Article Word Count
For something new for this year, I set up something to count words in articles. Then I realized how many articles there were and that such a chart would be unreadable, so I grouped them into category instead. Here's where my writing efforts went:
Closer Looks remain the heart and soul of written content on the site, making up more than half the words by volume. Seeing as how months usually have two or sometimes three such articles, this should come as no surprise, as other subjects get a bit crowded out.
Help related articles come in second, and entirely thanks to a concentrated effort over the Summer to write up some guides for new players, authors, and additional reference material that I felt the site could really use given the age and various inaccuracies of a lot of older guides to ZZTing. A lot of those guides were also only available in ZZT form, which while I love the fact that a ZZT world can be a ZZT world making tutorial, it's just not the best way to provide information compared to something with the ability to search text and features like ...formatting.
Barely behind are publication packs. I've always gone into them with the goal of documenting what was published alongside what and providing a chance to put out a feeler tweet so folks that may be interested would be aware rather than anything remotely in depth. With how many of the published worlds I haven't actually played, I couldn't realistically do that anyway even if I wanted to. Still, seeing the number of words come out so similarly to the combined help articles for the year makes me feel like those efforts haven't been wasted. The curse of being the only person really doing any ZZT writing regularly means that a lot of times, my coverage is the entirety of written material about a given game. So take your sentence or two covering The Lost Treasures of Digital Reality because otherwise there would be nothing at all.
Featured Games follow, ole reliable in terms of a smaller article for the month, especially by year's end when things get busy. I've still got a short list of modern titles that should probably get proper reviews, and part of me has always been tempted to award the status and figure out the article later. Although seeing how many z2 imported articles are placeholders for reviews that never happened, there's probably a lesson to be learned about the dangers of that.
I also wanted to check the spread on when worlds being covered for Closer Looks were released. Usually there are two such articles each month, with other articles sometimes taking their spot. Seeing as how there are more than 30 years of worlds to cover, I do want to the games that receive coverage to represent a wide swath of ZZT's history
And I think the spread for the year was pretty decent overall. There's more to it than just picking a different year every time. The most obvious being that half of the Closer Looks are selected via Patron polling. If everybody wants to see what the new hotness was in 1997, that's on them. In some cases, a shorter game got me to try a short sequel as well, giving us two Space Fighter: Mercenary games. The opposite happened with 2021's results as well leading to the same doubling up with Town of ZZT Remix which was just too dang long to cover in a single article.
There's also the struggle of finding a fitting game! A lot of early ZZT worlds, especially the more action focused ones can be difficult to capture well, and tend to work better when played live on stream instead. The 2000s era is tougher to make a selection from due to a sharp decline in games after the first few years of the decade, and a lot of games really leaning into unpleasant themes that make them a bit tougher to swallow than when they were new. The late 90s tend to be a sweet spot between game complexity, story depth, and how likely I am to need to use content warnings when covering the game.
There's also some personal bias as well. When in doubt, browsing the Interactive Fantasies catalog has been an easy fallback for me. Their older titles are goofy fun and their later titles are just fun. Many of them are the worlds I grew up playing and being excited for sequels to. I've got my tastes and try not to focus entirely on what I already like, but when the clock's ticking and something needs to get played and covered, it's hard to say no to names like Gus Turnell, Jackson Tough, and Rash'Tan Ythraqi. That and, you know, they were the big name in the late 90s.
