Defending Against the Zig Zag Opening

How would you defend when faced with a zig zag opening from White? Should I have played 1...d5 to my opponent's 1.d3? The center was up for grabs. My universal defense, which I only play when I have no clue what to do, could have held if I had continued to play a few good moves towards the end, as you will see in the Fruit engine continuations.

I'd just say throw your "universal defense" on the scrapheap.

Took a look at a couple of your games.  Looks like you play the QGD against d4.  A decent rule of thumb is that when you don't know what else to do, fall back on your d-pawn defense.  This won't work for every d-pawn defense, of course.  But it does for a lot of them, and the QGD is one.  The Slav, KID, and many Dutch setups work like that, too.

It looks for all the world like your opponent was playing some kind of system where he was just banging out his first moves no matter what you played.

Just for kicks, plug the black moves e6, d5, Nf6, Be7, and 0-0 into your engine against his first five moves, and see how it evaluates it.

Good idea. Thank you spending the time to look at my games and giving me a neat idea.

I tried your idea and believe it would be to develop as if I had the White pieces as opposed to pounding out my QGD - Slav for Black.

Example One is Black pounding out a QG/Slav with a Fruit engine continuation.

Example Two is Black developing as if he had the White pieces with initiative and went for the center squares.

Ex.1

Ex. 2