ZZT by Anna Anthropy: Book Review
I had never heard of ZZT until I started reading the Boss Fight Books series. This is because I never got into computers. Or, more accurately, never got into coding.
There’s a lot about computers that I honestly missed. This was probably due in no small part because I never had a reliable internet connection until the last decade. Computers were in my house, and I even had access to personal computers, both in terms of my parents’ that they used for business, and even my own PC which was a gift from my godfather. Still can’t believe that happened, but heck I killed a lot of hours playing Stronghold Crusader on that machine, so I wasn’t asking questions.
I note as a personal aside that I was so obsessed with the aforementioned videogame that I once sat in front of my PC for close to seven hours playing it, stopping only once for a bathroom break, and then afterwards discovered a female black widow had made a web literally less than a foot away from my own foot. Before my reader asks, no, I didn’t kill her, I just shooed her a bit and she crawled up into the walls where she could continue to eat all the bugs she wanted unbothered.
Pay it forward, and don’t be a dick. That’s my motto in life.
My experience and knowledge of personal computers is basic, but I’m beginning to learn more and more about them as I’m working towards building my own, and this has given me a perspective about my life I didn’t have before. I have been, for most of my life, a person who played videogames exclusively on consoles. My entire understanding of videogames was wrapped around console systems, even when I played computer-exclusive games. Video-games meant having a plastic rectangle filled with computer chips from a company like Nintendo, Sony, or Microsoft, and as much as it pains me to admit, I associated PC gaming with people who were “totally not cool.”
Nevermind the fact that I was also “totally not cool.”
I note this as an aside, it’s a truth immemorial that there’s nothing worse than a nerd who thinks he’s better than other nerds.
Apart from my general obnoxiousness, this distance I gave computers also caused me to miss a great deal of technological innovations, the opportunity to learn and master computer code, and it also made sure that I missed the development of shareware and community modded games like ZZT.
I should also note that while I always pronounce the title phonetically (Zee-Zee-Tee) Ann Anthropy notes in her book that Tim Sweeney, the creator of the game, pronounced it like it looks: “zzt.” Two quick vibrations along the tongue ending in a press against the back of the teeth. Think of a fly colliding into a bug zapper, or the sound a printer would make as you plug it in and then it immediately short circuits.
ZZT by Anna Anthropy is a short book, even by the standards of Boss Fight Books, and it manages in its 142 pages to make a beautiful statement about humanity and the social compulsion to connect to other people even in the most abstract ways. Written partly as a biography of their personal journey as a trans woman, a breakdown of the software that makes up ZZT, and a history of the shareware culture and ZZT modding community, Anthropy’s book is impressive for the way it balances multiple narratives, all while maintaining a core focus on a game that, by today’s standards of visual complexity in videogames, is deceptively simple. Looking at images of ZZT playthroughs it’s remarkable how much creativity was generated through an interface design that was afforded only a few characters.
And on that note, in an early passage Anthropy explains how ZZT relies on, and is built of a limited number of characters. She writes:
ZZT runs in MS-DOS “text mode.” That is, the game is made up of letters and numbers like the ones on your keyboard, just like the ones in this book. But there is more than just the Latin alphabet: the MS Dos “extended ASCII character set” includes Greek letters, mathematical and astrological symbols, international characters like eñes and ümlauts, arrows, playing card symbols, fragments of lines and patterns, and of course the smiley face that is the star of ZZT.
All of ZZT is built from just 256 characters. (12)
Looking at any screenshot of ZZT, the simplicity of its visual presentation is almost jarring. Even players like me who were raised on their Super Nintendo Systems would probably balk at the basic graphics. It’s difficult to fight the snobbery that contemporary videogame software has generated; anything below 60 fps(frames per second) is treated like abandonware in most contemporary player’s mindsets, and even the most pixelated retro-game still seems light-years ahead of what ZZT would offer.
Simplicity however is not synonymous with mediocrity.
And simple can offer far more depth than complexity.
In his graphic novel Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Scott McCloud observes what he refers to as Iconic artwork, and how it compares to photorealistic artwork. Having read the book more times than is humanly normal I’ll spare my reader a point-by-point recitation of his argument. Simply put, McCloud shows how visual art that is considered iconic is simple, i.e. two dots and a curved line can create a smiling face to the human eye. What’s important for McCloud’s argument, and Anthropy’s as well, is that iconic artwork allows readers to project themselves onto the figure being represented (and players since this is an essay about a videogame(or more accurately a review of a book about a videogame)). When a character on-screen is presented photorealistically it’s far more difficult to project my perception of self onto them. For example if the main character presented is an elderly man missing one eye, I cannot while playing or reading the narrative project myself into the story. It doesn’t mean I can’t identify with the character or appreciate that narrative, because just because I can’t “relate” to a character doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate the story. It just means that my emotional and intellectual reaction will be different than if the character was, say, a disembodied smiley face simply moving across the screen.
Which, coincidentally enough, brings me back to Anthropy’s book.
ZZT was an iconic game as much as it was a basic game visually, and these two factors explain why it afforded Anthropy as much emotional and intellectual solace as it did. By its design ZZT afforded players tools to not just experience a fantasy narrative, but also create new stories and worlds that they could disappear into. Anthropy describes this mechanic, as well as her own emotional investment into the software. She writes:
When you’re starting out, you don’t approach making a ZZT game by saying, ‘here is the vision of the thing that I want to make. How can I build that with ZZT?’ It’s much more natural to ask, ‘Here are the pieces that ZZT gives me. How can I fit them together in an interesting way?’”
ZZT was perfect for me when I found it–or when it found me. It didn’t demand familiarity with computer animation or digital music composition–every game uses the same 256 characters and the same bank of PC speaker sounds. It barely needed an understanding of programming concepts. All it required was endless reinvention .
And that was me as a kid. Eager to reinvent myself, but without a vocabulary to help me say how or why. Not sure why I kept being compelled to make games with female leads. I assumed I was just a pervert. My female characters were simultaneously my idea of a powerful regular woman as well as incredibly objectified. They were invariably captured, recaptured, imprisoned, and taunted. They would escape anticlimactically because a videogame always ends with a damsel being released. I felt guilty about acting out these confused fantasies in my game world–I didn’t realize I was awkwardly creating my first models for the kind of feminine identity I wanted.
Out of confusion and dysphoria I was building worlds that moved and spoke, worlds that responded to my touch. (46-47).
I’m honest when I say I’m a tad jaded when it comes to conversations about videogames. Or, really, I’m jaded when it comes to the rhetoric of and about videogames. Due to their commodification, videogames have always been products of capitalism and have rarely been afforded the space to experiment and play as a medium. Because of this there’s a lot of cold, corporate-backed soliloquies about games being the spaces where people can “break free” or “disappear into a new world of their own making.” These sentiments typically have the structural conviction of cotton candy: they implode as quickly as they are consumed.
Anthropy’s passage didn’t strike my ear this way, and I suspect it’s because it came from a place of honesty and conviction. Anthropy’s prose regularly rewards readers with such conviction.
I’ve begun, in the last few months, reading more and more about the history of videogames. The medium has always been something I’ve cared about, but only as a hobby. I never bothered learning more about how videogame software was developed alongside the personal computer movement. And words like shareware would have hit my ears like Mandarin(I don’t speak any Chinese(yet)). Anthropy’s book catalogs her own experience with a game that was built to be tweaked and modded and, most importantly, shared. She describes in wonderful detail how she discovered the ZZT modding community and how playing the games of other players allowed her to build a sense of self alongside a knowledge of computer systems. But as she pointed out, ZZT was important because it did not require advanced learning, it just required imagination.
She writes in one beautiful passage about how ZZT helped her conceptualize her understanding of gender when she says:
My mother expressed confusion, after I came out as trans, that she had never caught me trying on her clothes as a child. I spent my childhood dressing up in ZZT–trying on feminine identities to see how they felt. I was reading, too–fantasy worlds like Sword and Sorceress, and The Enchanted Forest Chronicles. But games of the unique quality of being in second person. I was able to play feminine characters, not just read about them. I made a lot of hypermasculine characters, too–a kind of aspirational masculinity that I, as a kid, had no access to. Invariably they were satellites, like Jeanne’s Rhygar, to their feminine doubles.
The use of both male stand-ins and objectified “strong women characters” made me feel hypersexual. I couldn’t understand that I was becoming these women, so I decided I must be fetishizing them. I felt guilt about this throughout my childhood until I encountered another trans person on IRC . (70)
I have to admit, this passage resonated when I read it.
Though I’m a cisgender man who’s only once or twice questioned his gender identity(even when I wore lipstick frequently, and a dress that one time) I remember navigating the rules and boundaries of gender in social spaces. I have and continue to live in East Texas, arguably one of the most socially conservative regions in the United States. And being a boy who didn’t like sports, and who would rather spend time playing with girls, I didn’t score any social capital. The fact that I was bisexual and started noticing boys as well as girls didn’t help. Videogames that offered me the chance to play as women were a chance to let go of the social pressures to perform masculinity (and also, being honest here, ogle a few beautiful women). Playing the female-presenting avatars was a way to just let go and not worry if I was performing the right or wrong way.
It was a simulation where I abandoned the self I was supposed to be, and just played in a space where I could be something entirely different.
This usually also involved guns and/or jet-skis.
It was the 90s.
Books, college, and a few less-than-stellar hook-ups on Grindr eventually helped me arrive at my own understanding of myself as a man and whatever that meant for me. But computer games might have provided just the same thing.
I could probably argue that since Grindr is a software program it might be comparable, but honestly after reading Anthropy’s book I’m positive ZZT is a lot more fun.
Finding identity and meaning in a computer game is a primary theme that runs throughout Anthropy’s book, but there was one more passage that struck me while I was reading. Near the end her book Anthropy observes how ZZT has aged compared to other software from it’s time, and observes that its existence today is sometimes difficult to track due in no small part to issues with archiving the various mods, chat-rooms, and cultural documents that came with it or were produced by it. Having been working on a writing project about a particular videogame that had less-than-popular reception and stumbling across similar issues this caught my attention, and one quote in particular perfectly summed up my thoughts on this thorny, and honestly rather worrisome issue.
She writes:
The Internet doesn’t forget. That’s the adage people invoke when they dredge up something from a politicians past, catch someone in a contradiction. It’s what makes Twitter terrifying. Our relationship to the ephemeral is changing or perhaps being obscured. There’s the illusion that everything is being documented that all the information we have access to will always be available. But that’s not true especially when we talk about the history of digital games.
At best, we’re flailing around a darkened room. We can talk about Super Mario or Sony. The corporations have made the most money, unsurprisingly, have the best documented histories. But that’s only part of the story of games. We’ve heard all about the successes, the superstars. What about failures and experiments? Weirdos and outliers? What about shareware developers and game making communities? (111)
How many videogames have been lost? It’s an honest question.
And I think about this a lot because of my job.
I work in a public library and one of the largest misconceptions patrons have is that everything is digitized, and that every record which has ever existed has been compiled, collated, and indexed properly so that it can be quickly accessed with minimal effort. The problem is this mindset has no basis in reality, and ZZT serves as a beautiful reminder of this problem.
There have been millions of videogames produced by individuals, production companies, and third-party organizations and yet the history of videogames as a medium has, as Anthropy noted, largely been dedicated to block-buster success stories. Games like Super Mario, Halo, Far Cry, Gears of War, Legend of Zelda, and Grand Theft Auto have had legions of dedicated writers, critics, and fans spilling oceans of digital ink either in praise or critique of these games, and thus interviews and historical documentation is easy to find. But games like ZZT, which had a dedicated following, but little in the way of block-buster success have, when it comes to narratives about the medium of games, gone unnoticed or forgotten. Someone is always going to find an excuse to write yet another essay about Pac-Man, but how many will feel the same compulsion to write something about Cubivore?
The answer is simply not many.
And this is partly just a reality of life; all things will inevitably fade away.
Anthropy’s book resonates because it is a vital outlier in a discourse that is often more concerned with reiterating what has worked, rather than what hasn’t. Rather than celebrate a game that sold millions of copies, Anthropy has produced a wonderful book which explores a subculture in videogames, while also writing a beautiful narrative of their own identity. ZZT is a videogame rich with possibility and from it emerged dedicated enthusiasts who saw more in the medium of videogames than just an opportunity for profit.
Words like identity and community can be quickly abused to the point they mean nothing. But Anthropy demonstrates that ZZT provided both of these, not just for herself, but for hundreds of players who still adore and worship this game. And the reader will be, like I was, better for having known about it.
Joshua “Jammer” Smith
5.13.2024
If you’d like to grab a copy of ZZT by Anna Anthropy follow the link below:
ZZT by Anna Anthropy - Boss Fight Book on the PC Classic – Boss Fight Books
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