Assignment 2: Spatial Analysis
Zork:
Zork is a text based game, thus it paints its pictures and describes its locations only with words. Though any visual effects are missing, the imagination easily fills them in based on the descriptions the game gives for locations and events. Locations often contains objects which you can interact with, such as eggs, paintings, etc. These objects can often be used later in the game in some different place to satisfy some purpose. Moving a rug could reveal a trap door, for instance, or picking up a piece of garlic could later ward off intrusive creatures.
Since the actual travel is based only on textual descriptions, it could be useful to draw up a map as you play to keep track of what rooms connect to each other. Rooms are connected by halls, ladders, and doors, and movement generally consists of moving in some cardinal direction or climbing up or down. This leads to fairly simple navigation, as long as you're paying attention to the descriptions of each room.
Myst:
Myst is almost a graphical version of Zork. It, too, is a puzzle/adventure game that involves traveling from place to place, collecting items, and solving riddles, but instead of typing in a direction to travel after reading a description of the room you're in, you click on a part of the screen while viewing an image of the room. The mouse cursor changes to indicate hot points on the screen, such as doors or other directions of travel and items you can interact with. Sometimes items would be cleverly hidden in any given space, and you'd have to be a little more observant to find them. On the starting island, for example, is a library with shelves full of books. Most of the books are unimportant to the game and you can't click on them or view them closer, but among those numerous decorative books are a few books with key information in them. They stand out a little from the other books, but you have to mouse-over them and see that the cursor changes to the interactive graphic to know for sure.
The travel in Myst, like Zork, isn't completely open for exploration. There are certain paths you must follow, and veering from them is not allowed. On a long road, for instance, you can only go forward or backward. It might seem tempting to walk off the road into the trees, but you simply can't do it. This doesn't make for linear gameplay, though. There are a number of paths and places, that can seem enticing to explore, but many of these will only throw you off the correct path.
The Legend of Zelda:
The Legend of Zelda is fairly similar in idea to Zork and Myst as far as how the game progresses. You travel back and forth from place to place, acquiring new items and information that allow you access to other places. Zelda, however, is a more real time game engine, as opposed to the sort of turn-based systems of Zork and Myst, where events don't really happen until you cause them to. In Zelda, creatures are moving whether you are or not, which means you need to keep yourself moving from room to room so you don't get yourself in trouble with monsters or traps.
In Zelda, you are mainly interacting with switches and buttons, pots, doors, and blocks, which can be pushed. Almost all puzzles are made up of some combination of these items. The puzzles also generally take place on a room to room basis. You might, for instance, have to break a pot to step on a switch that creates a path to a door that must be broken open with a bomb. Once the door is open, you can advance to the next room and discover what new puzzle awaits you. Your movement is guided by the goal of getting into the next room, though it's up to you to figure out how to do it. You might see a locked door and some pots and switches. You have to figure out what must be done to unlock the door, whether it's press all the switches at once, press some special combination of switches, or just break all the pots.
The actual navigation in Zelda is fairly simple. The world is made up of many rectangular "rooms" (which I'll use synonymously with the word "screens", as in a location that fits exactly into the game window or t.v. screen) which are pieced together in a grid pattern, with movement between rooms in the four cardinal directions. Within each room you can move your character along cardinal directions or diagonally. It's this small scale moving within rooms that lets you move in the large scale and advance through dungeons and parts of the outside world. Navigation is based on visual landmarks and map position. In addition, the quick scrolling effect when you move from one screen to another helps emphasize your direction of movement when changing rooms. This, combined with the simple grid layout, helps you keep your orientation. You can even remember how to get from one place to another by remembering the moves it takes to get there as combinations of Ups, Downs, Lefts, and Rights. It might, for instance, be 3 screens up, 2 to the right, another up, and one to the left to get from town to the next dungeon you need to get to. This allows for simple navigation, which doesn't necessarily imply simple gameplay.