Review: ZackAndWiki

It’s a sure sign that wikis are going mainstream when one appears for a video-game console. “ZackAndWiki” has the requisite goofy name (like TikiWiki or WikkaWiki), but once you try it out, you’ll find it approaches its job very differently than you’re probably expecting.

I’ll say it up front: ZackAndWiki: QuestForBarbarosTreasure is a disappointment when measured against the expected checklist of wiki features. Most seriously, it has no text editing at all, either WYSIWYG or markup. Instead the “pages” take the unusual form of 2 1/2-D environments, like jungles or ice palaces, that you “edit” by pointing to and manipulating “items”. This is a lot more limited, but in compensation the overall interface is extremely polished, with lots of colors and animation. Editing is accomplished by moving the Wii remote in a variety of intuitive ways, and offers nearly the expressive power of a keyboard while looking a lot cooler to do.

Wikis are of course expected to retain multiple revisions of pages; ZackAndWiki supports a limited form of this in the form of “platinum tickets” that allow you to roll back one (but only one) unwanted latest revision. So if you decide that having Zack be squashed flat by a rolling stone monolith was a mistake, it’s quite easy to undo it. But one rollback is it! I found that quite frequently this limitation makes accomplishing everyday tasks, like evading murderous robotic statues, a lot harder than necessary.

But focusing on ZackAndWiki’s drawbacks is a mistake — this isn’t another competitor in a crowded field; what it’s really doing is redefining the medium. Instead, consider its biggest innovation: puzzles. This has never been an area of strength for wikis, despite a few primitive attempts to model old “Choose Your Own Adventure” type stories — e.g. “The troll raises his axe. Do you FightTheTroll, RunAway, or OfferItABoxOfChocolates ?”. ZackAndWiki really raises the bar, incorporating the type of puzzles found in “The Legend Of Zelda”’s dungeons and of course in old graphical adventure games like “The Secret Of Monkey Island”. To the hardcore wiki fanatics this may seem extraneous, but I say don’t knock it till you’ve tried it. After a few hours of sneaking sleeping potion into cannibals’ stew so I could sneak past them, or flooding the lair of an angry lion, I found I didn’t miss things like automatic linking or inline comments at all.

Unfortunately, unlike the majority of wikis, ZackAndWiki is neither free nor open-source. The retail price of $40 (for which you get a boxed DVD) does compare favorably with enterprise wikis like SocialText or Confluence ($1200 and up). The manual, though full-color, is fairly brief, but to make up for it there is an unexpectedly deep tutorial included in the software, with animated avatars that guide you through the features.

I have to admit that ZackAndWiki isn’t for everyone. Though I’m personally very excited by the innovations and refinements it offers, it’s sure to turn off a lot of wiki uses with its total absence of text editing, multiple revisions, permissions, attachments, comments and networking; not to mention the lack of Windows, Mac or Unix compatibility. But i urge you to give it a try anyway. Once you’ve collected a few treasure chests full of enchanted pirate artifacts, you may never want to go back to the old way of doing things!