Since I've posted on tech like things the past couple of days, I thought I'd continue. During an almost random Google search, I came across this line:
West of House
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.
Anyone who had a computer in the early 1980s should immediately recognize these sentences. They are the first lines of the computer game Zork. Zork was a text based computer game originally released in 1980. I played the game in the early 1980s (after 1982 at any rate) on our CP/M based Kay-Pro II personal computer.
Compared to the massive multi-player role-playing games popular today, Zork is amazingly simple. A set of simple text commands open the "Great Underground Empire" to our intrepid adventurer (that is, if you can figure out how to get into the house!). Filled with nostalgia, I quickly found that the first three Zork games are available for free download, and after playing the game for a bit, I began to consider how this game could be used in a classroom setting or as a thinking tool.
First, Zork required a kind of persistence that I found confounding at first. Recently I have had several interactions with students that reminded me that persistence is a learned trait. I've spent considerable time telling students to keep doing research, keep searching the library, archives, or internet, and keep trying to refine language in a paper. The simple dead-ends in Zork and profoundly foreign interface (compared to the graphics laden interfaces of today's games) engaged my curiosity but also confounded me quickly as I had almost no assurance that I would be able to discover anything through my series of simple commands.
More importantly, however, is the spatial aspect of Zork. While the three-dimensional space of Second Life or other games provides a plausible representation of reality, Zork requires the player to reconstruct space through a series of simple, if vivid, descriptions. Navigation by the cardinal directions adds a layer of realism (and universality) to the interface. Even in Zork land, north is north (most of the time!). Even with several nice maps of the Great Underground Empire available on the web, it would be an interesting exercise to produce a map of the space described by Zork. Making the leap from text to space and back again is a common task for archaeologists who often rely on notebooks and published, textual descriptions as often as carefully wrought plans.
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.>go west
Forest
This is a forest, with trees in all directions. To the east, there appears to
be sunlight.>go west
You would need a machete to go further west.>go north
Clearing
You are in a clearing, with a forest surrounding you on all sides. A path
leads south.
On the ground is a pile of leaves.>kick leaves
Kicking the pile of leaves has no effect.>move leaves
Done.
In disturbing the pile of leaves, a grating is revealed.
Finally, the textual interface itself is an archaeological artifact. Exploring the earliest "interactive fiction" type computer games provides a perspective on the earliest efforts to create an immersive world on a computer. The spatial consistency in Zork echoes the spatial metaphors used today to produce understandable places of interaction and communication on in cyberspace. It would be silly to attribute the overarching spatial metaphors of cyberspace exclusively to Zork, but it certainly marks an accessible point of entry for students to understand how the historical metaphors of the internet continues to frame our expectations, experiences, and the potential of the medium.
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