Narrative Architecture, Zork, Building Worlds

*Spoiler Alert: If you haven't played Zork yet, proceed with caution because some of what I say in this entry will potentially "spoil" the story for you.

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Yesterday, when I started to play Zork, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I started out in front of a white house, on the edge of a forest. I thought this would be similar to the experience of interacting with Eliza, a simple exchange of user prompts and computer-generated responses. Boy, was I wrong. As I found out after several hours of stumbling around in Zork-world, the white house and forest actually sit on top of an elaborate underground empire called The Great Underground Empire, complete with secret rooms and monsters to kill!

After about 2 hours of playing Zork, I had accumulated a variety of random objects, including a jewel-encrusted egg, an elvish sword, a knife, a rope, a giant painting, and several other things. I had no idea what use these objects were for, but I had a feeling they'd be useful at some point. I'd managed to find a trapdoor in the house, and after descending underground, I realized I was on the edge of this massive underground empire. After another hour of stumbling around underground and arriving again and again in the same art gallery and bank, I became increasingly frustrated. I mean, here I was carrying an armload of impossibly heavy strange artifacts and I kept arriving in the same place. I needed to know what to do!

So, I did the immoral thing. I googled the solution to Zork. To my surprise, I found out that I'd barely even explored this underground world after 3 hours. Apparently, there were trolls to battle and thieves to encounter, and all those objects I'd collected actually had some type of essential use later on in the game. I was shocked that what I previously thought was a simple mundane house and underground cave was actually a giant empire. I still haven't gotten too far underground, but now I'm set on trying to explore this world further.

Playing Zork and then reading the "Game Theories" essays in First Person has made me realize the importance of an essential aspect in many video games: narrative architecture. Henry Jenkins says that "game designers don't simply tell stories; they design worlds and sculpt spaces." (121) Indeed, it seems like the art of crafting a "world" in a game seems to be a major preoccupation for game designers, and sometimes the beauty and elaborate detail of a world becomes key. It reminded me a lot of what writers like Tolkien, Rowling, and George Lucas do with their worlds--which Celia Pearce also elaborates on in her essay. In relation to Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, she says that "this highly elaborate imaginary world was tailor-made for interaction because, in Tolkien's own words, the stories were developed as a means to explore the worlds." (148) It seems like the efforts of today's game designers also continue the literary tradition of these writers; designers also create worlds for us to explore, except with the added aspect of interactivity. While Tolkien and JK Rowling's works are immersive projects in which the reader has no agency in controlling their reception of knowledge of the worlds, games like Zork incorporate major interactivity in the player's exploration of the worlds.

I think it's pretty interesting when we compare Zork with The Lord of the Rings or Star Wars and other texts with imaginary worlds. "Environmental storytelling" seems to be something that all writers and designers seem to strive for, but I don't think this necessarily needs to be judged as detracting from plot or character development. I guess in this sense, I'm partially siding with the ludologists and agreeing that we should "let games be games" and focus on what can perfect the art of gaming or world-building. And as for concrete ideas as to how to improve the process of world-building, I would personally like game designers to tell us how to reconcile some of the impossible time differences and other minor details. I understand that we're supposed to "suspend our disbelief" when we immerse ourselves in these worlds, but sometimes I just can't help but wonder when Lara Croft or the protagonist in Zork (aka, me) finds the time to sleep or rest. Also, with no pictures or graphics in Zork, I also wondered how in the world I was able to carry almost a dozen objects while stumbling around underground. In his essay, Jesper Juul even says that many games "work against the idea of immersion, because their discontinuous times and worlds point strongly to themselves as being games rather than believable fictional environments." (140) For me, sometimes suspending my disbelief just isn't enough, although I guess the logic goes that if I believe that trolls are totally normal in this world then it should also be totally normal for me to carry hundreds of pounds of objects.