Well, I have to admit that this was an enjoyable homework assignment. I left my video game habits, modest as they were, in a prior life, so the walk through memory dungeon was quite pleasant. Of course, returning to my old stomping grounds with a critical eye became an experience in itself. I played Zork long ago and far away, and at that point I had painstakingly mapped the terrain and finally bought a strategy guide to get me through a tough section that I cannot remember now, save for vague impressions of fire and ice.

This time around I was more content to wander and observe. I felt far from involved, and I watched my own reactions and the structure of the game much more than the actual play. I wanted to figure the game out, but in a totally different way than I once had. Perhaps this made it difficult to appreciate what the game brought to the table. Before my memory of command truncations and conventions kicked back in (hey, even if you never forget how to ride a bike, you may still wobble a little) I fought with the interface and reached some of the same frustrations that night owl did. The game felt clunky, probably as much because of my desire to pick it apart as my familiarity with more immersive environments.

I'm interested in the idea of "agency," as discussed at length in what we've been assigned to read so far in (you know, I'm really getting sick of trying to italicize things and bringing up my Favorites menu) First Person. I couldn't help but think of our experience with afternoon and other hypertexts when I read Michael Mateas' explanation of agency: "Agency is the feeling of empowerment that comes from being able to take actions in the world whose effects relate to the player's intention. This is not mere inferface activity. If there are many buttons and knobs for the player to twiddle, but all this twiddling has little effect on the experience, there is no agency. Furthermore, the effect must relate to the player intention" (21). I know Mateas is talking about games, but some of our complaints about hypertext and electronic fiction so far seem to stem from our lack of agency in determining the course of the text. The counterargument until now has been that this lack of agency is somehow artistically productive, that it demands more out of us, or makes us aware of the medium to which we are responding. But the first two segments of (I don't want my Favorites menu!) First Person suggest that our desire for agency in these works may simply be poorly founded. Assuming that the ambitions of Michael Joyce, et al are narrative, deprivation of reader agency may be essential; Ken Perlin says that this is exactly what the novel does. So Joyce and company are maybe just teasing us with the promise of agency, the result of which is not a feeling of empowerment but a feeling of frustration, which feeds into the narrative thrust.