Thursday, 16 July 2015

Textual Analysis: Week 01

Does the chosen game(s) make user input feel meaningful in terms of story direction and progression? Why or Why not?

The text based computer game "Zork", did not make the user input feel meaningful in terms of story direction or progression , as complying to the correct language proved difficult at times.
Being unfamiliar with text based games, I found complying to the games syntax challenging and what i believed to be logical responses or inputs were often invalid and halted my progression several times. After literally describing that “It is possible to climb down into the canyon from here.” I input, “climb down canyon” in which the game responded, “I don't know the word canyon.” Having the game stop my progression, even though I entered what I believed to be a valid input, took me out of the story and left me frustrated.
This resulted with me entering safe inputs that I knew would have an effect on the game, like go west, or, go north etc. Typing primitive and archaic commands for my avatar made the experience very bland and I didn't progress anywhere beyond reaching points where I “cannot go any further East.”

I did not feel any progression in either the story direction or gameplay, aside from accomlishing the trivial task of transporting to a slightly further area from where I originated, because the game language was foreign to me [despite being in english], and what I believed to be logically sound inputs did not register within the game world as anything/or anything significant halting any progression through the story, losing all desire or pleasure to play it.





No comments:

Post a Comment