Michael F Zozo’s Abstractia Dom Eternalis: The Maelstrom Puzzle

The following article was one of several short-form pieces of writing requested by a now defunct publication following the death of game designer and architect Michael F Zozo. Each was intended to serve as an independent summation of one of his titles.

Abstractia Dom Eternalis: The Maelstrom Puzzle was Zozo's final game. It was a natural offspring of the pre-internet 'play by mails' in which players would usually pay a monthly fee in order to mail choices and actions to a game master who return their correspondence, narrating the subsequent results. Though these were sometimes simple, others were vast multiplayer experiences in which dozens of agents interacted with the same world, meaning their actions had ramifications for the others within it.

Abstractia Dom Eternalis had the same premise, but conducted via email. Michael F Zozo announced the game and its very basic rules on a website that was first uploaded to the internet at some point in 1996. The game itself began in the first quarter of 1997 and lasted until Zozo's death in 2001. Unfortunately, the website has long sank into the mire of lost internet content, so the majority of the information is based on memory of those who were playing from the very beginning.

Most early adopters were fans of Zozo's previous works of interactive fiction – primary Ambigo, Urbania and Ego from Castle. The rules of the game were simple – each player signed up by emailing a specific email address and requesting entry, at which point they were allocated a code number which was to be used as the subject for all of their future emails. Each 'turn' of the game lasted two weeks and in that time period, if a player wished to play they had to email Zozo with a question. These questions would inform their characters actions and might be answered, unanswered or partially answered by the results which would be emailed back to them.

Once the game itself begun, it was incredibly surreal. There was a vastness and breadth to the setting that isolated players from one another until they began searching for others. In a manner that was typical of Zozo, locations and genre were chimeras grafted together with ugly misshapen scar tissue that straddled both. One location might begin as a large aquarium, but venturing deeper into it might reveal an underground boxing ring where fighters clashed in foul smelling water. Zozo claimed that the questions each player asked every two weeks were viewed by him through something he referred to as 'The lens of abstractia' but what this meant was never explained or further elaborated upon. The title of the game itself relies on another Zozoian trope of falsifying languages – whilst it is clearly meant to represent Latin, perhaps to create a sense of the phrase 'The abstract over everything' or 'Abstraction over all', it is nonsense gibberish.

On entry to the game, players would be sent an email detailing their location and scenario. Most initially asked the question 'where am I?' which would immediately change the location entirely. The lens of abstractia, it seemed, interpreted actions in complex and mercurial ways. Players would often meet other players and attempt to cooperate or share insight, only to be wrenched away from one another in disparate directions by the swirling maelstrom of entropy that inhabited the world. Never the less, players began to claim to develop an understanding of the mechanics behind the game. By carefully testing and studying (in a way reminiscent of the players of The Beribboned Door), they learnt to exert more control over their fate within, slowly developing their knowledge of the governing rules of the universe on a fourteen day rotation.

Forums quickly became a large part of the gaming experience, with players sharing ideas and locations, explaining the questions they had asked that had delivered them to these places. Widespread cooperation was used to further explore the borders of the fictional universe with different groups emerging who claimed to have complete understanding of the lens of abstractia. The inclusion of the word puzzle in the subtitle of the game led most to believe that Abstractia Dom Eternalis was not just a piece of multiplayer interactive fiction, but a cooperative problem with a solution that would either advance or complete the experience. Different players and networks of players vied to be the first to reach certain milestones or map the paths between different areas of the game.

“I have done it! I have mapped a reliable path of questions from The Seventh Column to the Abandoned Number Station via The Regretful Fjord.” One player posted in 1999. He had, it seemed, managed to use a series of predicted questions in order to repeat a cycle of three scenarios, something which nobody else had been capable of doing. Unfortunately, when others happened upon The Seventh Column, they could not replicate the feat even when using the same questions as the forums poster. This was a pivotal moment in the community, as it raised the question of how other players might effect the flow of the game. What was it that was specific to the initial player that had allowed him to cycle through the locations? What had changed when others tried to replicate it?

On July 7th 2001, Michael F Zozo wrote a short suicide note and took his own life. In the note he blamed a diagnosis of cancer and lamented the position he had been 'forced' into. To date, no evidence of this cancer diagnosis has been found. Abstractia Dom Eternalis was left frozen in time, unsolved and unfinished.

There was, however, a closure of sorts for players. After a considerable amount of investigation and communication with friends and family of Zozo, some of the Abstractia community were able to convince Zozo's publicist to open up the files on his computer relating to Abstractia. What they had hoped for was a vast and complex rulebook that detailed how the game would be played, or a working and updating series of documents that detailed the universe of the game as it existed in the moment when the final update had come.

Instead, what the publicist found was a list of locations and scenarios, none of which had been changed since their initial writing. He also found the email address where the 'turns' had been emailed. Not one of them had ever been read.