Mazes
From Maze
Mazes in Culture: From Greeks to Geeks (Working title)
This is as strange a maze as e'er men trod - The Tempest (3.3.1)
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 (1982) that was included with every C64 computer. 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$(205.5 + RND(1));
40 GOTO 20
The program is three lines long; little indeed, but not as short as the program that would later inspire this book. In the course of parsing the three lines, the manual explains that the graphic characters on the right side of the M and N keys "are the two characters that the program is using for the maze" (53). There it is, the first instance of this pattern generated by the random alternation of two slashes being called a "maze."
Two years later the pattern was once again described as a maze in the Commodore 64 hobbyist magazine Run. A section of Run called "Magic" featured C64 tricks mailed in by users, and in the July 1984 issue, the editor Louis F. Sander announced an
Amazing one-liner--Here is one of the best one-liners I’ve ever seen. It works on the VIC and C-64, drawing a continuous maze that is very interesting. (13)
Dan A. Krueger from Cary, IL, submitted the one-liner, and it looked like this:
8 PRINT CHR$(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 is familiar by now.
Twice, then, in the span of two years, this design was described as a maze. Why? The 10 PRINT pattern is clearly not solvable like a puzzle book maze, since there is, after all, nothing to solve. The continuous scrolling of the pattern, with each new line an addition to maze, makes it impossible to try to solve without pressing the STOP key, which is the Commodore 64’s equivalent of the modern ESC key, which will “break” the program.
Maze-Solve.jpg
375 × 238 pixels
Yet the pattern is repeatedly called a maze, perhaps as a sort of shorthand: one does not look at this design and call it a “randomly alternating pattern of diagonal lines.” To do so would quickly drain the design of its mystique. One calls it a maze.
Maze suits us, but how do we under understand a maze? Cryptic, compelling, and cabalistic, mazes invite many modes of interpretation and understanding. Mazes pique our curiosity and elicit a range of emotions: excitement, trepidation, anxiety, calm, among so many others. They are approachable as visual objects, as textual artifacts, as geographic spaces, and a full account of the cultural significance of mazes would traverse the fields of art, history, literature, religion, architecture, even music and dance. This chapter makes no pretense of offering such an account (For in-depth historical accounts of mazes and labyrinths, see Doob, 1990; Kern, 2000; and Matthews, 1922); it will, rather, only highlight those mazes and representations of mazes throughout history that reveal something about the 10 PRINT maze and the emotions evoked by running this single line of code. And we illustrate, through our discussion, how the maze becomes such a dominant visual trope, especially in the world of early personal computing.
Whether perceived as bewildering puzzles, places of terror, throwaway amusements, or invitations to contemplative meanderings, mazes in the West date back to the the legendary labyrinth of Knossos, which establishes the maze as a bewildering and even life-threatening space. They find their way onto coins and into spiritual centers and, eventually on the floors of cathedrals, most famously at Chartres in France. Hedge-row mazes bring the maze into the realm of public, shared diversion. In more recent times, mazes serve as spaces for movement and dance, and as commonplace diversions in puzzle-books. Sometimes, mazes are abstracted structures to be solved mathematically; and, in the field of psychology, the maze becomes a tool for examining behavior. Crucially, in the realms of computer-based games, the maze takes on an archetypal, structural frame of game play and encounters.
In the second part of this chapter, we examine the prevalence of mazes in early and contemporary computing culture. At once indebted to mazes as mathematical models and visual puzzles, computers opened up new ways of experiencing mazes. In particular, mazes change with the different perspectives commonly associated with video games: first-person, second-person, and third-person. Each of these perspectives 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 a third-person, nearly omniscient point of view, the entirety of the maze spread out before—or below—the subject. Regardless of the point of view, however, the maze structures every encounter with the enmazed space. And 10 PRINT, in its own way, builds upon and responds to these notions of mazes, at once confirming and challenging what is commonly held to be true about mazes.
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Sidebar:
A great deal of critical ink has already been spilled about the distinction between mazes and labyrinths, and the debate remains unresolved; we therefore use the terms mazes and labyrinth interchangeably. Besides, many languages do not bear out any difference. Nevertheless, as we will see below, there is a difference that makes a difference: namely the distinction that is made between the unicursal maze, on the one hand, that offers a single path through which walkers, say, find their way to the center or the exit without having to make changes, and the multicursal maze, on the other hand, that invite wrong turns and even multiple paths to the exit or center of the mze . A maze’s reason for being (its designer’s intent or purpose) will drive the designer’s choice of unicursal or multi-cursal design and the experience of using the maze will also vary depending on whether decisions are asked of users or not. Whether unicursal or multicursal, the reader will nevertheless note the preponderance of the term maze, since it is the word used historically in the realm of computers as illustrated by its use in the Commodore 64 User’s Guide. _________________________________________
What is a Maze?
The Oxford English dictionary offers two definitions:
- A structure designed as a puzzle, consisting of a complicated network of winding and interconnecting paths or passages, only one of which is the correct route through; a labyrinth; (occas. in pl.) the windings of a labyrinth. Also (as in quot. 1903): a structure comprising two points joined by a single winding line much greater in length than the direct line between the two points.</li>
- In extended use: a complex network of paths or streets; a bewildering mass of things (material or immaterial), in which the individual components are difficult to separate or make out. </li>
The first definition offers a strict description of a 3-D, real-world puzzle; the second, more metaphorical, allows us to name mazes representations of paths with certain characteristics. And popular usages have stretched the term’s meanings to cover intellectual puzzles, legal code, and confusing, labyrinthine spaces and situations of all sorts. The 10 PRINT maze is a representation of a maze, which might be perceived very differently by its viewers, with terror or pleasure, technically or aesthetically, emotionally or rationally, and so on.
10 PRINT fits some of the criteria that William Henry Matthews establishes for mazes in his definitive Mazes and Labyrinths (1922): they are "works of artifice,” not "'labyrinths’ of nature, such as forests, caverns, and so forth; they are endowed with "an element of purposefulness in the design" (182); and betray "a certain degree of complexity" (183). Finally he requires "communication" among the maze’s component parts and between its "interior and exterior" (183).
10 PRINT is, indeed, a complex work of artifice. Ironically -- and Matthews could not foresee this -- what is compelling and captivating about 10 PRINT is precisely that there is no Daedalus-programmer to purposefully design a pattern of outputs, but rather that this single line of code has the power to generate mazes on its own, without any instigator or embodied intentionality. In 10 PRINT, communication among the component parts is established by the regularities of the “blank” spaces between slashes, which in the aggregate also establishes, a sense of inside and out that is rather more muddled than Matthews might have anticipated. What’s more we situate 10 PRINT on the historical continuum of “endless mazes” invoked in this early use of the term found in the Oxford English Dictionary.
1542 H. BRINKELOW Lamentacion sig. Cviii, Leadyng them in an endlesse Maze of dyrtye tradicyons and folish ceremonyes.
As an endless maze, 10 PRINT tantalizes viewers, but offers no set path or solution, and fits Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) broad definition of the maze as "a confusing and baffling network, as of paths or passages; an intricacy; a labyrinth."
All mazes offer at least one path, and, as suggested in the sidebar, the key structural and therefore defining difference among mazes is whether they are unicursal or multicursal. This is true whether mazes be physical structures, mathematical constructions, drawings, or dances, or games. In unicursal mazes the space to be navigated is bound and the single path followed; users have no directional decisions to make, save to follow the meanderings of the path, leaving their attention, mind, or emotions free to wander or focus elsewhere, while continuing along, guided by the path itself, to the end at the center of the maze or a unique exit). The unicursal maze may be (and has often been understood as) a path in motion across time, offering spiritual and contemplative space to the walker. Understood this way, the path can be taken repeatedly and ritualistically, again and again offering new insight, peace, and spiritual comfort each time. In unicursal hedge mazes, where the hedges often limit one’s vision to an immediate and foreshortened horizon, one is particularly enclosed and protected.
For children over the centuries, unicursal hedge and turf mazes have offered curling lanes for running but less puzzling pleasures than the seemingly endless grounds for playing hide and seek out of doors in multicursal mazes. For in multicursal mazes, which are solvable mazes, the solution is complicated by the possibility of making wrong choices at key nodes where directional choices are required. Instead of following the unicursal maze’s predetermined path, walkers in a multicursal maze risk getting lost on their way. They are challenged to find the path that reaches the exit. Once that path is known, though, the maze becomes a unicursal maze, troubled only rhetorically, as it were, by a plethora many wrong turns.
The distinction between unicursal and multicursal mazes bears important implications for how 10 PRINT itself, not its output, can be seen as unicursal and multicursal. Typing in this program, beginning programmers engage in a ritual. At the same time, this program begins as a puzzle to the initiated. Unless programmers are fluent in C64 Basic and have memorized the PETSCII tables, they are unlikely to recognize the effects of the program until they see its displayed output. Once the code has been typed and executed and the programmer witnesses the maze, there is no returning to a naive view of this line of code, to reading the line without imagining its output. All the same, the mazes the 10 PRINT line generates are not single-solution mazes. Indeed, when the programmer is encouraged to make changes to the code, newly shaped corridors appear, and the maze itself proves to be endless still.
Mythical Mazes
The Cretan Labyrinth in Knossos, in which Theseus encounters the Minotaur, is the most famous ancient maze, whose walls casts the longest shadow on the mythology and the history of maze. Using that maze as a starting point will help elucidate the phenomenon that turns the assumption or reality of a multicursal challenge into simpler, manageable, and eventually fun experience.
The Minotaur, part man, part bull, and cursed child of Pasiphae’s unnatural love, is the merciless monster inhabiting the Cretan maze, mazes at the time being the places where kings hid such hybrid horrors. Theseus arrives at Crete and wins the affection of Ariadne, the king's daughter, who offers him a means of returning from defeating the Minotaur in the labyrinth: tying a string to the entrance and unraveling it as he proceeds through the maze, in order to be able the follow his track back to the entrance of the labyrinth. And, indeed, Theseus makes his way through the maze, slays the Minotaur, and finds his way back to the entrance as planned, and the victorious Greek hero takes Ariadne back with him to Athens.
The need for such a “clue” precisely invokes the existence of a maze -- the word “clue” (from “clewe”) refers to the skein of yarn “employed to guide any one in ‘threading’ his way into or out of a labyrinth” (OED) -- and assumes the complexity of a multicursal maze, with decision points and false paths to trick the traveler or risking him to lose his way. Yet traditional depictions and descriptions of the Cretan labyrinth suggest a unicursal, if very threatening, edifice from which nobody attempting to slay the Minotaur has returned alive. A study of allusions to and descriptions of labyrinths in Homer, Ovid, and other writers of western antiquity provides a range of interpretations of mazes as structures and edifices, dance or ritual pathways, or representations on coins and armor (Homer’s daidala) that is too long for us to indulge in here. Suffice it to say here that the depictions of the Cretan labyrinth as a dark, complex structure (see Ovid via Doob) and a need for easy way to double back to the entrance in the face of a terrorizing Minotaur are sufficient to understand why anyone, especially a Greek hero, would need to thread his way along a unicursal path devoid dead-ends or wrong turns.
In a sense, then, Theseus’s adventure at Knossos depicts the metamorphosis of a multicursal maze to unicursal maze, which itself reflects the change in experience from challenging, mysterious, threatening, or deadly to easy, known, reasonable, and tamed. It also illustrates how some puzzles have sequential solutions: it is not enough for Theseus to kill the Minotaur, sinc ehe still has to find an exit from the labyrinth. The order of the solutions may or not matter, but some puzzles will clearly be solved more elegantly than others. As we know from Grimm’s fairy tales, for example, bread crumbs don’t always solve the problem of finding your way back home, and may not have solved the Cretan problem. Finally, this original labyrinthine myth reflects the reality of many puzzles: once you know the solution, the puzzle’s complexity is quickly reduced and the puzzle thereafter understood as simpler if not simple. The pleasure of finding one more, perhaps more efficient, effortless, more elegant, or faster solution keeps us playing games, no matter how simple. The morphing of the maze from complex to simple is at work in 10 PRINT. As suggested above the ritual of the novice programmer is to enter a maze somewhat blindly only to see the light when the written program is displayed on the screen. This “Aha!” moment dispels the anxiety of creation, captures the excitement of programming, and simplifies the future while offering new horizons for new mazes.
Let’s look pause for a moment to introduce Daedalus, the artful architect of confusion and master designer of the labyrinth at Knossos, before returning to our 10 PRINT programmer. It is no accident that Daedalus has earned a place of honor as puzzle-maker supreme, haunting the future history of mazes from the leafy pathways of the hedgerow mazes, to the pages of puzzle-books and the meandering corridors of role-playing dungeons. Daedalus was the first in a long and living history of maze designers and programmers to understand that planning and intentionality are an integral characteristic of the mystique of the maze. In the legacy of this myth, a maze is a space planned often, but no longer exclusively, by a single person to be encountered, solved, and/or traversed by others. But 10 PRINT has no Daedalus, not even a credited author. It is itself a massively productive little architect that constructs and constructs and endlessly constructs, without pause (until the person at the keyboard intervenes), creating an endless, unsolvable maze.
It is not actually known whether the labyrinth in Knossos was real or mythology; no ruins of the edifice remain. Yet the telling of this myth includes a pattern that, as Matthews notes, became convention over the centuries:
Starting from the exterior, the 'path' runs inwards a short distance, turns so as to run parallel with the other wall until nearly a full circuit has been completed, then doubles back on itself and runs round in the opposite direction, doubles upon itself again, and so on until it finally comes to a stop in a blind end, having traversed all of the space within the outer walls without covering any part twice and without forming any branches or loops. (45). [Image]
Whether myth or reality, and however apocryphal, this story, its maze, and its creator’s role, are instructive. 10 PRINT may hide no Minotaur in its center, but the Cretan labyrinth and the search for the mazes of antiquity launch a mythology around mazes as the challenges of heroes. The code of the program itself plays the role of Daedalus. The wit and riddle of 10 PRINT stems from the cleverness of its concision, the elegance of its simple conceit. Mastering the Knossos maze required a clever hero with an enamored helper. 10 PRINT is an extension of Ariadne's string and in that maze-like output novice programmers no doubt hear the echo of the Minotaur's roar.
Material Mazes
Since 10 PRINT orchestrates a maze for viewers, we will now plumb a few historical mazes and maze types to understand the influence on their viewers, walkers, and players, especially with regard to the sort of maze 10 PRINT displays. From Minotaurs to Papal Bulls, the mystery of these twisted paths added to the complex symbology and sacred rites of Christian churches. Mazes begin to appear on the floors of cathedrals and basilicas, themselves already highly allegorical spaces. The earliest labyrinth shows up in the Basilica of Saint Reparata (Algiers) in 324 CE, and many others can be found still today. Among the most famous and one of the largest (approx. 12.3 m) church labyrinths is at Chartres (ca. 1200 CE), a walkable 11-circuit labyrinth ornamented around its outer-ring with “lunations” (Kern 153). Called “Domus Daedali” (The House of Daedalus) it has been the object of endless speculation, from rumors of treasure buried under its center to its functioning as a lunar calculator.# Mazes and labyrinths, as loci of encoded if mysterious meaning, invite decoding and interpretation.
Drop a labyrinth on the floor of a church, and a ritual is born. Church mazes tend to be labyrinths that were walked or crawled on the path to penance, allegorical pathways with names like Labyrinth of Sin, The Path to Redemption, Easter Dance, Images of a Worldview, The Path to Jerusalem, and these walkable pathways stood as paths to Christian salvation. These labyrinths do not tell a Minoan mystery but a Paschal one. Their entrances typically face the western wall of the church, on which scenes of The Last Judgment are depicted. More like a rosary or the Stations of the Cross, these labyrinths are unicursal; they do not contain dead-ends or choice points until the 15th century, when the aberration appears as Helmut Birkhan explains, as a "symptom of the secularization of the labyrinth idea" (quoted in Kern 146).
Leaving behind Minoan traps and tangled torture chambers as well as church and spiritual mazes, the history of maze takes a decidedly more secular turn when it becomes a space not only of ritual, but of leisure. The history of the maze is lined with hedges, marked by rocks, and surrounded by grooves. Church-like mazes and mazes that invite ritual attitude surface on the turf of other parts of Europe. Several of these appear more closely tied to pagan rites of spring. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for example, the faerie queen, Titania, ponders the ghostly outlines of abandoned turf mazes:
The nine men's morris is fill'd up with mud,
And the quaint mazes in the wanton green
For lack of tread are undistinguishable. (2.1.98-100)
As more and more secular mazes emerge alongside church and other labyrinth traditions, they retain some element of mystery, and acquire greater puzzle-play and leisure.
The introduction of hedge mazes, in particular, is noteworthy, for they have several characteristics that we find again in 10 PRINT. Like all mazes, they need to be planned and plotted (read: programmed). But 10 PRINT, once seeded, requires none of the tending and nurturing the hedge mazes need, and grows endlessly if allowed to. Indeed, the 10 PRINT maze continues to grow, at programmed speed, over time, endlessly, until the viewer interrupts it. Among the many ways of experiencing hedge mazes, none is more important for us here than the practice of “running” the maze in such fun ways that traveling the corridors of video games will later echo. The cascading display, too, that results from “running” 10 PRINT is no less crazed, with its slashes backwards a forwards, that the children we imagine gamboling and playing hide-and-seek among the hedges. One of the most well-known hedge mazes providing this sort of fun grew in Hampton Court Palace in London. It is attributed to Sir Christopher Wren and may date back to the time of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, its first occupant (Kern 261). Miller writes of its roughly half-mile of path: "It may be a sad sight to the 'highbrows' of horticulture, but to the unsophisticated many it is a never-failing source of merriment" (129). He describes the maze as an "undiluted delight" to "scores of hundred of children, not to mention a fair sprinkling of their elders" (129).
As a running display, 10 PRINT retains a dimension of mystery, baffling the viewer with its playful invitation to decrypt the paths it seems to forge as quickly as it foils our efforts to pursue their swashbuckling unfolding. 10 PRINT offers no path to religious practice, but the association of mazes and mysterious rituals does attend the later use of the program. As code, 10 PRINT taps into the maze-like mystery that visual symbols evoke: to type in a program from a manual is to follow the twisted line from code to output and back again. The programmer follows the single path of the code from ignorance to knowledge; this is the path of a pilgrim. It might not help programmers attain Christian salvation or welcome the Pagan coming of Spring, but it does offer an accessible means by which novice programmers may trace the steps of writing code and being initiated into the mysteries of this new magic box, the personal computer.
Mazes in Dance
A maze becomes a dance when the pathways become the visual depiction of the dancer's path. The intertwining of dance and labyrinth, of bodies moving in mazes, taking steps, making steps, are not new. Dance moved from being a sacred, ceremonial, ritual practice to becoming the secular performance we know it as today in the West. Dancers weave their steps and movements in space and through time; and in so doing they create an invisible fabric in and of space. Think of the labyrinth as a sort of mental canvas, the choreographer’s oeuvre played out on the dance floor through sequences of dancers’ steps, but also the choreographer’s multi-dimensional vision invoked, interpreted, performed by bodies in motion through space. The canvas takes shape in a topologically complex world, but one that dancers on stage, “in performance,” run through from beginning to end as though moving through a uni-cursal, fully plotted path. The labyrinth becomes multi-cursal for dancers when the plot thickens with improvisation, which often takes place during rehearsal, or, precisely, in improvisational dance.
Indeed, the Cretan labyrinth may have materilized through dance. In the Iliad, Homer credits Daedalus both with a dance floor and the labyrinth. Kern speculates that labyrinth was a choros, which has the double meaning of dance and dance surface. Since no labyrinthine building in Crete survives, the depictions of labyrinths on coins may indicate the path of the dance rather than a building. Though the Cretan labyrinth did not survive into the present, the maze dances based on it have. For while Theseus met the Minotaur in a Minoan maze, he and his men immortalized that adventure in dance on the way back from their mission. As Miller explains, "on the island of Delos they performed a peculiar dance called the Geranos, or 'Crane Dane,' in which they went through the motions of threading the Labyrinth, and... this dance was perpetuated by the natives of that island until fairly recently" (19). These dances have continued to be performed in Italy, Corfu, Munich, Upper Bavaria, and as far away as the Molucca Islands, where a maze-dance commemorates the killing of Hainuwele (divine maiden).
Indeed the Crane Dance is just one many labyrinthine dances tracing back to antiquity. Several Roman writers, including Virgil , Suetonius, and Tacitus, recount a "Game of Troy" or simply "Troja", which appear disparately as a ritual around a grave site and a kind of formal demonstration performed by youths, perhaps a military review. Other labyrinthine dances appear as part of an exclusion right, in which "movements ....are intended to weave a magical entanglement and spread a field of magical force to exclude all that is not wanted to enter the guarded place" (Knight qtd. in Bord)". Still more appear to be tied to rites of Spring.
In the Twentieth Century, Martha Graham adapted the motifs of the Cretan maze story in “Errand into a Maze” (1949). In this adaptation, Ariadne is the one tapped by the minotaur. After contemplating her escape from the labyrinth represented by a rope on the floor, as Roberta E. Zlokower notes, “she breaks her pattern and breaks her tormentor. The maze of rope reflects the maze of her mind and the maze of the myth, with the V- formed set, perhaps illustrative of a sexual fear as well, as the Minotaur leaps and pounces over the fallen female figure, prior to his own downfall.”
But where is the maze in a maze dance? It may have been one of the locations in which the dance was performed (Bord 13). However, more than likely the labyrinth is produced by the movement of the dancers. Kern notes that a consistent feature of Games of Troy is the demarcation of inside and outside. It is as if we can see through the walls to Theseus on his way through the Cretan trap. As a result, rather than a set of walls or lines, "maze" names a series of constraints to movement, a set of paths to be traversed, a procedure.
In the sense of labyrinth as a set of constrained enacted movements, another connection with 10 PRINT arises as the programmer becomes dancer. The novice programmer prepares to face the minotaur Commodore PET, (half-companion, half-machine) with only one line of code as a clue leading to safety. Treading that line across the keyboard, the technoTheseus travels safely through the convolutions of code by staying true to each symbol. Though that ritual seems to produce an aporia, the careful adherence to the path ultimately leads to mastery. At the same time, like the maze dance, it is in tracing this labyrinth, that its very corridors are created -- daunting hallways where PETSCII numbers obfuscate graphical elements and a simple loop conceals and endless string of instructions. To type the precious few characters of 10 PRINT and then to be amazed by its output is to participate in the creation of that wonder, to enact that dance that establishes the maze. It is in typing the line and executing the code that the programmer comes into contact with the mystery of concision in code and will thereafter be even more tantalized by the opportunity to build such a clever maze.
[Possibly cut] The maze-as-dance can be seen in contemporary video games, such as "Dance, Dance Revolution," which is presented as a series of proper moves. However, false steps do not trap the dancer in the space, they merely cost points. Moreover, the moves in the video game are disarticulated from space; whereas, the maze dance traces an imaginary space. In any event, dance in these games-as-labyrinths present sequences of moves of exploration as well as epic challenges to any Theseus of the dance pad.
In contemporary literature, Diana Slattery has created a work called The Maze Game (2003) that brings together the maze as a site of meaningful dance. In her work of electronic literature and attendant novel, Slattery depicts an immortal race enslaved to a dance game by a mortal race of "Death Dancers." The maze becomes a site of a gladiator showdown, but moving through the maze takes grace and “literacy,” since the maze is constructed out of glyphs from Slattery’s created visual language “glide.” Slattery’s work stands at the intersection of dance, maze, and narrative, but it is in figuring the maze as an utterance of a language that her work offers the most evocative exploration of mazes as semiotic systems in which communication and literacy are dependent on navigation. This is the very edge where 10 PRINT resides as a means of evoking literacy through the tracing of its path as a communication that is complete when the programmer executes the function and sees the output for the maze it is.
Mazes in Mathematics
Adventurers, dancers, puzzlers, and the penitent are not the only travelers of mazes. Their pathways are also full of mathematicians, for whom the problem of maze solvability is a mathematical problem, with particular ramifications in the area of "critical path analysis" (CPA).
George Dantzig, the developer of the simplex algorithm and linear programming, if often credited with playing a pivotal role in creating maze solutions. The simplex algorithm addresses the “shortest-path problem” and was originally put in service of minimizing cost on large-scale, Cold War Air Force projects. Behaving like a modern day Theseus, Dantzig himself has acquired legendary status as the student who, upon arriving late to a class, mistook the historically unsolved problems on the board as his homework. Needless to say, his professor was surprised when he turned in the solutions several weeks later. Critical Path Analysis has been used not so much in hedgerows or darkened hallways but in the twisty little corridors of project management. Around the same time that Dantzig was developing his model, James E. Kelley and Morgan Walker at Dupont developed their Critical Path Method, which offered an algorithmic approach to the shortest-path problem in project management.
The shortest-path problem has proven to be one of the grand challenges of the late 20th century. The puzzle appears in telephone routing, planning routes for driving, and optimizing circuit boards. Solutions to the problem would become part of the crucial machinery of electronic networks in autorouters, for example. Yet these solutions were not so far removed from the physical mazes. According to a site on the history of mazes, "The first autorouter was tested on a map of the maze at Hampton Court Palace about 35 years ago."
An interesting reversal happens as math takes up mazes. As maze-solving algorithms are applied to more and more real world puzzles, they in turn prove themselves to be mazes of telephones, rest stops, and resisters. Even more importantly, the terror of the maze is not the minotaur but time itself, time which can be just as easily be lost in inefficient and unproductive paths.
The celebrity of 10 PRINT grows out of the quest for optimization, where the clever distillation of a endless maze-generation to one line of code becomes the sign of mastery. The mathematical grand challenge of finding the shortest path thus introduces the aesthetic of optimization into the lore of mazes. Mazes become the basic structure of the challenges to modern computing, business, and civic life. 10 PRINT in this light pays tribute to a most fundamental structure of contemporary life and the obstacle to commercial profits, traffic flows, and the coursing of information over networks. The maze and the network prove themselves to be cousins when treated by the Thesei of mathematics. 10 PRINT is a thread, the clue, that leads gradually (and infinitely) toward the goal of optimizing processes in the source code that will shape and control so much of civic life.
Mazes in Mass Media
According to Clifford Pickover, the first major maze movie was aptly called The Maze, a 1953 horror film directed by William Cameron Menzies. The maze in the film was the hedgerow kind, like the snowed-under maze of The Shining (1980). A search of the Internet Movie Database turns up 33 works (film, tv, videogames) with the word “maze” in their title, including a 1929 melodrama, The Devil’s Maze, and the 1916 film, The Purple Maze. Meanwhile, “Labyrinth” turns up over 100. Perhaps it was the mythical or religious resonance of the latter word, perhaps just a cultural predilection for multisyllabic titles. Perhaps it is the labyrinthine nature of film itself, which spins along its path of images with a similar meditative, unicursal inevitability.
In the 1980s as adolescent boys and some adolescent girls busied themselves with 24-sided dice, a made-for-TV movie, Mazes and Monsters (1982), presented a young Tom Hanks as a young man who had gone over the edge into a psychosis where he could no longer separate his role-playing game from reality. Maze was not only an alliterative mate to "monsters," it also served as a conceptual metaphor for the dangerous playspace of these games. The movie spoke to both the moral panic around the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons and showcased the relationship between that game and the maze motif.
In these examples, the maze becomes a metaphor of horror and confusion, a site for getting lost rather than a contrived riddle to be solved. In the montage of cinematic narrative, a “maze” becomes metanymic for the space (physical, mental, real, imaginary) that obfuscates its path, that traps the wanderer, that will not make itself straight for the one who encounters it. In the 80s it also became the space where those who retreat into their imaginations through creative hobbies of writing or role-playing, will lose themselves to minotaurs of madness. Mazes thus become attached to tales of male obsession and isolation, the minotaur as a gendered cautionary tale.
Mazes in psychology
The maze also has cultural resonance because of its role in behavioral research. Mazes have been used as laboratory environments for rats and mice, and as means of testing these rodents. The depiction of mazes in certain cultural productions reflects this aspect of the maze. For instance, images of rats in a maze are prominent in Alex Proyas' 1998 film Dark City. Dr. Schreber, a captive human who works with his alien captors, is shown looking down on a rat in a large, intricate maze; the rat and the maze connect figuratively to the people in the film and the titular city, which is constructed for the purpose of an experiment. In Daniel Keyes' novel Flowers for Algernon (1966; first published as a short story in 1959), a white mouse with augmented intelligence demonstrates its abilities by traversing a maze. Algernon parallels the novel's protagonist, Charlie, in many ways: the success of the intelligence-enhancing procedure performed on him leads to its being done to Charlie. This sort of maze has been important in less mainstream literary practices, too. The co-founder of the influential French group Oulipo, Raymond Queneau, famously described the members of this group, who set writing constraints for themselves, as "rats who build the labyrinth from which they plan to escape."
Editorial cartoons and cartoons in The New Yorker [e.g., New Yorker cartoon: July 3, 2006] depict mazes of all sorts, but make particularly frequent and interesting use of the psychologist's maze. Cartoons sometimes employ rats as characters and sometimes substitute people for amusing effect. The rat's maze is also a staple in advertising. A 2006 TV commercial for the Game Boy Micro, for instance, shows a rat traversing a maze and finding one as its reward. In addition to these abundant fictional depictions of research mazes, pet owners and students have also put dozens of videos of rats and mice running mazes up on YouTube. Even though this experimental use of mazes is specialized and recent - not much more than a century old - it clearly became and remains a part of the popular consciousness.
Intriguingly, the first maze constructed for rats by researchers, which was built in the late 1890s, was not for testing the creatures. Willard Small of Clark University built a maze environment for rats to eat and exercise in when they weren't taking part in experiments. Small wanted the environment to simulate the burrows that rats inhabited in nature. But rather than look at the specifics of how these burrows are laid out, he modeled the first laboratory rat maze "after the Hampton Court Palace maze, a trapezoidal hedge maze that dates in its present form to 1690 but was probably built in the early sixteenth century by the first owner of the palace, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey" (Lemov 2005, p. 25). The maze was first given to rats so that they could relax - for restorative purposes quite consonant with the purposes for which the Hampton Court Palace maze was built. It made for an unusual continuity in the history of the maze, with the researchers treating the rats like aristocrats.
This thread would be broken when John B. Watson took up the maze and used it, initially in his dissertation research, to determine whether rats could make their way through it under different conditions. Watson, who became the youngest person to earn a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1903, continued his work by systematically blinding rats and maiming them in other ways to deprive them of different senses after they had learned their way through a maze. His work attracted public attention, and he was denounced in a New York Times editorial as a torturer. Watson, however, was sure of his behavioral science agenda and that the same principles that applied to rats applied to people. By 1916 he had moved on to experiments with infants. While he didn't mutilate them, in a 1920 experiment that became famous he did condition one, "Little Albert," to fear a furry white rat and furry white things in general.
The use of mazes in experiments with rats increased greatly during the 1920s. We now associate behaviorism, the perspective that all animal and human actions are behaviors, mainly with another American scientist, B. F. Skinner. Skinner's operant conditioning chamber, also known as the Skinner box, is another famous environment for laboratory animals that was built decades after Watson's mazes. While Skinner's name is better known today, Watson's maze remains emblematic - and similar environments remain in use today.
In 1959, one of the earliest computer programs written for fun - an example of "recreational computing" - depicted an experimenter's maze. The program, which is possibly the first computer program to draw a maze of any sort, was written for the TX-0 at MIT by Douglas T. Ross and John E. Ward. The TX-0 was an experimental computer built at MIT's Lincoln Laboratories along the way to the construction of the TX-1. The earlier computer was a transistorized version of Project Whirlwind and, when loaned to the Research Laboratory for Electronics in 1958, provided one of the first opportunities for people to program when not working on an official project. It also allowed programmers to work on the machine interactively, much as Commodore 64 programmers later would, rather than submitting batch jobs in the form of decks of punched cards. In the program that became known as "Mouse in the Maze," a mouse would move through a maze, eating cheese. The mouse could also consume martinis, which would cause it to become disoriented. Here, the environment implemented was not the hedge maze of diversion and fun, but a research maze which was then made playful by the implementation of an amusing reward for the mouse and appropriate behavior.
The rather thin default light-blue diagonal lines produced by 10 PRINT are likely to appear, against the default dark blue background, to be much more like white laboratory maze partitions than like hedges. In that case, the structure that is being represented may be more easily imagined as the maze of behavioral experiments and than the diversionary hedge maze. The regular arrangement of the "walls" in a grid is also more akin to the arrangement of the stereotypical laboratory maze. The output of the program may suggest a puzzle-book maze even more strongly, but if it leads the viewer to think of a structure of some sort, the rat-sized researcher's maze may be the one most likely to come to mind. It wouldn't be outrageous, given that a famous early computer maze - possibly the first - was explicitly based on such a structure.
If some of those who look at this Commodore 64 maze do think of the experimenter's maze, they are sure to make some different further associations. Instead of suggesting that the computer is creating structures or drawings for pure amusement, the idea of the laboratory maze offers something more serious and scientific. It also brings in the idea of the experimenter - at least indifferent to the struggles of the creatures lost in the maze and perhaps cruelly impairing those creatures - and the subject of the experiment, trapped in a bewildering structure created by powers and for purposes beyond comprehension. When 10 PRINT runs, it relentlessly provides a maze, but it does not seem to be trapping us in this maze in any straightforward way. Instead, given the top-down view and the lack of a user-controlled maze walker, the computer may be offering to collaborate with the user in experimenting on virtual rats. This would be a different suggestion than the cinematic, literary, and cartoon representation of behavioral science mazes that encourage people to identify with the rat or mouse. Whoever the rat may be, and whoever the scientist may be, any computer program that evokes the researcher's maze at least hints that the computer is a scientific instrument and that the recent history of science has some darker corners.
Mazes and Computer Culture
A clear line can be drawn from the physical and visual mazes of earlier times to the mazes of the digital age. It is here, in the computer culture that has arisen in the past thirty years, that mazes once again become part of daily life. With the arrival of the computer in the 1960s and graphical displays in the 1970s, the maze has entered a kind of renaissance. There are two important developments that contributed to the prevalence of the maze as a cultural production: (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, ludic representations of enmazed virtual space that is generated by mathematical algorithm.
It would be a mistake to assume that all computer and video game mazes operate according to the same principles. A useful way to think about the differences between various digital mazes is to consider the perspective each maze affords—and which consequently structures the encounter with the maze. Roughly speaking, it is possible to conceive of mazes as first-person, second-person, or third-person mazes, a framework with roots in narratology but which has also been commonly applied to videogames (for example, the first-person-shooter):
- First-person mazes are partially represented mazes, in which the maze walker is confronted with a subjective perspective of the maze; nothing can be seen of the maze except the wall or passageway directly in front of the maze walker;
- Second-person mazes are textually represented mazes, in which the maze walker is hailed by a second-person mode of address (“you”), and is fully at the mercy of the textual descriptions on the screen; nothing about the maze can be known unless “you” are told it;
- Third-person mazes are fully represented mazes, in which the maze walker maintains an omniscient view of the maze, a panoptic perspective that nonetheless does not guarantee safety or solvability.
Second Person 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:
YOU ARE IN A MAZE OF TWISTY LITTLE PASSAGES, ALL ALIKE.
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 | | | ___
| | | | _____|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 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|___
|^|_|~|__ |_______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:
Steven-Roy-Zork-Map-for-DEC.jpg
800 × 510 pixels
Visual Procedural 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. In 1981, for example, 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 [1] in the early days of video arcades and home computers
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 1970s and 1980s: textual and visual. 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. 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?
Computer Generated Mazes
Pickover also includes a section on "the largest computer-generated maze in the world," a title which seems quaint by today's standards. Although he notes the program could generate an 1000-page maze, he cites the largest one she had printed to date as a 200-page maze. However, he gives the title to the 1987 maze produced by Walter Pullen. This 23-foot maze had to be stored on "eight floppy disks" and "require one megabyte of disk space" (7). Pickover later adds an followup note from Pullen about a maze he had generated with "@2 miles of passages" that "stretched over 3031 pages" (8).
Needless to say, this quest for the largest computer-generated maze will always be chasing 10 PRINT, whose never ending corridors can be drawn merely by executing and repeating that line. These other mazes, such as Pullen's, are single-solution mazes. However, Moore's law no doubt affects maze production at about the same rate that 1 megabyte diminishes as a sign of large memory and the number of pages in a maze print out approaches absurdity.
Context of Expectations: Computer Graphics and Games
The representation of mazes in computer graphics was already a staple during the period that finds the 10 PRINT BASIC one-liner appearing in C64 manuals and journals -- in fact, the use of computers to represent mazes conceptually was common even before the advent of home computer graphics.
(Sidebar? Summary IF and the tradition of box diagram maps, the importance of mazes in Adventure / Zork / Acheton, and the contextual relationship to home computing and dominance of early PC video game industry. The maze was already a part of the culture of computer games before the computer game became visual.) Gotcha (1973 arcade) a game of tag between two players in a maze-like field of partitions
The Amazing Maze Game (1976 arcade) -- a classic maze
Maze Craze (1978 Atari VCS) -- a large set of games -- complete, race-to-complete, tag, etc. -- all played within classic mazes.
In graphical computer games, one common feature of the many different 2D maze video games from the period is orientation: all are rectilinear and aligned to the Cartesian axes, rather than being diagonal. This similarity, it turns out, constitutes the category -- in fact, it is even more important than the degree to which given games are maze-like, or what impact their maze-ness has on gameplay. Different games have different maze aesthetics. The arcade game Gotcha (1973) stages a game of tag between two players in a maze-like field of disconnected partitions which served as an obstacle course. Conversely, the arcade game The Amazing Maze Game (1976) implements a race (two-player or against a computer) to solve a classic continuous closed maze. A similar implementation on the home Atari VCS, Maze Craze (1978) provides a playable random maze generator as the field for a very a large number of games, including races and tag, and includes modes with invisible walls where the maze must be interactively felt out and remembered. Pac-Man (1982 Atari VCS)
Pac-Man (1980) is perhaps the most famous classic maze-like arcade game, although, like Gotcha, it is less a maze than a free-form obstacle course, using the free-floating wall partitions to complicate the game of tag rather than obfuscating any path to escape. When Pac-Man was reimplemented for the Atari VCS in 1982, vertical field was redesigned in horizontal format and for lower resolution display, however the essential topology of the game (partitions, looped corners, and warp gates connecting one side to the other) remained the same.
Another feature shared by all these games (both arcade and for home video game consoles) is their treatment of the screen display as a single complete visual unit, like the board of a board game. An interesting contrast to this aesthetic is a close-up design that puts the player in the Maze, the Atari VCS game Adventure (1979) implements a maze as a series of many close-up screens. Adventure was extremely loosely based on the interactive fiction work of the same name, and featured a hero with a sword collecting treasures despite the efforts of four dragons. Unlike Pac-Man, in which the player can guide Pac-Man out a warp gate on one side of the screen and see him enter on the other side, Adventure contains numerous topologically impossible warps that are always hidden from view, and can only be deduced. Instead of an overview map of the total maze, each screen is a claustrophobic close-up of simple paths, often emphasizing discontinuous fragments of other paths that can't easily be reached. This kind of claustrophobic, discontinuous maze-space was later further explored in Haunted House (1981), particularly in the use of darkness and the addition of keys in some modes to restrict and sequence room access.
Isometric Games
Ant Attack (1983 ZX Spectrum) Whether close up or distant, continuous mazes or partitioned obstacle courses, what all these period maze-games have in common is that, unlike the diagonal orientation of 10 Print, all are constructed of horizontal/vertical walls that are orthogonal to the edges of the screen and the scan line of the display.
Diagonal orientation did have a place in the design of early maze-like games, but not in simple 2D fields -- instead, it emerged through isometric video games that introduced diagonal motion at the same time it challenged the picture plane through the pseudo-3D effect of isometric perspective. In the arcade, two isometric games emerged in 1982: Q*bert, an completion/avoidance platform on an isometric pyramid, and Zaxxon, an obstacle-racer emphasizing pseudo-3D elements. Neither of these game designs is particularly maze-like.
Later games did incorporate maze-like obstacle elements into isometric gameplay. Part of this limitation was due to available resolution at the time, particularly on home systems. Graphics with isometric effects took up a lot of space, which limited the ability to design large complex level structures like mazes on a unified field. Thus, when Ant Attack (1983) and Marble Madness (1984) introduced isometric obstacle course elements on a large field, both did so using scrolling.** By contrast, Knight Lore (1984) follows the design pattern of Adventure for the VCS, showing a close-up view of one room at a time in a maze-like castle.
- Ant Attack also alters the camera view when navigating behind objects.
Even here, however, we see how extremely different aesthetic of early isometric maze games was when compared to the 10 Print output. While both have a dynamic diagonal orientation, the move from 2D design to volumetric pseudo-3D space leaves them, visually, worlds apart.
* c64 Programmers reference guide
* Potential illustration for IF sidebar
o Map of Varicella?
o MC Frontalot It is Pitch Dark @2:38
* Porting / Reimplementation as Translation vs. Adaptation
o Benchmark fiction?
[edit] Additional Images
Pac-Man (1980 arcade) -- a maze-like field of partitions must be run while being chased by ghosts Map of Adventure for Atari 2600 (VGmaps) 10 PRINT CHR$(77+RND(1)*2); : GOTO 10
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