Twisty little passages - mazes re-solved

Maze War is the grand-daddy of not only first-person shooters, but also networked multi-player games like World of Warcraft. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are mazes in WoW, Second Life etc, as they are the nursey-slopes for 3D environment creating. I doubt they feature highly in such games.

The persistence of mazes in the text adventure genre of computer games is due perhaps for two reasons. Mazes seem to have an affinity with things literary - they can be used metaphorically or as entities in a magical realist settings, in ways that wouldn’t cohere in more ‘realist’ graphically-oriented game. There is also the metaphor of ’story as maze’ of which Borges ‘Garden of Forking Paths’ is the most well known.

More importantly, the genre just seems to attract game designers who like mazes as mazes, and as a historical ‘in joke’. In Graham Nelson’s Designer’s Manual he puts it bluntly: “it is designers who like mazes … players do not like mazes.” I would also go along with his description of mazes as the ‘locked room’ of text adventures. Provide a novel solution, and you please everyone.

So it goes that in modern text adventures, mazes in name and appearance only often have peculiar and map-free solutions:

SPOILAZ ALERT
* an unsolvable maze - you flip a crucial location through the FOURTH DIMENSION making it solvable
* hedge walls surround the maze centre - you go back in time and squeeze herbicide on a section of the not yet grown hedge
* a fantasy sequence stuck in an unending maze - you eventually notice you are a bird and fly out

Certainly that last one would be hard to implement in a graphical game.

Bonus links:

3D Monster Maze - you will need to refer to the ZX81 keyboard to find the ‘CONT’ key that starts the game.

“You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike” - the maze as decribed in the original text adventure

Updated bonus

A model of Knossus in the Herakleion Archaeological Museum

My pics| the worlds pics of Knossus on flick’r

1. Marna on March 13th, 2008

   > exit maze

   You are standing outside the maze [....]

   >
   (that’s a v old skool solution)

2. FT's Alan on March 13th, 2008

   i left out the ‘maze’ in the Hitchhikers Guide game cos that’s such an exceptional game. in that it’s from the old skool and breaks a lot of conventions, including both the maze solution, and making the ’standard solution’ (for other games at the time) actually hazardous.

   at one point you find yourself inside a brain - it becomes obvious it is your OWN! as you travel from identical synapse to identical synapse, the standard way to map out the maze, to mark each synapse individually is to drop items at each point…

   this doesn’t work, and if you DO drop anything you later on die from brain badness.

   your wanderings eventually bring you to a black particle. it is the last particle of common sense that you possess. You remove it from your brain and go OUT OF YOUR MIND.

   DO

   YOU

   SEE