Zork (session 1): Diegetic Action

Location: Bedroom
Device: Computer
Time: 1 hour

It took some time to figure out how to move forward and type out the right commands when I first started playing this game. I looked up a playthrough of Zork on Youtube and referred to it when I got stuck at the beginning. I got confused when I tried to explore outside the house from the forest to the cliffs and couldn’t find my way back to the house. It seems as though my only direct entrance into the world described by the Zork manual is through the white house. Once I slipped into the cellar, I encountered and killed a troll in two commands.

I noticed that the narrator has a sassy response to some of my commands, which presents an interesting interaction between a machine action and an operator action. The screenshot provided below shows that I tried to move downward even though it wasn’t explicitly stated that moving in that direction was an option. That command wasn’t processed, it was prevented by a machine action and shown through text on the screen. Within diegetic space, I’m restricted by the specific descriptions that the game provides. I can either go north or south if stated in the description of a space like a cave.

According to the article titled Gamic Action, Four Moments, the “simplest nondiegetic operator act is pushing Pause. Pausing a game is an action by the operator that sets the entire game into a state of suspended animation” (126). I don’t need to pause the game to leave it in suspended animation, it happens between each command. The diegetic action is the text that appears on the black screen. Since diegetic play only occurs within a game, it’s the sound and the visual experience that plays during the player’s interaction with a game. Is it specifically in the moment or does the word apply to an element that reoccurs throughout the game?