Because of today's prominent and readily available graphics technology, text-based adventure games have become a thing of the past. Zork seems almost retroactively revolutionary. Its concept, portraying space and images using only words, is refreshingly different. The spaces feel real because of the language used to describe them. The language is vivid, making it easy for the player to visualize the setting. However, there is still plenty of room for imagination as the descriptions are not overly detailed.

You, as the player, know your location by the description of your surroundings. You are told "You are standing in an open field west of a white house..." and from there you can choose to move in any cardinal or secondary compass directions: north, south, east, west, northwest, southwest, northeast or southeast. When it is appropriate, such as when there is a tree or staircase present, you can also move up or down. Once you have chosen to travel in one of those directions, you are informed of your new surroundings and you begin to make a map in your mind of where you are and where you have been. Part of the challenge of the game is creating a map in your head of the relative locations of important places so you can traverse through space and return to places you have already traveled if needed.

When you begin the game, you are not told much about what your mission is. Perhaps you begin to move around out of curiosity and start to discover that there are interesting sights and sounds to discover. You might expect to find people in the house, monsters in the attic, and wild animals or common fantasy creatures in the woods so you explore with some caution. You notice that your score increases when you break into the house and so you assume that your earn points when you accomplish tasks that are not obvious when first taking in the scene. This causes you to think more thoroughly through what possible actions you can make in every situation. You discover your score increases when you find the jewel-encrusted egg and so decide to look for valuable objects to pick up. You see a nasty knife in the attic and you keep hearing about this song bird in the distance and so you look for more clues as to what the significance of these objects are.

The most frustrating part of the game to me is the way the player must move through the game. I could form a map in my head up to a certain point but after trying to move six different directions from a spot and not budging, I had a hard time remembering if I had actually made any progress. Then, my mental map would seem incoherent and I would have to reorient myself. I assumed that each move in a certain direction was of the same length. For example, if I were to move west once and then back east once, I would end up in the same place I started. I am not entirely sure that moves are indeed equidistant, but in my mind they had to be in order to make sense of the space. Because of this, the environment seemed to be a grid in which I could move between squares using my direction commands.

Sometimes you are presented with a path, or a direction of movement that seems obvious. The game creators expect you to take the path, and you expect to find something important along it or at its end. Sometimes the path is less obvious but the destination provides the motivation. For example, you do not see a way into the house but look for one because you are anxious to see what is on the inside. Or you discover a locked grating in a clearing in the woods and wonder if there is an underground tunnel into it. You have two main motivations: figuring out your surrounding world and accruing points. Through these two tasks, you hope to uncover both the mystery and solution and thereby win the game.