Jamie Antonisse

The maze has a rich background in digital interactivity. Countless games, from old text-based adventures to side-scrollers to first-person shooters, have had elements of maze-play in them. Often, finding a path through these mazes is a fun, exploratory experience. Just as often, it's frustrating as hell, and you wish death on the designer who stuck you with three doors and no keys.

Mazes in games, however, are usually not there for their own sake. They are usually created in the service of some other mechanic. In the original FPS, Wolfenstein 3D, the maze was a means of showcasing the innovative camera view/perspective. The maze form is also useful for creating tension and suspense: "What's around this corner? A German shepard, a Nazi?" In Castle Wolfenstein, the answer is usually "another corner", but the player's experience is heightened by the uncertainty the maze provides. The maze also lengthens a gameplay experience: how long would you spend in a Zelda dungeon if you were just taken directly from trial to trial with no backtracking or exploration? I'd estimate at least 2/3 of your dungeon time in Zelda is spent negotiating your path.

Clearly the maze-form is a useful tool for augmenting an exploration-based design. However, in adopting mazes as a tool, I think games may have missed some fundamental aspects of the experience. The thoughtful investigation, and the personalized choice of one path over another, are often overshadowed by a moment-to-moment fear of failure (which leads to rote repetition of a solved section of maze). I'm not saying there aren't merits to that fear, or reasons for it... that tension MAKES many of these games. I'm simply saying that there's an ease of exploration, a satisfaction of curiosity, that I associate with "mazes", and the repetition of gameplay and fear of failure decimates that. I have fond memories of pencil-and-paper maps, of contemplatively tracing a route in graphite and feeling that the imprint I'd left was somehow personal. Where are the games that play off that feeling?

It seems to me the Cache is great content for a maze, and that a maze, with some additional puzzle aspects, is a good model for the Cache. By its nature, a Cache is dense with information and possibilities: a winding, diverging path through it would break the narrative experience up in a digestible way. Because the Cache is already based around investigation, it would bring out the best in the maze-form... there would be no need for frustrating re-treads. However, I don't just want people to follow "the route"... making things linear would take away the point of the interactivity. I want to make the choice of path part of the creative exercise. The question is not IF you can get through, but HOW you can get through.

In the service of this goal I've developed a prototype: a Semantic Maze in which the player encounters a number of paths and locked doors. They acquire "keys" by their exploration of the maze, and, through some problem-solving, they can figure out which keys open which doors.

The "semantic" part comes from the fact that the doors are prompts and the keys are words. Through the various meanings of the prompts and words, doors can be opened by a variety of keys and vice versa. This creates a nearly limitless number of potential paths through the maze, even in a small environment.

I've tested out this prototype a few times now and it has been, by and large, a success. A few prompts needed tweaking, the goal needed to be more clearly defined, but the gameplay was there, and I could see, in my mind's eye, how it could support and inform a story environment.

Only the stories this gameplay supports the best weren't the stories I'd been telling.

*Sigh* Once again I've bitten off more than I can chew. This post is long enough as it is, and it explains the most important aspects of the work for class tomorrow.

Next time: The problems with the Eliza narrative, and why a less dramatic approach might lead to a deeper, more interesting experience.