Mazes

----

'''Mazes in Computers'''

==Introduction==

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 ability to easily generate complete maze-like structures on a screen or, with older computers, printed output; and (2) the appearance of procedural mazes, that is mazes traversed not through physically walking through space nor through tracing a pencil on a page, but through navigating ergodic, interactive text.

==Screen Mazes==

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).

But even before they hit the mainstream in ''Pac-Man'', mazes were a staple of computer culture, and on-screen maze-like structures abound [http://weizenbaum.mit.edu/mediawiki/index.php/Talk:Maze_walking%2C_solvability%2C_generate-and-test] in the early days of video arcades and home computers.

==Procedural Mazes==

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. Or rather, the potential of the maze resides in code. Only a portion of the maze is ever available to be traversed at any given time; the rest remains to be generated by algorithms. There are two types of procedural mazes found in the seventies and eighties: textual and visual.

===Textual Procedural Mazes===

While visual mazes might seem to be more "maze-like," in fact, the early procedural mazes were most often textual. 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).

One important consequence of textual procedural mazes is that the players solving them often generated secondary, visual mazes, often sharing them via BBSes or home computer user groups. Maze begets maze. For example, Jason Scott's TEXTFILES archive of text files found on BBS, FTP, and Gopher servers in the eighties, holds several early ASCII maps created by players of ''Adventure'', such as this [http://www.textfiles.com/adventure/mazmap.adv map of the twisty little passages all alike]:

Note: This maze is the same for both Adventure 350 and 550

_________ ______________

| |___| |

| W___W |

______________| | |_____ E _____|

| ___________S | | | ___

| | | | _____|W |_____ _____|N |____

| | | |___| | | |

| | | U___D |______| |

| | | | | E______S |

| | |E ______| |_____ S _____| |______ E ____|

|W |______ | | _____|W |_____ | |

| | | |__________| |___ ___|S |____

| | |_____________E D | | |

| | | ___| | W|_____

| |__________________| | |E ___________ |

| N__________________U | ___| |___ ____|E |___

|__ S ___| | N ___________| ___| N |__| |__

| | | | |___S,E W__S (EXIT)U__

|__| ___|W |____ | | | |

| | |___U,D ___| |____ W ___|

___| | | | | |

|___D | ___| |___ ____| |___

|___ E ____| | U,D | | N |

| | |__________| | |

| | ___ ___| |

___|W |_____ ___| W |___ |___W |

___| | | | |___S,E ____|

|___S BRINK OF |___| | |__|

| PIT N___S E|________________

|D ______ E | |__________________ W |

| | | |______________________| |

| | |_________________________ N |

_____|~~|____ |___ NW __|

| | | |

| BIRD CHAMBER| ___| |__

_____| |___ | BACK |

W_______________________E |PIRATEDEN|

Downloaded From P-80 Systems 304-744-2253

Adventure was enormously influential upon a generation of programmers and videogame players, but most immediately, the text adventure game inspired the even better known ''Zork.'' ''Zork'' too included a troublesome maze, its complexities most evident when fully mapped, as in this [http://www.textfiles.com/adventure/maze.zk1 ASCII map]:

NOTE: This maze is formatted for 80-columns!

ZORK I - Maze Map

______________________________________

|v __________________________________ <|

|v| ______________________________ |^|

|v| |v __________________________ <| |^|

|v| |v| ____________ _____ |^| |^|

|v| |v| | #1 |___|TROLL||^| |^|

|v| |v| | E___W ROOM||^| |^|

|v| |v| |W ________ S| |_____||^| |^|

|v| |v|__|v|__ __|v|__ |^| |^|

|v| |__/ N |__| S | |^| |^|

|v| | #3 /__D #2 | ____|^|_|^|__________________

|v| |_ W __| |__ E __| |> __|^|_|^|________________ v| ________

|v| __|v|________|v|__ |^| |^| |^| |v| | |

___|v|___| N #4 W |__|^| |^| |^| ______ |v| | THIEF |

|> _|v|___|_____ U __________|____| |^| |^| ____| #10 |_|v| | DEN |

|^| |v| _____|v|_____ ___ |^| |^| |v __E U___| | #18|

|^| |v| |#5 N | | #6| ____|_|_|D|__|E| |__ W _| |__ D ___|

|^| |v| |SKELETON ROOM|_| |_| #9 |__ |v| _____ |^|

|^| |v| | SW_ U_N&W /< | |v| | #11 | __|U|___

|^|_|~|__ |_______[[User:MarkSample|MarkSample]]___| |_ E| |________ S ____||^| |v| | || |

|__D #8 |________|^|___ |v| |^| | | |^| |v| |_NE _||CYCLOPS |

| SW_____SW D #7 | __|W|______|^| |E|_____|_|__|v| |v| | #17 |

|NE_NW| | || #12 D_| | #16 S_| |v| |_NW ____|

|v| |v| |E __ U _||E __ U __ S| |_ D ______W | ___|_| _|^|_

__|v| |v| |v| |v| |^| |v|__|v|_____|^|___|_||^|__| #14 |__| SE |

| SW| |v| |v| |v| |^| |____|v|_____|^|______|^|__S W _ W #13|

|GRAT| |v| |v| |v|__|^|_______|v|_____|^|___|^||^| |______| |_ S _|

|#15 | |v| |v|__|____|_|_______|_|_____|^|_____||^| |v| |^|

|__ U| |v| |_____________________________| |____|^| |v| |^|

|v| |v|_______________|_|_______|_|______________|^| |v| |^|

__|~| |______________________________________________| |v| |^|

|OUT | |^| |v|_______________________|_|____|^|

|SIDE| |^| |__________________________________|

|____| |^|_________________________________|v|

|_____________________________________|

LEGEND: v's, ^'s, >'s and <'s are aids in following some of the paths.

~'s and /'s denote one-way entrances.

NOTE: Hidden passages are not noted on this map. Want to leave some

element of surprise to the game!

Downloaded From P-80 Systems 304-744-2253

Both of these maps utilize the standard ASCII character set---especially underscores and pipes---to "draw" the maze, and in this way they seem to be precursors to the 10 Print maze, which appears to use slashes and backslashes for its wall. Though this comparison is not strictly true, as the Commodore 64 maze relies on non-standard graphical characters that only resemble typographical characters, a topic that will be covered later in this volume.

The use of ASCII to make these maps was necessary, since text files were more easily shared across platforms via BBSes than graphical files, as the graphical formats that are standard today were not yet prevalent. The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF), for example, was only introduced in 1987, by the online service provider CompuServe.

Of course, the restriction to ASCII did not apply when maze maps were shared via other means, such as mimeographs of hand-drawn maps, or this detailed map apparently drawn by a gamer named Steven Jones, which was originally published in DEC Professional in November 1982:

[[Image:Steven_Roy_Zork_Map_for_DEC_Professional.jpg|400px]]

===Visual Procedural Mazes===

The 10 Print program that is the focus of this book should be considered a ''visual'', ''procedural'' maze, an on-screen maze generated by an algorithm. From its very beginnings, the pattern generated by 10 Print was called a maze. Consider the earliest known iteration of the program, found in the ''Commodore 64 User’s Guide'' that was included with every C64 computer (1982). The Advanced Basic chapter offers "an introduction to designing graphics" and provides a "neat little program" that uses the RND function--the random number generator--to draw on the screen:

10 PRINT "{CLR/HOME}"

20 PRINT CHR$(205.5 + RND(1));

40 GOTO 20

The program is three lines long; little indeed, but not as small as the program that would later inspire this book. In the course of parsing the three lines, the manual explains that the graphic characters on the right side of the M and N keys "are the two characters that the program is using for the maze" (53). And there it is, the first instance of this pattern generated by the random alternation of two slashes being called a "maze."

Two years later the pattern was once again described as a maze in the Commodore 64 hobbyist magazine ''Run''. A section of ''Run'' called "Magic" featured C64 tricks mailed in by users, and in the July 1984 issue, the editor Louis F. Sander announced an

<blockquote>Amazing one liner--Here is one of the best one-liners I’ve ever seen. It works on the VIC and C-64, drawing a continuous maze that is very interesting. (13)</blockquote>

The one-liner was submitted by Dan A. Krueger from Cary, Illinois, and it looked like this:

8 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(8));:GOTO 8

The program is slightly different in form than the three-liner found in the ''Commodore 64 User’s Guide''--a fact that is addressed elsewhere in this book--but the pattern itself should be familiar by now.

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.

This chapter argues that the use of the word "maze" to describe what by many definitions is not a maze is rooted in the cultural history of the word in the 1970s and early 1980s, when "maze" conjured up specific images that resonated with home computer users.

It would simply be impossible to use the word "maze" within the semiotic domain of computers and not create some association with these games. Therefore, there's some cultural capital at work whenever 10 Print's design was called a maze in the early eighties. It is reasonable to conclude that the various sources from the early eighties that called the 10 Print design a "maze" were explicitly (though perhaps not consciously) tapping into a cultural history of mazes that home programmers and game players would be aware of.

Finally, though there’s no evidence to prove this, one wonders whether the program would have the program have had the same viral-like persistence if its description had made no mention of mazes?

== Bibliography ==

''Commodore 64 User's Guide''. Wayne PA; Indianapolis, IN: Commodore Business Machines; Distributed by Howard W. Sams & Co., 1982. <http://www.commodore.ca/manuals/c64_users_guide/c64-users_guide.htm>.

Jerz, Dennis. "Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther's Original 'Adventure' in Code and in Kentucky." ''DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly'' 1.2 (2007). <http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/001/2/000009/000009.html>.

Krueger, Dan A., and Louis F. Sander. "Magic $93." ''Run'' Jul 1984. 13-14. <http://www.old-computer-mags.com/magazine/magazine_viewer_eng.php?idx=Run.htm&base=Run&num=007&page=13>.

Langway, Lynn. "Invasion of the Video Creatures." ''Newsweek'' 16 Nov 1981: 90+.

Latham, Aaron. "Video Games Star War." ''The New York Times'' 25 Oct 1981: 100+.

Map of Twisty Little Passages All Alike Maze. TEXTFILES. <http://www.textfiles.com/adventure/mazmap.adv>.

Zork 1 - Maze Map. TEXTFILES. <http://www.textfiles.com/adventure/maze.zk1>.