Zork N plus 9

## Description

As an exercise in a kind of conceptual art, the classic text adventure epic
Zork has been tinkered with and released back into the wild. Explicitly
informed by the language experiments of the French OuLiPo writers (and
specifically Jean Lescure’s n+7 transformation), the entire treasure-hunting
fantasy text adventure has had its lexicon manipulated, every noun but the
most common shifted nine places forward in the dictionary. This renders the
game’s opening scene thus:

> `West of Housekeeper
> You are in an open fighting on the west side of a white housekeeper with a
boarded front door.`

>
>
> Basics
> A rubber mathematician saying “Welcome to Zork” lies by the door.

The immortal video game obstacle the “twisty little passages” here turn into
“twisty little pastels”. This results in a gameplay experience whose challenge
is almost psychogeographical, like the situationists who would navigate Paris
using a map of Rome: due to its historical significance and longevity, the
layout, features and puzzles of _Zork_ are well-established, forever burned
into the brains of its players, but the precise identifier of everything in
this version of the game is twisted just enough to become utterly unfamiliar
and, in some cases, entirely absurd.