Zork I: The
Great Underground Empire. Black screen. Stern white letters. The rapid blinking
of a white cursor bar anxiously awaits an input, an order. You are sitting in a
stiff wooden chair and the arctic air of the Hillman Library. Your winter jacket
is zipped up to your chin and your headphones are dangling from your ears. Little
notes scratched into your wooden cubicle distract your attention momentarily –
Jackie loves Jeffrey and Dr. Newman is a bitch and Philosophy sucks and oh,
there’s that classy, artistic rendering of a penis. Glad to know we are all
mature adults.
You are standing
in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
There is a small
mailbox there.
The blinking cursor. Go east, you
tell it, and you are sucked into the world of Zork – the world of jewel-encrusted
eggs in a bird’s nest, grates that aren’t very interesting to kick, ancient
brass lanterns that lead you down secret passageways past grues and Cyclops.
Playing Zork allows you to physically
experience the cyberspacial world of William Gibson’s Neuromancer. As we trace our steps from the dimly lit forest,
through the open window of a white house, through a trap door hidden by a rug, and
finally arrive at an underground land, we do so as a vague and somewhat
faceless explorer. As we enter the world of Zork, we, to varying degrees,
dissociate ourselves and take on a new identity. Yet just as much we change
personas, we remain ourselves. While I am in the game, I don’t really picture
myself moving through the forest nor climbing the unusually large tree. Instead,
I just see the scenery change around me as I think and type commands into my
laptop. The sniffley-guy two seats away from me pulls me back into the reality
of chemistry chapters to outline, and essays to write, and exams to study for.
When I first read Neuromancer, I could never understand
Case’s overzealous desire to regain access to the Matrix. I never really
understood the general attraction for science-fiction novels – the imagination,
the fantastic but improbable future worlds. Why couldn’t Case just be satisfied
with the “normal” world of Chiba? Why can’t we all be content with our
realities? I realized that the answer came down to the contemplation of
identity. I had never experienced myself in a virtual world until I played
Zork. Growing up with older brothers I had played the 007, Spyhunters, Halo, Call
of Duty, and Assassin’s Creed video games, but I was always the guy in the
screen. With Zork the plane of the virtual world starts at the edge of your face,
not a television screen that’s twenty, or maybe five, feet away. You aren’t just
in the game, you are the game. In Zork my eyes and my mind move through the
virtual world. There is an interesting dynamic between the preservation of
identity and the blurring of identity. A logical person is still logical in the
world of Zork, and an illogical person probably spends ten minutes looking
under the rug, looking in the empty trophy case, looking on top of the trophy
case, and then returning to the rug which is still too heavy to lift but has an
alluring object underneath of it. In Zork, you, not the back of some soldier’s
head, get to go on an adventure, get to experience things you never have
before. Escalate a few technologically-complex levels and you are Case zapping
in to the Matrix. You can have the rush of adrenaline and the butterflies in
your stomach without experiencing any actual danger. You can be the invincible,
infallible, untouchable person that you spent your youth bluffing. Driven by
the unknown and the motivation to complete a goal –whether it ist o collect the
jewels or to hack into Sense/Net and steal the ROM – your Zork persona and the
character of Case become addicted to the virtual world.
2 comments:
This is clever, thoughtful and fun. Your stylistic choice at the beginning easily could have been a disaster - it's so easy to overdo that sort of thing, but it was fun and engaging instead.
I'm going to make a minor leap here. You'll recall that I spent a lot of class last time talking about the way in which identity works in Neuromancer. You're tackling the same topic from a very different angle - maybe paradoxically, Zork is giving you better access to the kind of virtual life which allegedly modern video games give us, and which Case is also seeking. It lets you be *other* than you are, but in particular ways which are both desirable and limited.
I enjoyed this greatly as a more or less personal essay. What was missing for me was a turn toward the details (rather than just general impressions) of Neuromancer. What does your analysis, for instance, have to do with Linda's interest in video games, or with the way that Wintermute toys with Case when flatlining him?
A good idea and a good style deserves a good analysis to go with it, in other words. This is a wonderful start but ultimately overly general - that's the problem that a revision would need to solve.
Jessica, I loved this essay. This was easily the most captivating I have read thus far. The way that you wrote the essay about being the game and seeing reminded me of being in the simstim for you. It was very interesting how quickly I imagined everything and had a personal connection with everything you said even though it was a personal essay from you in it's own right. I really like the points that you make with the reality and similarly the lack of reality that occurs at the same time with the game, and how that is essentially the struggle of Case. If you were to revise this, all I could say to make it better is to expand on this idea with more examples from the text, while still tying it back to your central idea of what Zork is like for you. In a sense, you are emulating exactly what the game and book are, and because of this, I would like to know more about your experience and how it relates to Case. I think that this will give even more points of attachment for other people if they were to read it as most everyone has at least one conflict with identity in life. Honestly, I just think if you write more in this same style, it would be great. Overall, really great vision and essay, and I would definitely be interested in reading more.
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