on graphic images? Perhaps with the approach to this limit, we will see a reactionary movement back to games like Zork?
I don't know if anything can be done once you're in Hades...
I've been having a lot of trouble even getting started with Zork. I've played for a few hours but always end up going nowhere. Right now, I'm trapped in the basement, the troll ate my egg and I can't get out...
One note for all of you - there's nothing wrong with restarting Zork. In fact, there are hard limits on several resources (esp. the lantern), which generally means that you only have a certain number of moves to complete the game.
Both of you are getting into questions about the value of strictly linguistic narratives as opposed to more visual ones. This gets into the ever-shifting and deeply historical idea of "imagination," always an interesting topic, and one which relates to American/western individualism...
I can't even begin to entertain the fact that this game was once believe to be innovative and new. I guess after having been brainwashed by the idea that graphics were everything in a game, this is why. I sit at the computer, and I don't even know what the character looks like. I guess that's the point though- he is supposed to be me. But I would rather be able to look at some computer generated character, than sit in front of a blue screen for hours on end doing nothing but finding myself in the same echoing hallway every two minutes.
Needless to say, this game has caused much frustration on my behalf...
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