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kjorteoComplete... ish? Sort of? It's really hard to tell whether there's a win condition in this game, but I did a route and wrote a thing about it for the Museum of ZZT. I could possibly go back and do more someday; I've barely scratched the surface of what all is in this game. For now, the part I covered will be going into a giant collaborative effort with numerous sets of eyes going over individual components, because Flimsytown is well beyond the scope of any one author to review. I have no idea when this article will go live. I'm fairly certain I'm the only one who actually wrote their section so far, so between everyone else's runs and the eventual editing to put the entire document together, it could be a while!
But, you know, mine's good to go whenever they're ready. For my writeup here, I'm going to more or less copy/paste what will (eventually, assuming it's not edited out or rejected entirely) become my foreword for the project.
*ahem*
Flimsy's Town of ZZT edit (also known as Flimsytown or Flimtown, among other community nicknames) is a game(?) that has haunted me for a very long time. It's something I briefly saw back in the day, but never really got into. I tried, but I bounced off of fairly hard. This is because... well, look at it:
I... I'm sorry, what?
Throughout most of my time in the community, Flimsy himself was a mystery like that, too. He was the weird one. He was always doing something to cause chaos, usually by impersonating others.
My main encounter with him was the time that he and Zenith Nadir volunteered to help me judge a Weekend of ZZT game jam competition I was hosting. They both turned in their scores, but they were both awful. Nadir's scores at least made coherent sense, but they were jerkish and needlessly contrary to the point of being actively disruptive to the entire contest. Flimsy's... were complete nonsense. Distraught and unsure what to do, I asked the rest of the community for advice. Could I even use these? If not, what should I do? Would having only one set of scores be acceptable? Was it too late to find new judges?
Zenith Nadir replied, with obvious confusion, and told me that he hadn't submitted anything yet. Flimsy must have submitted both sets of scores, one under Nadir's name. Why? To this day, I don't know. Possibly just to be amused by the look on our faces when we had to sort through what had happened.
Flimsy was just kind of like that! He did weird random stuff like that, and people were like, "Uh... okay, Flimsy."
I moved on and moved out of the community. Years later, I looked back, and I learned that Flimsy had taken his own life while I was away. He left quite a lot of documentation and a lot of it is still somewhat difficult to sort through and make sense of, but at least part of the cause appears to have been a belief that no one really understood him. He was a demented genius who felt like he existed on an entire other level from everyone else. There was a lot of underlying isolation and loneliness that came with that.
On one hand, I felt horrible about the way I'd blown him and his work off at the time, because of what everyone reacting like that eventually did to him. On the other hand--and the part that really hits the hardest for me, and the reason I'm writing so many words about this subject--as horrible as it is to admit, he wasn't really wrong. It's true; few people if anyone ever understood him. I still don't!
I went back to Flimsytown again, this time contemplating it as if it were a riddle. As if there were a code in there somewhere, and if only we as a community could have cracked it back when this was made, before it was too late....
But... it's Flimsytown. It's just as inscrutable now as it ever was. If anything, it stands as a testament to just how effective Flimsy was at hiding his secrets through sheer chaos, and how effectively they remain secrets even today, even as the other methods of security eventually failed. Many ZZT authors jealously protected their games' code. Thie Museum looks at this phenomenon in Closer Look articles such as the one for Sivion, which is "super-locked," a rather excessive security measure that involves deliberately corrupting part of the world's code just to make ZZT crash when attempting to edit it. Tools existed to unlock locked worlds, and other tools (such as super-locking) existed to lock them down harder, and the community went back and forth in a sort of arms race. For the most part, locking was seen as an anti-cheat measure; if the player could edit the game, then they could put in an object to give them extra health or ammo, remove locked doors or enemies, or look at the source code to see how some puzzles are meant to be solved, thus ruining the author's intended experience.
That last use--looking at the code--is particularly powerful, and arguably the reason why people were so protective of it. For most games, simply seeing the code is a massive spoiler. Seeing that a guard has an "#if coin bribe" line somewhere in his code (that is, "check for whether the 'coin' flag is set, and jump to the 'bribe' label and execute the code there if it is") lets you know that the intended solution is to look for a coin somewhere so that you can bribe the guard. For most games, viewing the source code demystifies them in a way that the authors typically hated, hence the added security.
These days, locks and super locks can be broken with ease, and games like Sivion stand mostly as a testament to the Ozymandias-like folly of that mindset. Sivion isn't a mystery anymore, even if the author wanted it to be. Super-locking it might have slowed some people down at the time, but those days are long over.
Not so with Flimsy's work, especially Flimsytown.
Flimsy never locked his games, let alone super-locked them. He simply did something I've never seen any other ZZT author do before: he made games where viewing the source code doesn't help. Sixteen Easy Pieces was made almost entirely with premade built-in boulders, sliders, pushers, etc. such that there is no secret "#if coin bribe" hint anywhere to be found. What the player sees when playing the game is exactly what they see when editing it; the latter provides no advantage. As for Flimsytown, there is so much source code, with almost all of it looking like the MissingNo. glitch from Pokémon, that looking through it is just as mind-boggling as playing the game. Flimsy boldly lays all his cards on the table, openly inviting and even almost daring the viewer to look at and decipher them. (Part of his secret longing to be understood, perhaps?) It's the cards themselves that are the sort of Lovecraftian prose describing a figure that defies description.
You can view Flimsytown in the editor on the Museum site right here! It's not a secret at all! Good luck, and let me know what you find.
The whole experience, and especially my struggles and frustrations with understanding or mapping out any of this, gave me a strong desire to bring more light to this game. If I couldn't do it, then perhaps Dr. Dos or one of the other Museum patrons could. I nominated Flimsytown for the Closer Look poll. I was hoping that Dos could explain what I was missing in regards to this game, because after Flimsy's death, I really wanted to know. However, Dos decided that Flimsytown would be too much to cover in one article and vetoed that choice, so we did Sixteen Easy Pieces instead, followed by Shades of Gray. Still, I couldn't help but feel like those were mere warmups for this. Whatever's here, whatever secrets Flimsytown may hold, I want the community to find them.
Dos eventually decided to cover Flimsytown as a collaborative effort, tapping several authors from the ZZT community, the Museum of ZZT Discord, and whatever other third parties were interested. Flimsytown is massive, with each path leading to countless other paths, all of them a riddle at best and utter nonsense at worst. Dos is right; covering Flimsytown is beyond the scope of any one author. By gathering and combining our efforts, we hope to do Flimsy and his legacy at least some measure of justice.
But, you know, mine's good to go whenever they're ready. For my writeup here, I'm going to more or less copy/paste what will (eventually, assuming it's not edited out or rejected entirely) become my foreword for the project.
*ahem*
Flimsy's Town of ZZT edit (also known as Flimsytown or Flimtown, among other community nicknames) is a game(?) that has haunted me for a very long time. It's something I briefly saw back in the day, but never really got into. I tried, but I bounced off of fairly hard. This is because... well, look at it:
I... I'm sorry, what?
Throughout most of my time in the community, Flimsy himself was a mystery like that, too. He was the weird one. He was always doing something to cause chaos, usually by impersonating others.
My main encounter with him was the time that he and Zenith Nadir volunteered to help me judge a Weekend of ZZT game jam competition I was hosting. They both turned in their scores, but they were both awful. Nadir's scores at least made coherent sense, but they were jerkish and needlessly contrary to the point of being actively disruptive to the entire contest. Flimsy's... were complete nonsense. Distraught and unsure what to do, I asked the rest of the community for advice. Could I even use these? If not, what should I do? Would having only one set of scores be acceptable? Was it too late to find new judges?
Zenith Nadir replied, with obvious confusion, and told me that he hadn't submitted anything yet. Flimsy must have submitted both sets of scores, one under Nadir's name. Why? To this day, I don't know. Possibly just to be amused by the look on our faces when we had to sort through what had happened.
Flimsy was just kind of like that! He did weird random stuff like that, and people were like, "Uh... okay, Flimsy."
I moved on and moved out of the community. Years later, I looked back, and I learned that Flimsy had taken his own life while I was away. He left quite a lot of documentation and a lot of it is still somewhat difficult to sort through and make sense of, but at least part of the cause appears to have been a belief that no one really understood him. He was a demented genius who felt like he existed on an entire other level from everyone else. There was a lot of underlying isolation and loneliness that came with that.
On one hand, I felt horrible about the way I'd blown him and his work off at the time, because of what everyone reacting like that eventually did to him. On the other hand--and the part that really hits the hardest for me, and the reason I'm writing so many words about this subject--as horrible as it is to admit, he wasn't really wrong. It's true; few people if anyone ever understood him. I still don't!
I went back to Flimsytown again, this time contemplating it as if it were a riddle. As if there were a code in there somewhere, and if only we as a community could have cracked it back when this was made, before it was too late....
But... it's Flimsytown. It's just as inscrutable now as it ever was. If anything, it stands as a testament to just how effective Flimsy was at hiding his secrets through sheer chaos, and how effectively they remain secrets even today, even as the other methods of security eventually failed. Many ZZT authors jealously protected their games' code. Thie Museum looks at this phenomenon in Closer Look articles such as the one for Sivion, which is "super-locked," a rather excessive security measure that involves deliberately corrupting part of the world's code just to make ZZT crash when attempting to edit it. Tools existed to unlock locked worlds, and other tools (such as super-locking) existed to lock them down harder, and the community went back and forth in a sort of arms race. For the most part, locking was seen as an anti-cheat measure; if the player could edit the game, then they could put in an object to give them extra health or ammo, remove locked doors or enemies, or look at the source code to see how some puzzles are meant to be solved, thus ruining the author's intended experience.
That last use--looking at the code--is particularly powerful, and arguably the reason why people were so protective of it. For most games, simply seeing the code is a massive spoiler. Seeing that a guard has an "#if coin bribe" line somewhere in his code (that is, "check for whether the 'coin' flag is set, and jump to the 'bribe' label and execute the code there if it is") lets you know that the intended solution is to look for a coin somewhere so that you can bribe the guard. For most games, viewing the source code demystifies them in a way that the authors typically hated, hence the added security.
These days, locks and super locks can be broken with ease, and games like Sivion stand mostly as a testament to the Ozymandias-like folly of that mindset. Sivion isn't a mystery anymore, even if the author wanted it to be. Super-locking it might have slowed some people down at the time, but those days are long over.
Not so with Flimsy's work, especially Flimsytown.
Flimsy never locked his games, let alone super-locked them. He simply did something I've never seen any other ZZT author do before: he made games where viewing the source code doesn't help. Sixteen Easy Pieces was made almost entirely with premade built-in boulders, sliders, pushers, etc. such that there is no secret "#if coin bribe" hint anywhere to be found. What the player sees when playing the game is exactly what they see when editing it; the latter provides no advantage. As for Flimsytown, there is so much source code, with almost all of it looking like the MissingNo. glitch from Pokémon, that looking through it is just as mind-boggling as playing the game. Flimsy boldly lays all his cards on the table, openly inviting and even almost daring the viewer to look at and decipher them. (Part of his secret longing to be understood, perhaps?) It's the cards themselves that are the sort of Lovecraftian prose describing a figure that defies description.
You can view Flimsytown in the editor on the Museum site right here! It's not a secret at all! Good luck, and let me know what you find.
The whole experience, and especially my struggles and frustrations with understanding or mapping out any of this, gave me a strong desire to bring more light to this game. If I couldn't do it, then perhaps Dr. Dos or one of the other Museum patrons could. I nominated Flimsytown for the Closer Look poll. I was hoping that Dos could explain what I was missing in regards to this game, because after Flimsy's death, I really wanted to know. However, Dos decided that Flimsytown would be too much to cover in one article and vetoed that choice, so we did Sixteen Easy Pieces instead, followed by Shades of Gray. Still, I couldn't help but feel like those were mere warmups for this. Whatever's here, whatever secrets Flimsytown may hold, I want the community to find them.
Dos eventually decided to cover Flimsytown as a collaborative effort, tapping several authors from the ZZT community, the Museum of ZZT Discord, and whatever other third parties were interested. Flimsytown is massive, with each path leading to countless other paths, all of them a riddle at best and utter nonsense at worst. Dos is right; covering Flimsytown is beyond the scope of any one author. By gathering and combining our efforts, we hope to do Flimsy and his legacy at least some measure of justice.