Mazes and labyrinths generate a
surprising range of emotions. Partly,
this is because the former isn’t quite the
same as the latter. The associations of
the noun ‘maze’ are largely negative,
referring to bewilderment, deceit and
worldly distraction. A labyrinth is a
similarly confusing structure, but the
word has acquired more positive senses
over time – it can serve as a place for
reverie and contemplation.
Psychotherapists like Dr Lauren Artress
have even prescribed labyrinth-walking
as a form of meditation. Integral to this
distinction is the idea that while a maze
may have many paths, a labyrinth has
only one, however winding.
OFF THE MAP
For a time, mazes and labyrinths were
central to videogames. The original
first-person shooter was arguably Maze
(1974), created by students on Imlac
computers at a NASA laboratory. While
not the first of its kind, Namco’s
Pac-Man spawned a wave of 2D arcade
maze-chase games in the 1980s. “I
think a lot of how we understand
moving through 3D spaces in
videogames today comes from
maze-like experiences,” notes Holly
Gramazio, game designer, curator, and
scriptwriter for Dicey Dungeons, who
once organised a maze exhibition for
London game festival Now Play This.
“Even going back to the Windows 95
screensaver maze, right? A lot of early
3D, even if it wasn’t explicitly labelled a
maze, is something that we would now
consider maze-like.”
Mazes and labyrinths are a good
introduction to 3D movement in games,
Gramazio points out, because the
premise speaks for itself. “You see them
and you know what you have to do.”
They can also be a powerful “design
BUILD MORE Resources for lovers of mazes and labyrinths
ASTROLOG
A burgeoning archive of
maze and labyrinth
materials run by
uber-enthusiast Walter
Pullen. Includes a whole
section on cult Bowie
extravaganza Labyrinth.
astrolog.org/labyrnth/glossary.htmR/MAZES
The maze-makers’
subreddit, packed with
homebrew oddities of all
kinds. Consider
DeuxiemeCarlin’s
Disorienting Hallways,
which unfolds inside
of an owl.
reddit.com/r/mazesTHE LABYRINTH
SOCIETY
A US-based collective of
labyrinth sleuths. The site
has a labyrinth locator
and resources for
constructing
labyrinths at home.
abyrinthsociety.orgDAEDALUS
A free tool for building,
analysing, and
completing mazes that
allows for the creation of
specimens that have a
billion passages or
operate in five
dimensions.
bit.ly/2YBDpP1prompt” she adds, in that they show
how many different imaginative
contexts and perspectives you can tease
out of an ostensibly small area.
Computer simulations offer more
elaborate possibilities for maze-
builders, of course: they aren’t bound
by everyday physical conventions. In
Alexander Bruce’s Antechamber,
ascending a flight of stairs may leave
you on the same floor. In Ian
McClarty’s The Catacombs of Solaris,
stopping to look around morphs the
corridor ahead into a wall. For all these
precedents and opportunities, however,
mazes and labyrinths aren’t much
celebrated in games today. Maze
environments are inherently artificial
and arcane, and it’s difficult to fit them
into many stories and settings. But the
real problem, perhaps, is that mazes
and labyrinths aren’t that fun to
navigate – at least by the standards of
games that define ‘fun’ as a brisk
feedback loop between task and reward
with minimal ambiguity or downtime.
“In a digital maze, you cannot
separate people’s frustration at their
inability to find their way out from
their frustration with the interface and
how the maze is presented,” Gramazio
explains. “When people are stuck and
can’t find their way out, I think
overwhelmingly the response is, ‘This
is bullshit, I can’t figure out where I’m
going.’ It’s not, ‘OK, this is very clever, I
need to stop and think about the
choices I’ve made.’ Getting people to
feel comfortable and confident in their
navigation of complex digital spaces is
already quite difficult.” Gramazio
herself enjoys thinking about mazes but
is less keen on walking them, in real life
and otherwise. She came close to
abandoning her first Final Fantasy“Getting people to
feel comfortable
in their navigation
of complex digital
spaces is already
quite difficult”
Wandering Not Lost
FE ATURE
DeuxiemeCarlin’s
Warped Trails,
the current
largest published
Minecraft maze.