Zork was just a little bit before my time, and although I was an avid fan of successors of Zork, I commented I had never played it when a colleague and I were discussing what we were playing. For him, it’s nostalgia, he pinged me a link and out of curiosity I checked it out.
What blew me away about my first playsession was how immersive the game is. Nothing but text, and yet I got that rush like I did back in the eighties. My imagination flexed that unloved but well-honed muscle where the text-based interface transports me to a world where anything is possible.
These games are sort of on a grid, where you can go west, for example, using the text-based interface. However, locations can open up myriad pathways, such as the cellar in Zork, so the navigation system does not map spatially to a grid.
Directed graphs seem a good candidate as directionality is important in terms of functionality in the game, they allow for a node to connect to different nodes in different directions.
During my first adventure, where I was eventually felled in my nth fight with the troll, I began to sketch graphs in my notebook.
I knew I’d need to plot these graphs before long, and I was right. My second playsession was dominated by developing a good enough visualisation. It was time to crack out Quarto, tidyverse, and ggraph. I need full visualisation customisation options, but with some automation for scale. This is a ggplot problem.
