ZZT (Boss Fight Books)

Anna Anthropy delves into what makes ZZT--as she herself admits, "an obsolete game-making tool"--special. She interviews members of the ZZT community from the nineties, and discusses the whole experience, from playing the original game, to building new levels, to discussing it on Prodigy and IRC.

Anthropy admires the creativity of the fans who made new worlds for the game with its limited tools:

Sweeney built these commands, these codewords, into ZZT so he could test out his worlds more easily. He built them for utility. He built them as shortcuts. Authors built whole worlds around them.

Some created games far outside the original parameters:

“Zem! was kind of part of a larger movement of what the community termed ‘engine games,’

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making the player control a different avatar through an additional control panel,” Zem! creator John D. Moore tells me. “I got a severe joy out of twisting ZZT to do something that it wasn’t really intended to do, and even something no one had quite thought to do before. I knew I wasn’t making a perfect iteration of Lemmings in ZZT, but I was pretty thrilled to be adapting it to an altogether different medium with concessions to what that system’s limitations were, and further, exploring new territory made possible by those concessions.”

Anthropy also muses on the elements of game design as they relate to ZZT in particular and other games in general.

Throughout, Anthropy relates her experience with ZZT to her experience growing up trans:

I spent my childhood dressing up in ZZT—trying on feminine identities to see how they felt. I was reading, too—fantasy worlds like Sword and Sorceress and The Enchanted Forest Chronicles.

On the whole, this is an excellent book for anyone who wants a view on this particular niche of nineties gaming or computer culture generally. show less

In the vein of Boss Fight Books Volume 1:[b:EarthBound|19386071|EarthBound (Boss Fight Books, #1)|Ken Baumann|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1386814390s/19386071.jpg|27457432], but is written in a tighter fashion and also has good insight into the creative process behind a lot of personal game development.

Whereas the first book was a beautifully sprawling mess of biography and description, this one is tighter. This befits the narrative architecture of each game.

[a:Anna Anthropy|5181019|Anna Anthropy|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1328825784p2/5181019.jpg] has shown a gift for embedding the autobiographical (esp. pertaining to her personal journey) into her work, and this book is no exception. It really captures the joy of what happens show more when a well-crafted (accidentally or purposefully) game engine allows someone who isn't a professional game developer (yet) to delve into the act of creation with no real clue to what they are doing. show less

I never played ZZT, but had equivalent experiences with BBSes and door games. MMMmm, IGMs for LoRD.