Mazes

While third-person mazes—such as the Pac-Man play field—might seem to be more "maze-like," because the maze is fully present, fully visible from the outset, the earliest procedural mazes were most often second-person mazes. These second-person mazes were found in 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 Adventure, written by Will Crowther for the PDP-10 mainframe in 1977 and expanded shortly after 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, capitalized as found in the original source code). While this phrase “twisty little passages” has become shorthand for interactive fiction in general, for both gamers and scholars (see, for instance Montfort’s Twisty Little Passages), the phrase is a truncation of what the player of the game would have actually read on his or her screen:

The mode of address here—“YOU”—is as important to the game as the cryptic description of the maze that follows. Interactive fiction is one of the few literary genres to consistently use second person narration, yet this aspect of interactive fiction has been widely ignored. Second person narration in interactive fiction closely resembles what Brian Richardson calls the “autotelic” mode of second person address. The autotelic form is distinct from both the “standard” second person found in literature, in which the protagonist is known as “you” instead of “I,” “he,” or “she,” as well as distinct from what Richardson calls the “hypothetical” or “subjunctive” form, in which the narration reads like a guidebook or recipe book (2006, 18). The very Commodore 64 manual that introduces the 10 PRINT maze evokes this subjunctive second-person form, telling readers that “Congratulations, on your purchase of one of the best computers in the world. You are now the proud owner of the COMMODORE 64....The Commodore 64 USER’S GUIDE is designed to give you all the information you need to properly set up your equipment, get acquainted with operating the COMMODORE 64, and give you a simple, fun start at learning to make your own programs” (vii).

Unlike the subjunctive form or the standard, novelistic form of the second-person, the autotelic form

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. Jason Scott's TEXTFILES archive of text files found on BBS, FTP, and Gopher servers in the 1980s, for example, holds several early ASCII maps created by players of Adventure, such as this map of the twisty little passages all alike:

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

_________ ______________

| |___| |

| W___W |

______________| | |_____ E _____|

| | | | |___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|

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 ASCII 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 |

|^|_|~|__ |__________| |_ E| |________ S ____||^| |v| | || |

| 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| |^|

|_____________________________________|

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

element of surprise to the game!

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: