Xyzzy

Xyzzy is a magic word from the Colossal Cave Adventure computer game.

In computing, the word is sometimes used as a metasyntactic variable or as a video game cheat code, the canonical "magic word". In mathematics, the word is used as a mnemonic for the cross product.

Origin

Modern usage derives primarily from one of the earliest computer games, Colossal Cave Adventure, in which the idea is to explore an underground cave with many rooms and to collect the treasures you find there. By typing "xyzzy" at the appropriate time, the player could move instantly between two otherwise distant points. Hundreds of later interactive fiction games contain responses to the command "xyzzy" as a tribute to Colossal Cave Adventure.^[1] More recent games have shown a trend of increasingly more elaborate and in-jokey responses.

The origin of the word has been the subject of debate. While one common story is that Crowther "made it up from whole cloth" when writing the game, Rick Adams points out that the mnemonic "XYZZY" has long been taught by math teachers to remember the process for performing cross products (as a mnemonic that lists the order of subscripts to be multiplied first).^[2]

Uses

Xyzzy has actually been implemented as an undocumented no-op command on several operating systems; in Data General's AOS/VS, for example, it would typically respond "Nothing happens", just as the game did if the magic was invoked at the wrong spot or before a player had performed the action that enabled the word. In more recent 32-bit versions, AOS/VS responds "Twice as much happens".^[2] Similarly, the low-traffic Usenet newsgroup alt.xyzzy is used for test messages, to which other readers (if there are any) customarily respond, "Nothing happens" as a note that the test message was successfully received; the Google IMAP service advertises a strange CAPABILITY called XYZZY when you issue the CAPABILITY command. If the command XYZZY is given, the server responds "OK Nothing happens."; in mIRC, entering the command /xyzzy will display the response "Nothing happens"; and in the computer game Diablo II, the command /xyzzy literally does nothing as opposed to any other unusable command giving the feedback "That is not a valid command."

The popular Minesweeper game under Microsoft Windows has a cheat mode triggered by entering the comment xyzzy, then pressing ⇧ Shift and then ↵ Enter, which turns a single pixel in the top-left corner of the entire screen into a small black or white dot depending on whether or not the mouse pointer is over a mine.^[3] This feature is present in all versions except for Windows Vista and the Windows 7 beta, but under Windows 95, 98 and NT 4.0 the pixel is only visible if the standard Explorer desktop is not running.

In the early late 1980s a VAX/VMS program by the name of xyzzy was used to send live messages to other users on the system. This program was touted as a "deluxe chatting program".^[4]

Xyzzy was the inspiration of the name behind the interactive fiction competition the XYZZY Awards.

References