Computing History of Mazes
From Maze
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[[Category:Mazes]] | [[Category:Mazes]] | ||
| + | ==Introduction== | ||
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| + | The phenomenon of mazes as a staple of computer culture is not distinct from the other cultural and historical instances of mazes. As the earlier sections of this chapter make clear, mazes have been a significant part of human culture for millennia. With the arrival of the computer in the sixties, and graphical displays in the seventies, however, the maze entered what might be thought of as a renaissance. There are two important developments in this period to consider: (1) the first appearance of procedural mazes, that is mazes traversed not through physically walking through space nor through tracing a pencil on a page, but through reading ergodic, interactive text; and (2) the ability to easily generate maze-like structures on a screen. | ||
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| + | ==Procedural Mazes== | ||
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| + | Procedural mazes are mazes in which the entire structure of the maze does not coherently exist in physical or visual space. The maze resides in code. There are two types of procedural mazes to consider: textual and visual. | ||
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| + | ===Textual Procedural Mazes=== | ||
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| + | One interesting consequence of textual procedural mazes is that the players solving them often generated secondary, visual mazes. | ||
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| + | ===Visual Procedural Mazes=== | ||
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| + | ==Screen Mazes== | ||
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| + | One is tempted to pin the advent of maze craze to the release of ''Pac-Man'' in the U.S. in October 1980, followed by ''Ms. Pac-Man'' in 1981, and the popular (though problematic) subsequent ports of those games to the Atari VCS in early 1982 (''Pac-Man'') and late 1982 (''Ms. Pac-Man''). ''Pac-Man'' appeared on the Commodore 64 itself in 1983. Early descriptions of ''Pac-Man'' often described the playing field of the game as a "maze." For example, in 1981, the ''New York Times'' characterized Pac-Man as "a circle with a big mouth that eats up dots in a maze while other big mouths try to eat it up" (Latham 1981), while ''Newsweek'' mentioned the "maddening ''Pac-Man'' maze" the same year (Langway 1981). | ||
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==The Appearance of 10 Print== | ==The Appearance of 10 Print== | ||
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Twice, then, in the span of two years this design was described in print as a maze. Why? Why describe the output as a maze and not the more general terms design or pattern? The reason likely depends upon the position that mazes held in computer culture in the 1970s and 1980s. Quite simply, this was the era of the maze craze. | Twice, then, in the span of two years this design was described in print as a maze. Why? Why describe the output as a maze and not the more general terms design or pattern? The reason likely depends upon the position that mazes held in computer culture in the 1970s and 1980s. Quite simply, this was the era of the maze craze. | ||
| − | One is tempted to pin the advent of maze craze to the release of ''Pac-Man'' in the U.S. in October 1980, followed by ''Ms. Pac-Man'' in 1981, and the popular (though problematic) subsequent ports of those games to the Atari VCS in early 1982 (''Pac-Man'') and late 1982 (''Ms. Pac-Man''). ''Pac-Man'' appeared on the Commodore 64 itself in 1983. Early descriptions of ''Pac-Man'' often described the playing field of the game as a "maze." For example, in 1981, the ''New York Times'' characterized Pac-Man as "a circle with a big mouth that eats up dots in a maze while other big mouths try to eat it up" (Latham 1981), while ''Newsweek'' mentioned the "maddening ''Pac-Man'' maze" the same year (Langway 1981). | ||
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But even before they hit the mainstream in ''Pac-Man'', mazes were a staple of computer culture in its more marginalized forms. Most significantly, mazes were a central feature of early text-based adventure games, now known as interactive fiction. Mazes in these games were not symmetrical spaces to navigate so much as puzzles to solve, non-Euclidean space represented textually. The genre began with the groundbreaking Will Crowther's ''Adventure'', written for the PDP-10 mainframe in 1977 and expanded by Don Woods into a full-fledged underground adventure. Basing the game in part on his own caving experience in the Mammoth Cave system, Crowther included in Adventure a ten-room "MAZE OF TWISTY LITTLE PASSAGES, ALL ALIKE." Woods would go on to add a second maze, this time "TWISTY LITTLE PASSAGES, ALL DIFFERENT" (Jerz 2007, 23). | But even before they hit the mainstream in ''Pac-Man'', mazes were a staple of computer culture in its more marginalized forms. Most significantly, mazes were a central feature of early text-based adventure games, now known as interactive fiction. Mazes in these games were not symmetrical spaces to navigate so much as puzzles to solve, non-Euclidean space represented textually. The genre began with the groundbreaking Will Crowther's ''Adventure'', written for the PDP-10 mainframe in 1977 and expanded by Don Woods into a full-fledged underground adventure. Basing the game in part on his own caving experience in the Mammoth Cave system, Crowther included in Adventure a ten-room "MAZE OF TWISTY LITTLE PASSAGES, ALL ALIKE." Woods would go on to add a second maze, this time "TWISTY LITTLE PASSAGES, ALL DIFFERENT" (Jerz 2007, 23). | ||
