ChickenWire v2.0

This latest article's subject is an absolute nightmare of a game to cover in any meaningful way. It was a patron nominated world, and when I saw it as a request for something to cover, I waffled for a bit on whether or not I should accept it at all. It's been awhile since I've actually ran into a world that needed any content warnings so let's put them up front all at once rather than have to pepper them into the article repeatedly.

To be clear, while these topics are brought up within ChickenWire, I have made sure to not put anything front and center within the article. I will mention these things occurring, but not go into the specifics of what is said. I'll also bring up that several of these warnings apply to quoted community members and not its author making a game glorifying these things.

Regardless of how dire ChickenWire sounds from the above list, it's also a world that is undeniably an important part of ZZTer history and culture. Originally released the way back in 1999, where I don't think a single one of those content warnings would have applied, ChickenWire is a comedy game at its core that over the years gained a heavy focus on the ZZT community and in particular the culture of its forums and chat rooms for its source of comedy. The game was updated multiple times over a period of more than ten years, in which new material was added as well as removing jokes that no longer amused an older audience.

In 1999, ChickenWire was a simple unscripted world of whatever its author Zenith Nadir could come up with. It has inspiration in the form of both Darren Hewer's Rangest for MegaZeux as well as the earlier ZZT comedy world Triple Weird (itself a game with several updates, previously being titled Double Weird and originally Weird) with both games having a generic player wander around talking to oversized objects and hopefully being entertained through text, animation, and music. Where the Weird series stops in 1996, ChickenWire picks up a few years later providing the next generation of ZZTers something to laugh about.

By this final 2008 release though, the tone of ChickenWire has shifted dramatically. While plenty of the original jokes are still there, many have been adjusted to better reflect the ZZT community's idea of humor at the time. Unfortunately, what was funny to the community in that era was generally punching down on ZZTers/MZXers that weren't welcome to sit with the cool kids. This makes ChickenWire a tragically accurate time capsule, memorializing awkward kids being annoying and the attitudes of those who wanted to make clear that they were not welcome.

Previously, I've been distant when it comes to this period of ZZT's history. The era in which creating games was a distant second place in terms of importance to ZZTers compared to being a part of the in-crowd. Whenever that attitude made it into games, it led to some of ZZT's roughest releases to go back to.

Recently, I've wondered if I was being too judgmental on the era, realizing that the mid through late 2000s aren't a minefield of games best left gathering dust, but just as creative and appealing as any other era. The negativity tended to be found in community hangouts, the IRC channels and the z2 forums. The creative output of people putting their time into judging people weren't really doing a lot of game making. Worlds like ChickenWire are the exception, yet the legacy and focus on actual quoted material rather than pure editorializing (as seen in my atrocious and embarrassing game Mooseka Rules With An Iron Fist) make it an important artifact to look at and hopefully be able to say "Man, I'm glad I'm not that person anymore".

Comedy Like It's 1999

ChickenWire wasn't always so mean-spirited. The original release is considerably de-fanged, going all-in on absurdity and randomness as the origins for its humor. A lot of modifications over the years have modified the punchlines or removed things entirely if not up to standard, which is a perfectly sensible thing when this last update is nearly a decade after the original release.

Comedies tend to be the ZZT games I have the lowest expectations for. They're often very much a product of their time, and rarely hold up today. Games like The Mansion of Bill love coming up with zany things like spam jokes and electing Jabba the Hutt for president. NextGame 33 has about half of its content being a low-effort Titanic parody with the protagonist's love interest being named Nose, and then there are tremendous number of Star Wars parodies which are so dire to come up with any jokes as every one scrambles to come up with words that rhyme with "Luke", "Han", and "Vader". All of these games for laughs are more tiring than anything now, even if I can see them getting a more positive response back in the day. (Maybe less so for the 10th game starring Puke Skywalker.)

Luckily, this game has one edge over pretty pretty much every other ZZT comedy I've come across: I have nostalgia for the earlier versions. The opening of this version still begin with a number of classics that I remember from when I was eleven. I might not laugh now, but at least I'll be able to say that I did at one point.

This includes the rhubarb man, who I think about to this day when I hear the word rhubarb, probably because I hadn't heard the word rhubarb prior to this game. This is also a good example of the ever-changing ideas of humor between versions. Originally, touching the rhubarb object next to this guy emphasizes that it's nothing more than a rhubarb "NUFFINK ELSE YOU SICKO!!". Later, Nadir spells it out explicitly: "IT IS CERTAINLY NOT AN ERECT PENIS DAMNIT". No longer would ZZTers be afraid to say the word penis. Believe me.

Here it's just "roobarb & custard" for the entire message. Penis jokes are no longer as funny as they used to be.

Also the rhubarb man himself has gone from being rejected by the player for coming off as weird to being rejected since mom taught you not to take vegetables with funny names from total strangers who might then abduct them for their vile lusts. The expectations for modern ChickenWire are set fairly quickly.

Some bits do make it through entirely unscathed. This clever clever stall has been in the game since day one. Twenty-five years later and I still don't know if there's a joke or reference here or what this stall's deal is.

And I didn't even realize how much of ChickenWire had stuck with me over the years. This is another case where even today if a purple object in ZZT is ever described as pink I think of this.

Sometimes Nadir will make himself the butt of the joke, though far more gently than other people will be later. The foothills here are hills with feet. That's the entire joke originally. However, as the series went on and room needed to be made for other objects, their numbers have continually dwindled. Here, Nadir explains it simply: they suck. They are not a good joke and they will continue to go away until they are forgotten. That's about as rough as it gets for him, realizing a joke from a decade ago wasn't all that funny.

Thanks to its considerable history, ChickenWire has a number of distinct eras. You can usually safely guess when a joke was added based on how tame it is, how much it ties into the art that surrounds it, and whether or not it name drops a community member.

The sad thing about ChickenWire ...well okay, there are a number of sad things about it these days. The sad thing about the 1999-era jokes is that Nadir isn't wrong about them not being all that funny a decade later. Opting to play the game's original release will virtually eliminate the more depressing aspects of the game, but humor suitable for twelve year olds in the late 90s still isn't what people playing ZZT games today are after either. The game would still be a letdown, albeit one where you can see why it found success early on, and one that when you finished playing it, you wouldn't need to lie down in bed.

The presentation is on the higher side of things, and in 1999 ChickenWire's title screen was one of ZZT's strongest, beginning devoid of anything save for a company name in the corner, before a missile whooshes by leaving the game's title in its wake. Stars then pop into existence, ground forms, and trees arise from it. There's even a player-clone controlled menu of options to view the game's credits and view the requisite Interactive Fantasies catalog.

As a programmatically generated title, it's one of the nicer ones. Certainly a step up from yet another Energizer bunny joke lifted from Mission: Enigma. Though speaking of, despite the game having no real star, somebody does show up to introduce the game: Mr. Jim Doily.

Jim follows the classic trope of bashing the author, and he has his reasons. Jim was supposed to star in a game called /\/enemis (excellent stylization), only for Nadir to cancel his game, and guts its title screen to be used for ChickenWire instead. Nadir, takes offense to Jim's lack of professionalism as host, though as 1999 is "Green is evil" era Zenith Nadir, it's not long before Nadir melts away and Jim can leave.

These title screen cinematics often overstay their welcome, but Jim and Nadir keep up the pace, and help set up the tone for an absurd little game where players aren't going to do much more than watch and read.

The gags in ChickenWire tend to be confined to their initial space. Although Nadir does provide passages to navigate backwards through the world, in practice the game operates on the principle of "out of sight, out of mind". You touch your objects, enter the next passage, and then never think of them again. There are some exceptions, including the player suffering from pyromania and really having it out for trees. This was present in the original where it was a bit sillier, though now the emphasis is on taking the acts more seriously.

There's a very nice looking animation of a number of trees going up in flames when players throw a match into some nearby petrol. It's an optional act, though one that the game assumes players indulge in, as a later scene references this misdeed. The old version has the narrator chide the player for burning the trees and replacing some pretty art with an empty void. It's destruction for the sake of Nadir's impressive going up in flames animation. Players are always doing bad things in games solely because they had the choice after all.

For modern audiences the same scene is given an update that leans in to the depravity of such an act. There are screams of agony and an entire forest reduced to ash in "under the steel jackboot of 'random' humor".

The player, upon hearing all this, is turned on.

There's some more disrespect for vegetation with a "Keep off the grass" sign later. More than a dozen objects on the outside of the board constantly check if they're aligned with the player to be able to detect when the grass has been stepped on. All so a man with a funny accent that may secretly be groundskeeper Willie can pronounce grass as "grease".

This one stuck with me a child just because I had never seen such a way of figuring out the player's exact position before.

Trees are just like, a weird pillar of ChickenWire jokes.

The one that's relevant though, is this one next to a comic book shop. That comic shop gets to have a section of its own as you get soooo many of Nadir's hot (not really) takes on comics as a medium. For now, what matters is that there's another tree to burn.

Pay no mind to Satan running an ice cream truck. Or to the ZZT-creature fusions that sing The Monster Mash: Liger, tion, beffian, and ruar. They're not as important.

One last tree serves as the only way forward. This time, players are forced to burn it down, but before they can do so, none other than Smokey the Bear shows up to prevent the crime and have the player imprisoned.

Prison sequences are some of ZZT's most enduring iconography. Countless games have you escape from a cell, and even in the 90s it was recognized as cliché. ChickenWire lays claim to being the first game to subvert expectations. The player's imprisonment is swift, with a strong forty-two year sentence. You are placed in a cell with the usual fixtures, bed, toilet, and sink, but the narration tells a different story than the usual jailbreak.

The player, for once, actually has to serve their sentence. Nadir wisely realizes even in 1999 that the comedy here is simply that you don't escape, and not in a gruelingly long wait. If you haven't played ChickenWire before and go in unaware that this is going to happen, it's probably the game's definitive joke. Because escaping prison is such a common thing in ZZT worlds, there's a real expectation of a board of ZZT prison escape humor. Getting to wait, not having any idea how long you'll need to wait, and not actually having to wait for long takes the scene in an unexpected direction.

The player in turn loves it. They're sad to leave even.

Nadir seems to be in agreement, with almost no changes between the original release and the final. The throwaway dialog for the toilet and such are tweaked, a dig at a ZZTer to be discussed in the next section is tacked onto your pillow, and rather than celebrate no longer wanting to burn things the player develops a new fetish for their own hands!

Still, compared to the constant shuffling of everything else, the prison board is still very much the prison board.

Also the prisoners in the other cells were updated to be characters from Nadir's Frost series. That's a bit of a weird change as the prisoners in both versions don't actually do anything. It's a detail that I doubt anybody out there would notice. For as big of a fan of those games as I was, the only reason I'm able to point it out is because Nadir just states it outright at the start of the scene.

And considering how many little hidden remarks are tucked into the game's code in comment form, I was surprised that none of the Frost crew had anything of the sort other than being named.

So it's not as if ChickenWire has entirely lost its original premise. There are quite a lot of gags which can still amuse. When the changes aren't to slip in a quote tangentially related to the object in question, the updates can be a real improvement. An animation of Scooby Doo and Shaggy being chased by a ghost is a cute little cinematic day one, yet not exactly the pinnacle of humor. Now, there's some fun to be had in the unexpected subversion of things, with the player tell them to fuck off and angrily pointing out that Shaggy says "Zoinks!" not "Zoiks!" as Nadir mistakenly went with in the original. The surprise aggression is a lot better when it's the player yelling at a cartoon character and not a real person.

Perhaps there's a sweet spot somewhere. I really only focused on the 2.0 release and a touch of the original, but maybe 1.5 or 1.8 has the fun of ChickenWire without the teenage drama. There's enough that remains intact and enough that I would say is adapted to an older audience that this update could have been entertaining. It's a matter of a change in priorities that keeps 1999 looking so innocent while 2008 has no fear of being seen as tasteless in a community whose tastes were so aligned with what Nadir was including. Both are products of their time, it's just a lot easier to salvage antiquated jokes from the original than it is to enjoy the game's fresher humor in its final release.

Clowns Are For Laughing

The real (intended) humor of this final update to ChickenWire is in the many inclusions of quotes and references (sometimes subtle) to various ZZT community members over the years that those in power decided sucked. These people have their embarrassing moments recorded in objects to be a part of ZZT canon for all time. It's not great!

The repeated punching down on the community's targets at least has one positive for it. Once in awhile someone would show up who was simply a shithead. The 2000s had its share of evangelical Christians whose likes included ZZT and whose dislikes included anybody that wasn't straight. The kind of folks who were happy to let you know that you are going to Hell for holding hands with another boy. You will be damned for eternity for smoking weed instead of doing your homework. "Your works are but filthy rags before the throne of God" as one such member once said. Some people were going to be unwelcome for good reason.

I'm going to avoid using the aliases of the various targets in this game, even in those instances where the hostility stemmed from genuinely awful behavior. Anyone appearing in ChickenWire has since had a good fifteen years to change their behavior, and I don't want to suggest that these people should be assumed just as troublesome now as they were then. Really this applies to those of us doing the dragging equally to those being dragged. A lot of us have since come to regret how we acted in those days.

Truthfully, this to me is ChickenWire running at peak nostalgia. These people are people I interacted with, and saw firsthand how awful they were, and in return I was just as awful to them. There's a dark humor to seeing them again, frozen as I knew them in 08'. It was never helpful to laugh at them. No amount of making fun of them ever led to a realization that actually it's not a personal failing if you're queer, furry, or partake in controlled substances. But these are conversations and quotes that I have some memory of. Some of which it's been so long since I thought about them, that I couldn't help but laugh at some of the more absurd bits of dialog found in this game.

Take "T" for example. Personality-wise back then, they were the kind of person who wanted to be the smartest in the room, single-handedly turning the word "evocative" into a catchphrase. Were he just a bit of a dweeb, it would be easy to forget about him. I mean, who wasn't a dweeb back then?

"T" famously made a post about how 9/11 was the fault of the passengers on the hijacked planes. For all the really bad 9/11 jokes the community made, this one was a genuine belief in their "moral failing".

So, yes, I did laugh even now when I was reminded that this guy also posted about masturbating in his parents bedroom for an "incestuous thrill". I will still laugh at this. It does nobody any good. There are other things I can laugh at out there than this dude's legacy, but it's been quite some time since I remembered that one.

Funnily enough he also regularly found himself in arguments with "S", another community target, though that one fell under the category of "annoying, but not worth a fraction of the energy we spent on him". Even when arguing with someone who we would have considered to be equally annoying a person, his choice of words went on to become immortalized in ZZT history. Every last one of us chatting in #rawr could probably to this day tell you who told who that they would thumb them in the lips.

Other community members who earned their negative reputation are portrayed similarly. "J" leads the religious brigade, with a little bit of "L" also being roughly fifteen years old and discovering Jesus and realizing these ZZTers with their sex and drugs were damned and doing everything they could to yell at us until we might repent.

For those who are able to piece these names together, "G", with his famous prank is surprisingly absent from ChickenWire, which is a real shame as you could easily make it an event within the game world rather than just the IRC log that most of these jokes consist of. It's nice when these people say something funny that you can tell somebody else about without coming off as completely unhinged

"J" being more involved with ZZT than MZX, meant being in contact with his hell-bound peers more often than "L", which led to a number of quotes becoming ZZTer memes. These range from the comical:

To the kind of thing that makes you wonder what made him think the reaction to saying such a thing would be anything other than it constantly being quoted back at him:

ChickenWire tries to turn moments of frustration into comedy. These people often were draining to be around, constantly incited arguments, and made ZZT games even more rarely than the cool kids. For a cheap laugh at the time, ChickenWire would be effective on anyone that wasn't regarded as a target. If you weren't cool enough to sit at the popular kids' table, at least recognizing them as the cool ones was a start. ChickenWire was a compendium of moments to bring up whenever these people started talking somewhere to derail whatever they were talking about, whether it be the dangers of premarital sex or preventing a thread about an upcoming ZZT game from ever being able to just discuss how development was going.

A random NPC spits out an IRC log of "R" who is somewhat borderline for being whether they should be included in this category of people that would still be unwelcome today if they hadn't changed in all these years. They were somewhat before my time so I already don't have a clear picture of what they were like, and while they obviously caused problems, I don't think they were nearly as prevalent as some of the others whose exploits are recorded in ChickenWire.

In this case, the reason for this person being unwelcome was due to committing a number of ZZT faux pas, namely plagiarizing boards and even re-skinning somebody else's game entirely. (Which leads to fun moments as one is themed after an 8-bit platformer and the other is themed after a popular sci-fi series, but some dialog is unchanged between them which really gives it away.)

He's also infamous for his "ZZT Virus". This amounted to a batch file than when ran would delete all files in C:\ZZT. I you kept your files anywhere else, which was almost certainly the case well into the era of mainstream Windows dominance, it would do nothing. Which is very funny because you would just drop this file into your ZZT directory where just deleting *.ZZT would be work regardless of location, but he chose to guess a directory and thus restrict it to that single location.

As for ZZTers running funny batch files, it's the classic way to launch games with custom character sets, so it's honestly a pretty ripe vector for doing some damage. This kind of thing is why there's an upload queue, and why the Museum still has one as well.

To my knowledge, nobody actually lost any data to it.

With this feat of programming prowess under his belt, "R"'s IRC log is an amusing tale of calling z2 admin craNKGod a nerd, lame, _and_ gay. (By far the most owned crank has ever been in his entire life.) "R" then proceeds to hack crank by sending pretend console messages in chat. HackMan loads and sends packets to craNKGod, who does the funniest thing and acts like it's having a devastating effect. And with that, "enjoy ur virus!!!" entered the community's lexicon.

...I don't know what "R" was actually hoping to accomplish here. The people starting arguments obviously intended to win them, making their opponents look like fools and proving themselves to be superior in some way or another. Obviously "R"'s plan was doomed to fail? Crank could have said nothing and nothing would have happened? I don't know man. I will never understand this community.