ChickenWire v2.0

Dedicating All My Energy Into Making Sure You're Upset

A lot of the time however, the people being insulted as punishment for their crimes had done little to earn the response. A number of inscrutable lines to ZZTers who weren't around then boil down to somebody said or did something that I thought was stupid, and now I'm going to turn that into their defining trait.

This kind of thing is slipped in all over the place. Even some of the board names in ChickenWire are quiet reminders that somebody out there was doing something the cool kids did not care for. Just the phrase "The ZZT Periodic Table" is a joke on its own, no pointing and laughing needed. If only we had better things to do with our time rather than compile logs of dumb shit people said online.

Whether it's IRC chatlogs, forum posts, LiveJournal entries, personal websites, or even your ZZT games themselves, if the community found it and disapproved, you would carry that weight for as long as it was remembered. Games like ChickenWire and later sites like ZUltimate (a ZZT wiki more focused on community culture than ZZT itself) extended the duration of you being a punchline, but even without sites that naturally lent themselves well to such things, ZZTers found opportunities to keep everything alive.

And it is in fact unfair make a scapegoat of Nadir, who was one of many. I was a major part of this, and so were several others. ChickenWire is just a readily accessible example, but this behavior goes back for many years, slowly overtaking and transforming the vibe of the community from that of teens excited to make their own video games to teens who can't wait to see what "X" will say next that will then be repeated back at them in all caps by channel owners and site admins until they leave or until someone else takes the spotlight.

ChickenWire will bring up the time somebody's awkward teen cybersex logs somehow got shared with the wider community. It's easy to see why a community of teenagers would turn it into a source of ridicule, ignoring any ideas of privacy lest they miss out on saying "ballpark figure" at every opportunity even when the people involved had long since moved on in life. It was an incredibly cruel thing to do to someone from day one, luckily predating the era of sexting so it's entirely poorly written IRC /me commands about humping. Here in the ZZT community, rather than get your laughs and move on, it got penned into the history books so that future generations could know: One time a girl asked a guy for his penis size, and he answered her.

Some objects in ChickenWire contain hidden comments left by Nadir which almost certainly went unseen for years in a world with little reason to open it in the editor. The object in question which references this log is one of them. In it, it's pointed out that the log is from 2001. Seven years later, people were still laughing.

Nadir says the seven years passing haven't made it it any less funny. "It's aged like fine wine."

And as much of ChickenWire involves taking old boards and finding ways to make them funny again, the fact that one of the participants was named after a pokémon meant that it was just the perfect thing to add on the 1999 board with the pokéfreaks worshiping Pikachu.

Other people don't have it as bad, though even when Nadir compliments somebody it doesn't make up for their transgressions. A hut from Gem Hunter: Special Edition is included not to make fun of Tseng, but to praise him. Even if, according to Nadir, it's no longer cool to like Tseng's games anymore, he still has good things to say about it along with Da Hood: Special Edition and Mega Job. Not everything is negativity.

Until you head a few objects over and meet Tseng who is promoting his... his... his Mega Man sprite comic! Sounds like he was having fun creating something, but he forgot to ask the ZZT community that he had already left behind if they approved of such a thing first. The most inane things were deemed so important that when I played the game and saw his character flaw was sprite comics, I was surprised that it wasn't the harmless thing I remembered ZZTers dunking on him for. Why is my brain still holding on to these stupid facts and stories? What does it mean that ChickenWire didn't introduce me to these "slights" but refreshed my existing memory of them?

One person who was a staple foil for ZZTers to abuse was "Z". "Z" had a lengthy history in the ZZT/MZX communities, where they would frequently be insulted for their weight, social standing, mocked for repeated threats of self-harm. It was extremely one-sided, and a significant part of my own ascent to a position of power (IRC channel operator status, z2 staff) was built on an unhealthy obsession with documenting everything "dumb" this guy did.

Yet one of the first things you see when you start ChickenWire is a link to z2, being hosted on a subdomain owned by "Z". "Z" never received thanks for what he did. Without him picking up the slack when Home of the Underdogs was no longer a suitable host for the archives^[1], it's very likely there would be another thousand more "unpreserved" ZZT games needing to be rediscovered. It's unlikely I would have even started work on the Museum if I didn't have z2 as a starting point.

Instead of praise, they got nothing but mockery. We're extremely fortunate that he never just deleted the site because he absolutely had every right to. Even when the move was being discussed, the possibility of "Z" deleting the site abruptly was a real concern.

There's really nothing else to say. The targets of the community were anyone and everyone that ever made a mistake, spoke out of line, or was socially awkward. That we also were vicious to racists and homophobes doesn't change the immense levels of toxicity becoming our own defining trait.

Smiles Without Malice?

Defining as it may have been, the final update to ChickenWire isn't exclusively poorly-aged bullying. There are few newly added jokes that will actually give you something to laugh about guilt free, things that might even be appreciated by people who weren't active in ZZT in 2008.

The OG title screen for example has had some considerable changes since the original release. It's a rare instance where I feel like there's a genuine improvement between old and new, and it doesn't even need any disclaimers about everyone being an asshole to each other!

The corner credits now include the ZN initials and a little Nadir object. This time, when the rocket flies by, Nadir falls from the heavens, and tumbles to the ground, complaining of invisible ruffians mid-fall. Sure enough, the secret the to dynamic title screen is a bunch of invisible statless items, of which Nadir does indeed bounce of ruffians.

Nadir goes on to explain that he was tired of the character back-talking at the author trope, and now Jim Doily is nothing more than a brainless zombie used to trigger some of the title screen's effects, nothing more than a puppet for him to control. Jim appears momentarily before being ordered to get to work, and no longer needing to melt as "Green is evil" is similarly an ancient artifact of ZZTer humor, Nadir instead teleports back to his corner with a loud "LUCY I'M HOME"!

The oddly specific complaint of invisible ruffians and physicality to the humor in how Nadir's fall isn't a simple plummet make for a still engaging scene that plays better to what would have been funny in the 2000s. It's not random, it's extremely specific, and the extra effort in the falls plays nicely with the emphasis ZZTers were placing on making things more interesting to look at beyond simple linear motion when it came to animation.

Now, if the rest of the game could have followed in this style, we might be on to something.

The numerous cameos aren't entirely mean-spirited. There are a few rare moments where something simply funny happens to someone without it defining them for the rest of their time in the community. Yet even these do focus on targets, so perhaps they were intended to.

It's nice to just have a funny IRC moment.

If you're old/online enough to remember bash.org and its collection of comedic IRC happenings (of which ZZTers used a voting exploit to bump up one of their own submissions to the #1 rated quote), you'll be happy to see little snippets of conversation like this. They're laughs in good fun rather than to brand someone.

The ZZT community eventually spun off their own take on the site known as IRCMan, which was full of a mixture of quotes like these as well as the more mean-spirited comments. Nadir very well could have just crawled through that site's archives and assembled a greatest hits as a low effort way to mine for comedy. Though whether the game would have aged better or not had he done so is hard to say.

This release of ChickenWire specifically refers to itself as "Special Dave2 Cameo Edition", with an optional challenge to find it. It's a textbook example of hidden content in a ZZT world that would never be found under normal circumstances.

Where can he be found? Well, on this very board. Simply wade into the water where there's a secret path of fake walls, touch a solid wall that's actually an object, and then touch the border of the room to reveal an entombed Dave2.

Your reward is to call him Canadian scum. It's not much of a cameo, but at least the two are clearly on good terms (looking at Dave's review of the game) and the player's reaction is meant to be funny and not mocking like a number of others in the game. All this effort to get him just to tell him to fuck off got a laugh from me.

On that note, the desert island here is home to another solid joke that I'm really surprised is brand new to this version. It absolutely feels like it would've been in the original release. It's the old castaways imagining each other as food gag in ZZT form. In order to show what the other is seeing, Nadir the two switch between smiley form and that of various foods with hidden objects nearby to handle recoloring.

You get a burger(?) , a slice of pizza , a banana , and lettuce? . It's really cute, and goes to show that even in this final release, there's still room for some new gags that are welcome additions that don't require a target.

The Comic Shop

ChickenWire leans in on the ZZT/MZX communities for most of its humor, but one board shifts the focus to a different area for Nadir to get angry at everyone doing it wrong: the comic book store.

This store includes a handful of depictions of the kinds of people who read comics and get angry about them, and shelf after shelf of merchandise for Nadir to unsubtly provide his thoughts on. This board is in the original release where it takes the much more expected approach of ZZT bookshelf humor, providing silly names for made up comics.

Now though, it exists to share opinions on DC, Marvel, indie publishing, manga, newspaper comics, explicit comics, webcomics and more. It's so much to take in, especially as someone who has never gotten all that deep into comics personally. Me exploring the comic shop is probably similar to somebody outside of the ZZT community trying to make sense of the rest of ChickenWire.

You get your low-hanging fruit of course. A whole section is labeled "Comic strip collections that I hope will never happen" consisting of complete archives of milquetoast newspaper comics^[2], your Marmadukes, your Love Is, your Family Circus. A fanboy is angry about how out of character Dance-Man is in the latest Kickfaceman, vowing to never read comics again but oh ho ho he's gonna be by next week.

The comics fangirl meanwhile is upset about the purity of manga and how only good comics come from Japan. American comics are baka! Japanese comics are kawaii! Alas her DeviantArt account is full of derivative anime characters, so what does she know?

For a much much deeper cut, there's a collection of comics by "D", a furry artist who was a similar target within the furry fandom for ...making bad webcomics that he thought were good? He might have like, lied about having found a publisher once?

This article could have an equally long companion piece about the Crush! Yiff! Destroy! forums for self-loathing furries to lament how they wish these people would just be normal like them. Nadir introduced me to them and I was a long time poster in darker times. (Nadir at least basically lurked, while I dove in like a dumbass.)

It's another instance where yes, this guy was greatly overvaluing his artistic abilities and mass appeal, and probably was getting into plenty of arguments about it that drove people crazy. Yet just like so many of those targeted in ChickenWire, if you did not wish to deal with this guy, you could just walk away at any time and stop getting upset at everything they do.

There are digs on comics that get attention for being artsy and dramatic about real life experience like cancer that win all the awards because of how brave the authors are. There are comics making fun of how women in comics are often just sex objects, with Bitchblade: The Tittening. There are Japanese comics being lumped into unflattering categories of the era like "Anime Shojo Bishies ^_~".

And oooh you better not include a Mary Sue in your work!

So much of it comes off as people enjoying the wrong things, and being too stupid to appreciate the good things which are coincidentally the ones Nadir likes.

The negativity crammed into such a little comic shop is even a bit much for Nadir, who includes a secret list of comics that he does enjoy if you touch the sign of the shop repeatedly (or in my case, look at a text dump). I can't comment on most of them as I haven't even heard of the majority of comics listed, but I'll toss in a few random ones and some that I do at least know a little about.

• "Pure Trance" by Junko Mizuno
• "Blue" by Kiriko Nananan
• "Dr. Slump" by Akira Toriyama (with a note saying not to worry, it's nothing like Dragon Ball Z.)
• "The Incal" by Alexandro Jodorowsky & Jean Giraud (aka Moebius)
• "Scott Pilgrim" by Bryan Lee O'Malley (which would have been ongoing at the time)
• "FRANK" by Jim Woodring
• "Bone" by Jeff Smith
• "Slow News Day" by Andi Watson
• • Mainstream comics that aren't horrible include:
  • "The Invisible" by Grant Morrison
  • "Watchmen" by Alan Moore
  • "Superman: Secret Identity" by Kurt Busiek & Stuart Immonen with a note that even if you hate Superman you should check it out because it's about Clark Kent

I can vouch for Bone. Bone's good.

It's kind of a shame the list is hidden in a way nobody would stumble across it while playing, it would be nice if this game's legacy could at least have "taught people about some cool comics" as a bullet point. Yet, it just doesn't fit in with everything that surrounds it. If we were here talking about things we liked, we wouldn't have much an update now would we?

Meet Me Here On IRC. LOLOL

One of the more palatable highlight(s) of the game are the two different IRC channels turned ZZT boards. These have been a staple of the game since the first release, where the ZZT chatroom of choice was #darkdigital. By 2001's update, it had given way for #misanthropy. For 2008, it's now #idiots-club's time to shine (with a touch of some folks who left in the #rawr era). Recognizing the #MA board as a time capsule, Nadir kept it in the game accessible via a time machine in case you want to relive the older days.

The #darkdigital variant is incredibly time, with some goofing around, but everyone seems to be pretty chill with one another. There's a great gag with one person that enters the room and is kicked out for being unwanted, who then walks in again and again with a different nickname in hopes of not being noticed. In this case it's a name that I have heard in passing, but have no association with being a ZZTer who wasn't welcome. Nadir includes an apology to his portrayal so I'm not sure if maybe it's a bit tongue in cheek, though the "WE DON'T WANT YOU HERE" kick message makes it unclear. They must have been the Dave2 of the time.

One can't help but get the feeling that removing the people who are causing problems rather than turning them into a circus act to gawk at leads to a more enjoyable space to hang out in.

#misanthropy (Mizan's Trophy) is another traditional cameo board. A handful of outsiders, as in literally outside of the building are the only people being dunked on. These are for the most part pretty tame, two of them aren't even given quotes for dialog. One that is is somebody being extremely racist about a channel operator of Asian descent and it's the only instance in the game where a racial slur appears. Their exclusion from the channel proper makes a lot of sense actually.

One is interesting in that it is somebody complaining about the channel causing "massive unforgivable damage to the community". Is this an early realization that the community's hostility would lead to fewer people sticking around?

Probably not. It kind of veers in an unhelpful direction of calling admins fascists and communists. ...This probably isn't 100% a quote, but the start of it feels specific enough that I suspect it's a summary. Maybe it genuinely is "you're making an unwelcoming space", but given what surrounds it "you're making an unwelcoming space for me" might be the correct read.

The people on the inside are pretty tame. They all have little one liners that give you hints at what they were into at this point of their lives. Hercules talks about getting beer. JohnWWells sings songs from H.M.S. Pinafore. Zamros yells "PENIS". Kracken raars upon her throne.

The most detailed thing here, is the bathroom which consists of open pit toilets that the player calls gross only for Nadir to discuss their merits in great detail. This is probably the thing he is most positive about in the entire game, and now I'm starting to understand why Frost 2 goes into such detail on the underground waterworks.

The then-current IRC channel is #Idiots-Club, with a hint of its predecessor that fell between ChickenWire releases, #rawr. #IC is divided up into three rooms reflecting three different cultures within the channel, though everyone intermingled in practice and the split is more to make it easier to find someone specific you might have in mind.

You've got your stoners, your video game players, and your errata. There's a little extra consideration for the furnishings here as well. The stoners are are focused on a lava lamp while the gamers all stare at a large TV where a Super Nintendo has been hooked up. Missed opportunity to let players unplug it.

Again, most cameos are pretty tame, boiling people down into a half-sentence each for the most part, with only a scant few being low-key insulting.

You'll find me among them in the gaming room. I'm playing Pocky and Rocky with Celine. I get to be Rocky because my fursona at the time was a raccoon^[3]. Celine, also a furry, wishes to play as the tanuki and not the human. This is the lament of every furry to this day.

"J", the homophobic child is here, not because he was known to be a gamer, but because he can be dunked upon once more with a video game related topic, referencing the time he abruptly asked whether people thought Peach or Zelda was hotter. I completely forgot about this, and did laugh. There are indeed dunks to found here. Nadir does a bit of editorializing by adding a parenthetical to the end:

"S" returns and his the honor of getting multiple lines. Just as before, you get the idea that this guy was pretty insufferable to be around if harmless. I would have thought he was gone by this point and that these quotes were old ones that Nadir never forgot (which were probably enshrined on IRCMan for easy access to anyone wanting to put him in their game). The tiniest effort led to me finding evidence that they were at least still showing up in 2007 even, and still acting just as they had in their earliest days. "S" was basically a powder keg for Nadir, with the two clashing so frequently that the number of times "S" and Nadir told each other off rivaled the number of times everyone else combined told "S" off.

Zamros is still here.

If you found Dave2 earlier and freed him, he'll also show up here. I haven't even discussed the person he brings up, but I think by now you get the picture with recurring targets.

Some of the portrayals re lost on me. Did Quantum P say this once? What a bizarre way to memorialize him. A few are just various smiley faces. Many are really generic. Gofer-chan saying "awwwww yeeeeaaahhh" might be real, but that guy was way more involved in a number of memorable moments, both regrettable and otherwise. I've got gofer-chan stories, and there's no way Nadir didn't as well.

Final Thoughts

Uhhhhhhhhh.....

You probably don't want to play ChickenWire. It's a time capsule of the community at it's worst. Those who weren't around during that era dodged a bullet. There's really nothing to recommend to people who didn't immediately know who I was referring to with "J" and "S" and the like. You'll get a number of references and quotes of people who were constantly being made fun of, and maybe if you're lucky, the recipients were shitty enough people that you won't have to worry about sympathy.

But now we're a decade and a half past even the freshest of material in ChickenWire and both the harassers and the harassed have had so much time to change for the better that you can't do much other than hope that so many of the people named in ChickenWire managed to grow up a little. Hopefully those who were actually pretty awful people mellowed out and hopefully those who were "cringe" found some lasting happiness outside of 2000s IRC communities that weren't very receptive.

If you're one of people like me who was participating in and actively encouraging shitty behavior towards those who didn't fit in, there will be bits of dialog in ChickenWire that can be painful to see now. Why were we like this? And why did it take so long to stop being like this?

We'll never know for certain how much of the ZZT community fading to near-nothingness in the late 2000s was because of the increase in effort needed to play DOS games on computers built to play Unreal Tournament 3 rather than Town of ZZT; how much was the proliferation of countless other tools that let you make your own games; and how much was people finding ZZT and getting discouraged when they saw the user base. The first two factors were inevitable, but it never had to be like this. This is the community that was built. It never needed to be this way, and it's sad that those who recognized the relentless hostility for what it was back that and wanted a better ZZT community were never able to have one.

If you were around in this era, particularly if you were on the side that was laughing rather than being laughed at, you'll probably find a few laughs still. Most of which will be "I totally forgot that the <X> guy also did <Y>!" Then perhaps a moment of wondering why you anyone was privy to <X> or <Y>. So much of the culture boils down to any mistakes are permanent whether that be behavior that genuinely needs changing like the anti-queer rhetoric, or you got hormonal after a teenage romance ended and vented in a way that nobody ever allowed you to move past.

And of course, we were constantly eating our own. Every cool kid was one punchline away from being the butt of a joke for months, with any acknowledgment that you were getting tired of your friends belittling you only making it relevant to bring up more and more often. You had to hope it eventually stop on its own, biting your tongue every time.

Some people wised up and just left, but leaving the ZZT community didn't just mean getting away from some jerks, it also meant that an outlet for creativity was being closed off. Making ZZT games without the community as an audience who can understand and appreciate the challenges of doing it well was a pretty significant thing to lose just to avoid being called the r-slur every time you opened your mouth.

One cameo in particular stands out to me, a quote not of someone making a fool of themselves, but just their farewell message on IRC before they disappeared for years.

"Leaving."

In the credits Nadir says that he misses them, and wouldn't have minded them leaving if they let people know what they was moving on to. He then brings up something embarrassing they once did that he can still laugh at the memories of. I wonder if this reaction could have anything to do with his goodbye message being just one word, and how even then it still managed to be turned into their ChickenWire legacy? In ZZT ammo is text, and so in the ZZT community everyone's text became ammo.

And to be clear, it's not just Nadir that was doing this. It me, it was other staff members, it was other IRC regulars. It was the norm. Nadir compiles this material in ChickenWire, but I loved to archive this kind of embarrassing material. IRCman was an easy site to make sure that even if your fight happened at three in the morning that it would spread to a wider audience when the sun came up. Long before, you'd have Bencomic, a ZZTer curated conversation of IRC material to webcomic form that did the same. The worst parts of ChickenWire are nothing new. Nadir could have put these same logs in the 2001 update and it wouldn't have seemed unusual in any way then.

For something actually positive to say about ChickenWire, it's got some lovely presentation. Nadir's boards are compact, full of things to interact with, and loaded with all kinds of details that act as doodles in margins. You'll see animated volcanoes puffing out smoke, flashy (but not too flashy) colorful effects with invisible walls, and impressive multi-character effects with #char. There's a trampoline to bounce on, weird rooms to be spun around in, and a linear transporter maze to get to one board which are all silly little diversions to break up the monotony of touch object -< receive message. Boards have fancy slime animations outside the borders, and #Idiots-Club has a bunch of (moderately) flashing lights that turn a screen focused on a drab gray building into one the world's most colorful boards.

There are those burning trees, along with shimmying cubes that play with #char and blinking colors. Boards that don't use all their space have backgrounds depicting cities under a full moon or mountains at sunset. You can watch two smiley faces play ping-pong. Heck, there's even faked Super ZZT spiders that move on a web of objects, with everything synchronized to create the illusion that this pile of objects is just two spiders on top of some walkable tile. It's great work that would make fans of Ned The Knight drool. The fuss and misery steal the show of course, yet you can tell that there's been a lot of effort put into this world of the years.

There's a surprising amount of music too! The game has a jazz-inspired soundtrack composed by Viovis that Nadir encourages you to listen to in full, along with direct access at the end of the game to a soundtrack board for easy revisiting. Other songs by other composers are included as well, which includes tunes meant for his Frost games. Plus the old 1.0 jukebox containing a number of credited favorite tunes from various ZZT games just because he could.

None of it makes up for what ChickenWire became, a repository of antagonized people reacting to the abuse, with attempts to justify the fun at other people's expenses by coming up with character flaws to make it acceptable to do so, and sometimes some silly jokes about ZZT prisons or silent iPod raves offer a reprieve.

It's a relic of a game whose early incarnations are a celebration of ZZT's weirdness and its ability to surprise via what you see when treating text as symbols on a board versus what you see when you read English text upon examining objects. There's still some legit humor in here, old and new, that continue follow the spirit of the original. There's certainly not enough that that final release will leave anyone who wasn't around for the bullying shaking their heads (and at this point, the people bullying will probably all shake their heads just the same). The older versions will be more palatable, but old ZZT humor is more misses than hits. Still, I'll take a missed swing over a punch down.

• ^[1] z2 would have been forced off HotU in 2009 regardless when the site closed down, though the move from HotU to "Z"'s hosting appears to have been in 2006 due to issues with HotU's domain and the servers routinely timing out on us.

  The politics of ZZT in 2006 being what they were, there's a z2 forum thread discussing the pros and cons of moving, and moving to "Z"'s hosting with a number of us fearing that he would delete the site if we were mean to him.

  For something actually incredibly funny, apparently the move was a one time $10 payment to "Z" and somebody paid him before the staff even decided to switch hosts. There's plenty of (gentle) bickering about "what if he steals the ten whole dollars" which would be the funniest scam to pull. Boy do I miss the days when $10 was a huge deal financially.

• ^[2] Okay, actually this one is within my wheelhouse. I gained an appreciation for the newspaper comic from reading The Comics Curmudgeon and the newspaper comics thread on the Something Awful forums, the former of which I still look at daily while also manually following a bunch of strips that would frequently be posted there. As is often the case, it began ironically to make fun of them and eventually led to a genuine interest in them, their history, and how insane they often are. Dagwood needs to unionize, and I'm posting the currently Mary Worth storyline in a Discord with some friends who are now also hooked on how bizarre its dramas are.

• ^[3] My phrase that wasn't allowed to die was quoting a LiveJournal post where I "came out" as furry. Though more popular was a non-ZZTer furry friend's congratulatory message that ended with "You cute raccoon you! ^_^".