Article Word Counts
And for all the articles published this year, we've got a break down of where those words went, which is about what you'd probably expect.
Closer Looks are never not going to make up a considerable majority of the text added to the site each year. They're kind of the whole reason the Museum has articles in the first place, to have any text record of these games. The vast majority of which have essentially zero surviving words online, save for the lucky ones that got reviews or awards that have a paragraph or two that probably uses the term "wonky".
Then livestreams, whose descriptions add up over the course of a year. Again, another blind spot is just how little footage there is of most ZZT worlds. Hopefully the streams provide a good look at what actually playing these games is like today. And with the average week resulting in two new streams, even the quick overviews make up a decent portion of text.
The gap between live streams and publication packs has narrowed a bit this year too. Now that I'm now longer trying to make entries within publication packs double as Tweets, I am free to write more than 240 characters if a world has an interesting backstory or something that makes it particularly unique. No more mandatory Cliffs notes. That being said, I still prefer to keep it brief, especially given how many published files are now ones that I've already written a little about in livestream descriptions. I can't tell you the number of times I've confused myself thinking that I already wrote about a game for a publication pack, only to realize that I'm thinking of the stream description.
And then just some tiny slivers. Featured Worlds, some Let's Play non-live streamed recordings, and a single misc article (last year's stats). Oh, and an imperceptible sliver thanks to WiL contributing a video walkthrough for Darius Vöd.
Closer Look Subjects By Release Year
With more than thirty years of history to choose from, I try my best to spread things out a bit when it comes to Closer Looks. While the quantity and quality of releases can vary over the decades, there's no such thing as a bad year. Except maybe for 2011 with its one known release, but even that one is a banger! It's only bad in terms of variety.
For 2023, things were a little bit more clumped together than before. The mid-90s got a solid focus, though some of that is due to the simple method of translating one article into a single year, which means double-counting multi-part articles for Adventure and Adventure Part 2. The former of which has a clear discrepancy in its date between the title screen ad the file modification time anyway. Never trust a graph.
Good ole Y2K and Y2K+1 however are bit more reliable with their file dates though they still have their share of multi-part articles thanks to Voyage of Four and Gem Hunter 3.
I tend to flip back and forth between feeling like I'm focusing on too much of one era of ZZT and not enough on another, so perhaps it's no surprise for the articles to land where they fell. The mid-90s is a great time for ZZT, where worlds have moved on from (but not forgotten) their early inspirations of the Epic published worlds. More often than not you'll find STK graphics in these worlds, which while not exactly a promise of quality, does inspire at least some confidence. This era is full of pleasant surprises, memorable classics, and a lot of evolutionary dead ends for what a ZZT game might be.
The early 2000s meanwhile, I have a bad habit of mis-characterizing the era as ZZT entering its dark age. A community more insular, more hostile to newcomers, and more demanding of their expectations to be met in any given game. Yet the more I actually play worlds from this time, the less prevalent this negativity seems to be. The hostility isn't entirely imagined, but whenever I worry something will be too mean-spirited or use too many dated terms to be worth showcasing when there are so many other ZZT worlds that have yet to be played, that fear is rarely all that justified. In ever year, no matter how rough things may have gotten on IRC and forums, there were others that wanted to just "Shut Up and ZZT".
You will get more r-slurs and sometimes f-slurs, which are indeed rather unfortunate, and worth noting for those who would rather focus on playing the thousands of worlds that don't have such issues. However, the odds are good that if you remember the 2000s, you won't be particularly shocked by what you come across. While a few notable exceptions still occur, the ZZT community at its worst was generally too busy being awful to actually make games. Looking at what I've played, the average world from the early or mid 2000s isn't something best left buried. It is still an era of experimentation in pushing ZZT to its limits, and an era of valiant efforts by teenagers trying to tell the coolest stories they can imagine. (No promises that they'll succeed at it though.)
