Introduction
Suppose someone asks you to explain what a maze is. How would you do so?
If you want to describe to someone what exactly constitutes a maze, you have to know what a maze is, what its purposes and uses are, how mazes are designed, and what gameplay elements there are. I’m going to discuss these aspects in this post.
What is a maze?
A maze is a complex network of paths or passages designed to puzzle or challenge someone navigating through it. It typically consists of interconnected pathways, dead ends, and sometimes multiple routes, with the aim of making it difficult to find the correct or desired path from the entrance to the exit.
Mazes are often built as puzzles or recreational activities and can vary widely in size, complexity, and design. They can be created using hedges, walls, paper, or computer programs, and solving a maze usually requires problem-solving skills, spatial awareness, and sometimes a bit of trial and error to reach the solution or the end point.
Where are mazes typically encountered?
Mazes can be found in different shapes, ranging from virtual mazes (2- or 3-dimensional) to mazes in real life.
In real life, the most common place where you may find a maze is in theme parks, but some farmers also turn their corn fields into mazes for tourism purposes on their farms (you’ll usually find these corn mazes in North America).
Another place where you may often find a maze in some shape or another, is in art and culture… think about movies, paintings, and books.
Flat mazes, or 2-dimensional mazes, can usually be found in newspapers, puzzle books, and games (on both console as well as mobile devices… but there are also plenty of 2-dimensional mazes to be found as games on websites).
Virtual mazes can come in 2-dimensional or 3-dimensional types. The most common type are 2-dimensional ones.
Types and variations of mazes
The most well known and most common type of maze is a 2-dimensional, perfect maze in the shape of a square with and entrance and exit at the edges, usually on opposing sides of the square, and paths confined within the square that you need to navigate through to go from the entrance to the exit of the maze.
Such a perfect maze can also be made in 3-D, with upright walls. In modern videogames, such a 3-D perfect maze has to be navigated with a character controlled by the player, and essence, the concept is the same is if you were navigating a real life maze: find your way out of the maze, which usually requires you to go from a starting point to an end point or exit.
When we’re designing a virtual maze, though, we can create many other types of mazes besides a perfect maze. Examples include a weaving maze, where the paths intertwine and weave in each other; directional mazes, such as ‘left-only’ or ‘right-only’ mazes where you have to traverse the maze by talking only left or right turns, respectively; and blind mazes, where the playing field is concealed so you have a more difficult time planning your path.
Read more about the above and more types of mazes.
Purpose and use of mazes
Mazes serve various purposes and have been used for all sorts of reasons, such as:
1. Entertainment and Recreation
Individual entertainment is the most popular reason for creating and navigating through mazes, whether that’s on your mobile device in the form of a game such as Mazy Maze ;), or finding the exit of a maze in a theme park.
The best thing about mazes is that they’re puzzles that provide a challenge and amusement and they’re suited for people of all ages.
On top of individual entertainment, mazes such as those found in historical gardens or tourist destinations (think of corn mazes in North America) can also contribute to tourism and local economies by attracting visitors from all over the world.
2. Symbolism
Beyond entertainment, mazes often symbolize journeys, quests, challenges, and the complexities of life. They can represent metaphors for personal or spiritual paths, encouraging reflection, perseverance, and problem-solving.
3. Cognitive Development and therapeutic use
Solving a maze requires critical thinking, spatial awareness, and problem-solving skills. Mazes, especially those designed for educational purposes, are great tools to help children and adults alike develop these abilities in an interactive manner.
Mazes are sometimes also used as tools for cognitive therapy or to assess certain psychological traits. They can help in reducing stress and practicing mindfulness. Larger, and thus more complex mazes can also be used to test your patience and focus.
What to consider when designing mazes?
So if you want to create a maze, what do you have to consider to create a good maze design?
1. Size
The most important thing to start with when designing mazes, is the size of you maze. How large do you want your maze to be?
The larger your maze is, the more difficult it will be to solve. Even if you don’t implement complex gameplay mechanics (such as arrows, directional gameplay aspects, or concealment of the pathways), just increasing the size of your maze will result in an increase in its complexity.
1.1 How do you determine the size of your maze?
It is best to express the size of your maze as a grid with columns and rows.
Each cell in the grid is part of a path. All cells together combine the many different paths in your maze.
If you’re thinking about designing your maze, I suggest to start with an 8×8 maze. This allows for some creativity and freedom in designing different pathways, yet requires a few tries to (visually) solve the maze. In my opinion, an 8×8 size maze is the perfect size to experiment with different pathways and learning how to purposefully mislead your players with false paths, without taking too much time as it would if the maze was larger.
2. Patterns and layout
Once you know what size of maze you want to create, consider the type of pattern(s) and layout you want to implement. I’ve describe a perfect, square maze in one of the previous sections, but there are in fact all sorts of layouts and patterns you can use. Think of different geometric shapes (circles, squares, triangles) for your maze and navigational patterns such as intricate pathways, loops, dead ends, false paths, decision points, and branching corridors. The patterns you use for your maze have a direct impact on the complexity of your maze and its navigation.
Further, you can also use techniques like symmetry to create visually appealing mazes while ensuring fairness and equal challenge in navigating through different paths. For example, draw out your maze on a 8×8 grid, then copy (and mirror) that design and junction them to quickly form a larger maze. Just make sure you test your initial maze first before copying and mirroring it, because if it contains unwanted dead ends or other errors, the copy will have those as well!
3. Different gameplay elements
There are also all sorts of gameplay elements that you can include in your maze design. These are usually found in (mobile or console) games where you have to navigate a digital maze (such as I am developing in Mazy Maze).
Examples include a maze that changes it’s paths based on what the player does (so called reactive mazes), a maze that has (large) sections of its path conceiled (a blind maze), and mazes that contain arrows at certain cells that indicate which direction the player must go if he/she walks over the arrow.
There are in fact many different types of mazes you can create, each with its own aspects that can drastically change its gameplay elements.
Maze solving techniques
Most puzzles have specific techniques that help in solving them. The same goes for navigating through mazes to reach their endpoint.
1. Wall-following
A well-known trick or ‘algorithm’ for solving perfect mazes, is ‘wall-following’. It its a method to navigate through a maze from the start by maintain contact with one wall (the left or the right) of the pathway at all times, until you reach the exit.
If the maze does not contain complex gameplay elements, then wall-following will always lead you to the end point, eventually (note though, that it’s not always the most efficient or fastest route to the endpoint).
Mazes with complex gameplay elements such as arrows, reactive mazes, or directional mazes, break the wall-following technique though. These kind of mazes are usually encountered in (digital) games (for example, I have arrow mazes in the roadmap for the Mazy Maze mobile game, so expect that kind of maze some time in the future in the game.).
2. Path tracking
When navigating through a maze on paper (such as found in newspapers or puzzle books) or small mazes in digital game, you can also track your path by drawing a line in the path as you navigate through the maze (or, in case of a mobile game, hold and drag your finger or mouse over the screen to draw a line).
By visually tracking the paths you’ve visited, it’ll be easier to find your way back in case you get lost and to limit the possibilities in order to find the correct path.
Conclusion
So you now know what a maze is, where they are encountered often, gained some insight into different types of mazes, and learned what aspects are taken into consideration when designing mazes and how mazes are usually navigated through.
The next time somebody asks you what a maze is, you can direct them to this article as a reference to your explanation.
How did you used to describe what a maze is in the past? Let me know in the comments below!
Leave a Reply