Mazes

In discussing the version of 10 PRINT found in the 1982 ''Commodore 64 User’s Guide,'' the manual points to the two graphical characters "that the program is using for the maze" (53). So, the output of 10 PRINT was called a maze from the beginning, from the program's first appearance in print. The programmer who submitted the one-line version found in ''Run'' also described it as "drawing a continuous maze" (13). Whether or not the 10 PRINT pattern that shows on the screen is solvable at every instant, it was consistently identified as a maze in the early 1980s. If everyone were to see the output simply as a pattern of alternating diagonal lines it surely would not be as interesting to execute, to understand, and to discuss this program. The maze is the central visual trope used to read 10 PRINT's output.

Cryptic, compelling, and cabalistic, the maze invites many modes of interpretation and understanding. Mazes can pique our curiosity and elicit a range of emotions: amusement, excitement, confusion, trepidation, calm, and hopelessness among others. They are approachable as visual objects, as textual artifacts, and as horticultural and architectonic spaces. A full account of the cultural significance of mazes would need to traverse the fields of art, history, literature, religion, architecture, and even music and dance. This chapter makes no pretense of offering a comprehensive account of what mazes mean. (For in-depth historical accounts of mazes and labyrinths, see Doob, 1990; Kern, 2000; and Matthews, 1922.) Rather, it highlights those mazes and representations of mazes throughout history that bear on what Commodore 64 users in the 1980s would plausibly associate with the output they saw after running 10 PRINT. This can help to explain 10 PRINT and also the computing context in which it existed -- one in which mazes were very often represented and simulated.

Whether perceived as amusing puzzles, places of terror, or invitations to contemplative meanderings, our current cultural ideas of the maze (certainly in the Unites States and in much of the West) date back to the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur in the labyrinth of Knossos, a bewildering and life-threatening space. Mazes have since appeared on coins, on walls, and in spiritual centers. Hedge-row mazes have presented public, shared diversions. In more recent times, mazes have served as spaces for movement and dance and as commonplace diversions in puzzle-books. Sometimes, mazes are abstract mathematical objects or scientific tools for studying animal behavior. And in computer games, the maze takes on an archetypal, structural frame for adventure, chase, and combat.

Indeed, the computer has provided new ways of experiencing mazes. In particular, the experience of the maze shifts with the different perspectives commonly associated with video games: first-person, second-person, and third-person. Each entails a different form of embodiment, a different form of subjectivity, and a different perception of space. Experiencing a maze one corridor at a time from a first-person point of view is markedly different from experiencing the same maze through the "you" of a text adventure or through a third-person omniscient or overarching view. By considering how 10 PRINT relates to computer mazes of these types in games, it is possible to understand more about what 10 PRINT's maze means, and what makes this program inviting to try out and to modify.