New Media Communication @ Tunxis CC - Spring 2007

For readers who stumble upon this post and want a little bit of context, here is the assignment, and here is a link to Amanita: Samorost and to Zork.
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Amanita: Samorost is a game with no instructions. At the start, it doesn’t look like a game at all. There is some music playing in the background and an interesting collage/image with a few scattered animations (blinking lights). The whole thing just sits there. If the player shows no initiative and gives up, the game is over. If the player begins to wonder what the hell he is looking at, he starts exploring the game space with his mouse cursor. When it changes from the traditional arrow pointer icon into the hand clicker icon, he clicks. Something finally happens!

The player learns that he must look for his cues on what to do next. The opening graphic screen of Amanita: Samorost has what appears to be a bottle neck with a stopper in it, just asking to be clicked. Clicking in the general area of the bottle stopper gets the story going. So for a game with no instructions, it certainly has rules. The initial goal of the game is to manipulate each environment in such a way that the little fella from the bottleneck can proceed. And for the most part he’s no help at all, content to wait on the player to figure things out.

And the story gets rolling after that first user interaction. The view is expanded and the player sees that another planet-ship is on a collision course with the planet-ship that the protagonist is living on. A cut-scene where no user input is allowed shows how the little guy gets from his own planet-ship over to the other one, and the game again waits for the player to explore with his mouse. There are some characters toiling away in the fields that smaller than the one in the foreground, though similarly dressed. The difference in scale implies that the little ones working on the hills are much further away.

The first step to completing this stage is to check out the relationships of all objects in the environment. The character lounging in the foreground isn’t smoking his hookah. So the player clicks on the hookah and he smokes it. The contents are spent. Try clicking on the hookah again, and the guy tries to smoke from it, but gets nothing and discards the mouthpiece. This mouthpiece looks kind of like a key, and there’s a keyhole very near where the mouthpiece now rests. Clicking on the mouthpiece causes it to jump up and rattle around in the lock. The next thing to do, naturally, is click on the button atop the lockbox. This starts that ski-lift in the back ground rolling—but nothing happens! The player notices a loose cable, and clicks it. Try the button on the lockbox again and the ski-lift brings the main character up the mountain. He’s ready to go, and he’s facing to the left. There’s a left-pointing arrow on the left side of the screen, so the player clicks on the character, who turns around and skis back down where he came from. There’s another environmental factor to tweak. It’s the sign. Clicking on it until it points toward the left (where the hint/arrow points) ought to do the trick. Bring the guy back up on the ski-lift. Oh wait, on his way down he knocked the cable loose again! Finally after getting him back on the hill, with the directional sign pointed in the right direction, the player clicks on the guy. At this point, the player receives a pretty explicit hint. The character says “He’s in my way” and an arrow appears out of nowhere pointing directly at the obstructing character. When the player clicks on the little worker dude, he moves and then the player can click on the main character and send him skiing off to the next level.

Compared to this early stage, clicking on the main character from here on in elicits nothing more than a shrug and a stupid look (unless he’s able to act, assuming that the environment has been appropriately manipulated). The ultimate goal of the game is revealed at the end, when the other planet-ship that the little guy landed on (and explored with a great deal of help from the player) is steered clear of collision with his home planet.

As a game, Zork starts off very similarly to Amanita, but instead of the player being faced with a graphic environment and background music, he’s faced with a brief text-only description of the environment. Those superficial differences aside, the games both sit there and wait for player input, with no indication of where or how to start other than environmental cues. A person interested in playing Amanita will use his mouse to explore the environment, checking for places to interact. A person interested in playing Zork will mentally construct the environment, and will perhaps take the most obvious action by typing into the prompt: “open mailbox”.

The player can manipulate and explore the environment in Zork just as he can in Amanita, except that in Zork the player can move back and forth between rooms or spaces. Using text commands instead of the mouse, the player can walk around the house and discover a window that’s ajar. Attempting to enter through the window at this point is impossible, because the window is not open. This is a lot like trying to lift the character up on the ski lift in Amanita when the cable is loose. It’s an environmental condition of the game space. The player in Amanita cannot operate the ski lift with a loose cable, just as the player in Zork cannot enter the window while it is merely ajar.

Similarly to the subtle hints in Amanita, there are some subtle hints in Zork. Using the window example, the description of the window upon examination is “The window is slightly ajar, but not enough to allow entry.” Hint, hint! If the player enters a command to open the window, he is informed that “With great effort, you open the window far enough to allow entry.” Another hint! The next command is to “Enter window” and then the player is in the house.

In Zork and in Amanita, the player learns the rules of the game as he goes. In Amanita, if the player attempts to do something that is not possible, he is notified visually or aurally. In Zork, he is notified via descriptive text. There are many objects in the world of Zork that the player may wish to interact with, using commands like “spit on table,” that are not possible. In Zork, one cannot just spit on the table, it’s a limitation of the game’s programmers, who did not foresee that the player might want the character to spit on the table. In Amanita, perhaps the player wants to swat one of the little flies that is buzzing around. Well, it simply cannot be done. Clicking on the fly—at least when I tried it—has no effect.

I would say that Zork and Amanita have more in common than not, when viewed as systems. It’s easy to take a superficial glance and conclude that Amanita is far more advanced than Zork, but that ignores the fundamental aspects of the gameplay, which are the same.