How games use maze structures. Looking at the design principles of how games are made with mazes and such structures create game worlds. An accompanying activity is that a class in groups make tape mazes, using garrer tape form these principles.
Anton Hechtfreelance musician & creative practitioner
1. Ancient and medieval labyrinths or mazes (the words have different etymologies but mean the same thing)
are characteristically double. They are full of ambiguity, their circuitous design prescribes a constant
doubling back, and they fall into two distinct but related structural categories. They presume a double
perspective: maze-treaders, whose vision ahead and behind is severely constricted and fragmented,
suffer confusion, whereas maze-viewers who see the pattern whole, from above or in a diagram, are
dazzled by its complex artistry.
4. the maze as both a design and an experience. This is what she refers
to as the “duality of the maze”.156 This dual aspect of the maze, as symbol and experience,
5. Game Pathway
the paths are generated by the player’s actions, so a focus on the player’s experience along these paths
and the objects found at points on them. In acknowledging how to overcome obstacles along the path
it is also possible to understand the role of the path in the player’s learning and mastery of the
gameworld.
7. Purpose
purposeful play, being the activities
intended by the designer, and appropriated play which is the play formed out of the player’s
exploration of the game system.
9. Patterns - Rhizome
The rhizome is generally used as a
new way of thinking about digital
media, particularly
hypertexts. Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari, the founders of the
reworked concept of the
rhizome state that “any point of a
rhizome can be connected to
anything other, and must be.
This is very different from the tree
or root, which plots a point, fixes an
order.”
10. aporia and epiphany
“aporia and epiphany”45, where aporia is seen by Ryan
as a “dead-end” or a “puzzle to be overcome” and the epiphany is the “discovery, such as the
solving of an enigma or the elimination of an opponent, that enables her to progress in her
quest.”46
11. This is a discussion reiterated by Murray, who writes:
the computer’s spatial quality is created by the interactive process of
navigation. We know that we are in a particular location because when we
enter a keyboard or mouse command the (text or graphic) screen display
changes appropriately.
Navigation
12. BLIND ALLEYS
“blind alleys” found
within games.66 “Blind Alleys” may help the player gain extra lives or weaponry but do not
exist as paths that lead to other parts of the gameworld.
13. TIME -
Time is categorised by Juul in terms of “play time’”, which “denotes
the time span taken to play a game”, in contrast to “fictional time”, described as, “the time of
the events in the game world
14. PATH and Choice
the words maze and labyrinth may be used
interchangeably, as Doob notes,
Both models are based on the concept of the path, the journey from beginning to
end; both imply a sequence of movements or perceptions, usually designed
intentionally as a sequence, and both may involve choice, although the nature,
implications and prominence of that choice vary greatly
Notas do Editor
By Kim Navarre from Brooklyn, NY - Labyrinth of Failure by Chris Hackett and Eleanor LovinskyUploaded by McGeddon, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9565133