informal blog about zork

One personality trait of mine, which I am not necessarily proud of, is that I get frustrated quite easily. With that said, playing Zork drove me crazy. If my command wasn’t quite right, I would get a response back saying something like, “I don’t understand that word.” Then I would have to reword my command and hope it would work. This can be applied to my writing as well. Sometimes you need to alter the way you say certain things in order to get the reaction that you want from the reader. I also tried drawing a map to help me through, however sometimes I would say “go west” when I knew there was a room there, but it did not always work. I then had to find another way to get to the room I wanted to go to. The most frustrating thing about Zork was when I would write a direction, such as “North” and I would get a reply saying, “You can’t go that way.” I had to constantly think back and retrace my steps to see which directions were a possibility.
As I advanced I learned things, such as getting the painting and placing it in the trophy case, killing the troll with the sword, and climbing down the rope. I also experimented a bit and ate the garlic, just to see what the response would be. The game responded with something like, “you’re going to have bad breath”, which I thought was pretty humorous. I didn’t come close to finishing Zork, but I did manage to get the pot of gold and some other things to put in the trophy case, which took numerous tries and many hours of rewording my commands and getting lost.