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Xyzzy


Last time we explored the history of the MMO in regards to its uncertain future, we looked at the evolution of the genre from text based adventure charging through the roof to play over ARPANET all the way until Clash of Clans! This is one of gaming's oldest genres concept it has altered the entire industry! From this also came one of gaming's oldest jokes dating way back to Colossal Cave Adventure (the MUD used in the picture last time), the joke came in the form of a spell that has traversed the empty gaming netherspace beyond the screen: Xyzzy!

If you're like me you may well have first heard of this mystical spell from the website Cards Against Humanity Online, I thought it was the phrase "Pretend your Xyzzy" was just a random assortment of words and letters. I should have known! So, what does this powerful spell do? If you use it in Colossal Cave Adventure you could be taken to distant places in the game's world. This spell has its uses, obviously, but the spell became bigger than itself, it became a cult following, think Dopefish level of fan adoration as we hop franchises and follow the spell's path across gaming history!

Minesweeper, wait, it hit Minesweeper next? Of all the gaming worlds! Anyway, in 1990 Microsoft released the first version of Minesweeper and entering the command "Xyzzy" followed by Shift and Enter turned a single pixel in the top left corner of the screen either black or white, depending if the mouse was hovered over it. What? You expected something better? This easter egg was present across all versions of Minesweeper but sometimes you would need to close Internet Explorer. Why? I have no idea, let's move on to the next game and hope that it does something cooler!

Next up on our hit list is Zork, I said I wanted to mention this game last time and now we can't seem to shake it! Enter the command "Xyzzy" here and your in-game character will here a voice calling you a "fool". Probably because Zork and Colossal Cave Adventure were rival text based adventures. Infocom games also had a similar response in their games as did later text based adventures. Want something better? Got a Chromebook? No? Me neither. Well if you did and decided to boot the laptop up in developer mode the laptop will be in "sad mode". How can you cheer up your laptop? Press the Xyzzy button the screen will change to a fake Blue Screen of Death! Xyzzy's pulling pranks now, probably bored of changing a single pixel in a corner of the screen!

In Dungeons and Dragons Online we see Xyzzy manifest into a malovelent force! Xy'zzy is a nearly invulnerable raid boss in the Hounds of Xoriat adventure. At least Xyzzy is back in the realm of fantasy, even if it has become evil. Xyzzy had made literally hundreds of other appearances in games and also in the real world. Some HP laptops can have the command Xyzzy input and the console will reply "I see no cave". For a near forgettable spell it sure became a huge phenomenom, but where did "Xyzzy" come from? Who thought of the name? It's a weird spell name, mainly becasue it's less Harry Potter and more cold, hard Maths! It's time to talk about Vectors, sadly not Vector, the crocodile guy from Sonic but we might come back to him! The Cross Product is a binary operation on two vectors in a three dimensional space, following? Good! Skipping through more mathsy terms like "psuedovector" and "orthogonal group" which probably weren't important, maybe, and we find the equation: a=b*c where a= (ax,ay,az), b= (bx,by,bz) and c= (cx,cy,cz), as a note, imagine the x's, y's and z's as subscript and have it actually look like a vector, if you know what they look like! Using maths wizadry we get the following equations:

ax = bycz-bzcy

ay = bzcx-bxcz

az = bxcy-bycx

Try putting the first three equations in the paragraph above into a 3*3 grid and follow the diagonal lines of the subscript. You'll get XYZ, the three equations above are something to do with Sarrus' scheme but I have no clue what that is, but if you mirror XYZ you get XYZZYX and somehow the final "x" ws lost and we are left with XYZZY. Now we've got the name what on earth has this got to do with Colossal Cave Adventure? It's to do with computing Cross Products but the creator of Colossal Cave Adventure claims to have no idea about the mathematics function before calling the spell Xyzzy. So that magical spell which has traversed the real world and our favourite games is not magic but rather Maths! In the end, aren't they the same thing?

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