ZZT by Anna Anthropy

ZZT by Anna Anthropy

Author:Anna Anthropy [Anthropy, Anna]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: criticism, gaming, MegaZeux, Epic, PC gaming, Text, Anna Anthropy, ZZT, Text-Based, Games, nonfiction, Megagames, shareware, Tim Sweeney, video game, ASCII
Publisher: Boss Fight Books
Published: 2014-05-12T04:00:00+00:00


Everything Would Fall Apart

My friend Jeanne Thornton, when she was young, made a series of ZZT games named and starring a guy named Rhygar. “The one authentic thing in there,” she says, “was this obsession with women, in particular this proto-dyke character who was like a general and hated my (male) main character, but slowly this weird respect and understanding grew through infinite conversations. I remember thinking over and over that ‘if I were female, I could create something real; too bad it didn’t work out that way,’ and then kind of burying that thought and trying to just replicate something I enjoyed.

“Now I’m inclined to think of it as this trans feeling before I even knew that trans feelings existed: this deep, deep sense that life, creativity, emotion, and human connection were something that only women had access to, and I had just like been born wrong and had to make do, trying to access this thing from the outside. There was this quasi-Quranic thing for me about depicting women in any way, in my comics, in my writing, in anything—like I was really, really afraid to do it because it felt as if it would be revealing something, as if everything would fall apart if I did it—and this one big ZZT game was one of the few times I felt like I seriously attempted it.”

Jeanne’s experience mirrors my own: I remember feeling, when I was young, like I couldn’t write from my own experiences because my experiences were somehow fake. Everything I created had to be generic, identity-less, because something about my reality was inauthentic, wasn’t me. For many years of my life, I was unable to sign my name to anything. One time I worked up the nerve to put my given name on a comic: shortly after, in a panic, I edited every instance of my name into another, fictional name, so it was no longer me. I introduced a whole other character to the comic to claim this name, to take the weight of identity off my shoulders.

“In the never-finished ending,” says Jeanne, “the main character dies, and the female general goes on to be the main character of future games set in the main world; the idea of having a female character be the main character just seemed like something too dangerous to actually do.”

“I grew up in a small, isolated town in a reactionary religious household,” says another ZZT author, Paige Ashlynn. “So, I was extremely sheltered for most of my youth. My parents kept tight reins on what films my siblings and I could see or which books we were allowed to read. We didn’t even have a TV set until I was eleven. But for some reason games flew under their radar: They let us play pretty much whatever we wanted. As a result, games introduced me to a lot of contemporary culture that my peers at school were getting through other channels.

“Games were also my first experience with cross-sex identification or genderplay.



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