Talk:Zork

Did you know nomination

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by Jack Frost (talk) 12:12, 5 November 2022 (UTC)

(

• Comment or view
• Article history

)

• ... that one historian compared the importance of Zork to that of Homer's Iliad? Source: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/pc/the-history-of-zork
  • Reviewed: Template:Did you know nominations/Doyle spiral
  • Comment: Although Matt Barton is only called a "blogger" in the source here, he's actually a tenured professor and has published a few things. Thus, I believe we can call him a "historian", or at least something similar. Anyway, open to other or adjusted hooks!

Improved to Good Article status by PresN (talk). Nominated by LordPeterII (talk) at 09:15, 27 October 2022 (UTC).

General: Article is new enough and long enough
New enough: Long enough:

Policy: Article is sourced, neutral, and free of copyright problems
Adequate sourcing: Neutral: Free of copyright violations, plagiarism, and close paraphrasing:

Hook: Hook has been verified by provided inline citation
Cited: Interesting:

QPQ: Done.

Overall: @LordPeterII: Good article. Hook is interesting, article is sourced, and the QPQ is done. Approving. Onegreatjoke (talk) 13:29, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

• @Onegreatjoke: Thanks for the review! I've thought about it a bit, and I would like to adjust the hook slightly, because Barton is a professor of English, not history. I believe calling him a "scholar" would be a more appropriate generic term, or "scientist" (I'm not sure which one would sound more natural in English).

• ALT1: ... that one scholar compared the importance of Zork to that of Homer's Iliad?
• ALT2: ... that one scientist compared the importance of Zork to that of Homer's Iliad?

Would you also approve ALT1 or ALT2? Then the promoter can chose which term they prefer. –LordPeterII (talk) 15:46, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

Sure i'll approve both of those. Onegreatjoke (talk) 15:57, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

Thanks; I struck the original one. –LordPeterII (talk) 18:11, 29 October 2022 (UTC)

Further reading

PresN, I added the added Drew reference to a Further Reading section (optional at MOS:FURTHER). It wasn't clear if the sources were all being used in the article since there is underlap between those and the references. Since they are, a further reading section is indeed more appropriate for the ref. Thanks. Airborne84 (talk) 10:55, 29 April 2023 (UTC)

@Airborne84: do you have a link to an archive of that source? There's not much point adding a further reading article if it doesn't have information that's not present in the article, never mind that the vast majority of readers aren't going to have access to a 1983 magazine article. --PresN 12:52, 29 April 2023 (UTC)

PresN, I don't have an archive link. But it is there for (1) anyone to use as a source in the future, and (2) to show readers the different sources that published on this topic. That seems to generally be the purpose of a Further Reading section. Airborne84 (talk) 14:04, 29 April 2023 (UTC)

@Airborne84: Ok, well, if you don't have a link... then what is in the source that isn't in this article? The purpose of a "further reading" section isn't just to list sources that aren't used in the article- otherwise most articles on mainstream topics could have a section with thousands of books, articles, and links. The purpose is to say "here's a source that contains further detail, that may be too in-depth for a general-audience article". I don't see how an article in an obscure magazine about play-by-mail games is likely to have further detail for readers beyond the sources that are already in use in the article, especially since 0% of readers will have the ability to read it seeing as it is a 40-year-old niche magazine that had at its peak 3000 readers and isn't available in archives. --PresN 01:59, 30 April 2023 (UTC)

It is unclear to me what the issue is here. Listing this review is encyclopedic. I won't comment on what your statement of "0% of readers" implies related to me (I have access to it). Consider also that WP:V states that "Rare historical sources may even be available only in special museum collections and archives." But you could seek additional opinions if you feel strongly that Wikipedia is improved if this reference is removed. Airborne84 (talk) 03:11, 30 April 2023 (UTC)

If the purpose of listing it is simply to exhort future editors to include it in the article, then use {{refideas}} on the talk page. I agree with PresN's conception of the Further reading section's purpose. It sounds like the source in question is just a contemporary magazine review, which is unlikely to reward dedicated readers' efforts in tracking it down. Since you're the only one here with direct access to it, why not simply incorporate it yourself somewhere if you think it says something not covered by other sources, or failing that, scan/transcribe it so someone else can make that determination? Axem Titanium (talk) 05:20, 30 April 2023 (UTC)

Thanks Axem Titanium. I listed two purposes for including the article. It also shows coverage of the topic across sources. In this case, the source is primarily for play-by-mail articles, but provided coverage of a video game as well, which was somewhat unusual. If no one thinks that's encyclopedic, happy to go the refideas route. Airborne84 (talk) 12:20, 30 April 2023 (UTC)

Just here to echo that "further reading" and "see also" sections add less value than integrating reliable information into the article. It might be worth emphasizing this in the video game manual of style. Shooterwalker (talk) 02:50, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

Question: would we even consider Nuts & Bolts of Gaming a reliable source? A contemporary review (mentioned at The Nuts & Bolts of PBM#Reception) suggests it was amateurish around the time the Zork piece was published (1983), although it had improved by 1985. Is/was Mike Drew a game journalist or author? Without knowing more, this doesn't seem like something that we'd mark as "reliable" at WP:VG/RS. Woodroar (talk) 14:10, 30 April 2023 (UTC)

I'll push back on this to say that the state of game reviews was not great across the board in 1983 and few publications would pass a 2023 bar of reliability. There is some intrinsic value to a contemporary review from (near) when the game came out, just to get some sense of what people of that era thought, even if the writer/publication does not meet our current definition of reliable. I don't know the content of the review though, so I can't say if it provides anything more than is currently written in the #Reviews section of the article. If not, then it wouldn't make sense to include, but not on RS grounds. Axem Titanium (talk) 17:52, 30 April 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, I agree that games journalism was not great at the time. I also agree that showing a contemporary viewpoint would be nice, but how is that not WP:ILIKEIT? If the source is low-quality or unreliable, is it a valuable resource? I don't think so, personally. Woodroar (talk) 18:32, 30 April 2023 (UTC)

There's no objective measure for quality. Maybe it's the best review/publication of its time and nothing else meets today's bar for reliability. I don't know, I haven't done the due diligence. Published contemporary viewpoints are crucial to include because they are not replicable by any source going forward. Things cannot become "cult status" or have "aged poorly" if there's no record of how it was received at the time. Contemporary viewpoints, even poor quality ones, give some indication of that reception. This discussion is all academic though, since I have no idea about this particular source and can't speak to its quality or usefulness. Axem Titanium (talk) 19:14, 30 April 2023 (UTC)

I'd be happy to drop it and revisit if or when we can all review the source. Until then, should the "further reading" listing be removed from the article? Woodroar (talk) 19:33, 30 April 2023 (UTC)

I finally pulled out the magazine again. The review is fairly critical, with both positives and negatives for the game. I think the most useful part would be the contemporary thoughts on its difficulty at the time as an emerging game related to other games of the period. But I moved it to refideas for now until I have time to look at it further. I appreciate the comments. Airborne84 (talk) 23:02, 30 April 2023 (UTC)

Game name origin

There is a sentence, that I wish to be removed from the article:

The game was unnamed, but the group had a habit of naming their programs "zork" until they were completed, a term in the MIT community for an in-development program. Section Development, part Inception, par 3.

I tried to remove it in this edit which happened to be reverted for lack of reasoning. Here is my case:

It is a quite bold claim which is cited many times but confirmed only once. Never ever has it been confirmed by no one other than Tim Anderson. It is even contradicted by other sources mentioned here in wikipedia.

Source 15: Article "Masters of the Game" in The Boston Globe Magazine from May 1984. Marc Blank says: Actually, it's just a nonsense word. There are all kinds of words like that that hackers tend to use -- words like 'frob.' Frob means thingamajig, and it can be used as any part of speech. It's a generic noun and verb.

Source 18: Article "History of the Zork" in special edition of IEEE Computer magazine from 1979. Authors of the game say: ...the [game] name was chosen because it was a widely used nonsense word, like "foobar".

Article "A Zork By Any Other Name" in The New Zork Times Vol.3 No.1 1984 (Link) ...authors Marc Blank and Tim Anderson were at a complete loss in thinking up a good name for their new game. Since they wanted people to play it, and since you can't run a nameless program, they needed something quick. Blank chose Zork, a nonsense word commonly used at the MIT Lab for Computer Science as an all-purpose interjection.

No other material from that era does prove that there was any habit of naming unfinished program a "Zork". I tried to reach people from Dynamic Modeling Group from that time and nobody could confirm that anybody else than Tim did it. I put all the findings into the blog post which I believe sums up everything needed for removing this one misleading sentence from the article. The blog.

Please consider all I wrote. David.Polakovic (talk) 07:14, 18 June 2026 (UTC)

• And we also have Softalk, October 1982: “Blank explains how Zork came to be Zork. "We'd generated this game with eighty places and five problems, and we didn't have a name for it. We just put it on the system. We had to have some type of name for it—files need names. Zork was a nonsense word used around the lab at the time as an exclamation—like, 'Zork, look at that!' The name stuck.”

That said, I am less convinced Anderson is actually contradicted. He also states in the cited source in the article that it was a nonsense word floating around and used in a variety of contexts just as Blank does; the only unique wrinkle is claiming it was habitually used to name programs. Maybe that is an exaggeration or misremembered, or maybe it was something of a tradition at some point among some portion of the folks in the lab and Blank was just not aware of that or himself forgot about it. I think that bit in the article should be rewritten because it completely fails to mention the broader etymology of the term, but I am less convinced it should be omitted entirely. Indrian (talk) 08:00, 18 June 2026 (UTC)

Maybe then the sentence should be "The game was unnamed, so the group chose "zork" as the file name, a nonsense word used around the lab at the time in a variety of contexts. Anderson later claimed that the group often used the term for programs still in development.", with the first sentence cited to the globe and IEEE articles and the second to the existing New Zork Times article. --PresN 13:42, 18 June 2026 (UTC)

That would work for me. Indrian (talk) 14:00, 18 June 2026 (UTC)

"one of several nonsense words..." Masem (t) 14:24, 18 June 2026 (UTC)

Done. --PresN 14:36, 18 June 2026 (UTC)

I would make it "... Anderson later said that the group often used the term ..." as per WP:CLAIM. ~Maplestrip/Mable (chat) 14:55, 18 June 2026 (UTC)

I would personally stick with "claimed" rather than "said" but anyway, I am happy that this long time misleading quote has been corrected. Thank you all. David.Polakovic (talk) 18:32, 18 June 2026 (UTC)