PM: Some of your walk-through mazes-with-rules, such as the Bureaucratic Maze, are fairly radical because they have no walls. At what point does a maze cease to be a maze? For example: is NerdCon a maze or a puzzle? It's similar to Bureaucratic Nightmare - which is clearly a maze, since it's adapted from your own - but it has some potentially significant differences.

RA: This brings up a very interesting point. There are games and puzzles that, on the surface, look very different from each other, but they contain the same underlying principle.

NerdCon and the Bureaucratic Maze follow in a line that goes back to the Colossal Cave, which was part of Adventure, the first adventure program. It was written in 1972 by William Crowther, and it ran on the PDP-10. For a complete history, see this page. The Colossal Cave was a maze with this underlying principle: what entrance you take into a room determines what exits you can take out of the room. It is therefore a multi-state maze. The state you are in is not just determined by where you are but also by how you got there.

After personal computers appeared, there were many adventure programs. The one that I played (for many months) was Adventureland, written for the TRS-80 by Scott Adams. Every one of these programs had a maze similar to the Colossal Cave (but towards the end of the 1990s, along with greater use of graphics, these mazes appeared less frequently).

In 2000 I had what I thought was a brilliant idea: if kids liked the mazes in adventure games, they would really like a version that they could actually walk through. I created something I called The Dungeon Maze. It had four rooms with five corridors making connections between the rooms. When you enter a room, you pass by a sign that says something like "Take Exit 1 or Exit 3," and once inside the room you see signs identifying the various exits. With only four rooms, it sounds like it would be simple, but it was actually very complicated.

The Dungeon Maze was implemented a few places in 2000 as part of my small courtyard mazes outside large cornfield mazes. The implementations weren't very good. One used strings on poles to define the rooms. One cut the rooms out of a corner of the cornfield, but the rooms weren’t made large enough. I still think this is a brilliant idea and I hope someday it will be realized in a better form. I think it could work well as part of a haunted house attraction.

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