Moving Maze: The Intertextuality Between Player and Environment Agency
Yiou Wang and Yujie Wang
In Creativity and Cognition (C&C '21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 20, 1–5. DOI:10.1145/3450741.3466806. Presentation video here
In Proceedings of Art Machines 2: International Symposium on Machine Learning and Art 2021. School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong 10-14 June 2021. Artistic Project Presentation
“From Checkers to Complex Systems“, Exhibited at Chengdu Times Art Museum, 3.13 - 6.13, 2021, Chengdu, Sichuan, China
“Ocean 2.0“, Exhibition at Slime Engine, https://www.slimeengine.com/oc2/yiouwang-yujiewang
WebGL version: https://y-w.itch.io/moving-maze
Keywords
Games/Play; Generative Design; Architecture; Storytelling; Reinforcement Learning; Behavior-driven Reconfigurable Space
Abstract
The maze, an architecture of ritualistic identity from Classical civilizations, is reinvented through the contemporary lens of gameable architecture. With novel analytical insights on the system-part relationship of a maze, we design a Moving Maze that moves its parts methodically in response to the player’s movement. A misorienting system composed of repetitive parts, the Moving Maze is deconstructed into the non-subdivisible unit, which can propagate into a field through replication and orthogonal rotation. The digital game generates unpredictable and interactive outcomes with fragmental movement using gamer-relational rules, in which the gamer achieves the joy of navigating through the intellectual discovery of the system’s moving rules and smart rerouting. An art synthesizing procedural computation with gaming architecture, the Moving Maze pushes the imaginative boundary of what a maze can be and embodies the philosophy that systemic complexities arise from the simplest and most elementary things.
2021 ACM Conference on Creativity and Cognition (C&C ‘21), Presentation by Yiou Wang and Yujie Wang
In a system, complexities arise from the simplest and most elementary things. In a game, the best design reveals the most with the least contrivance. With research on the culture of mazes and its link to humans’ love of game, we create the Moving Maze - a maze that could move its parts methodically in response to the player’s movement. We design a method that generates an unpredictable and self-renewable system with fragmental movement according to simple gamer-interactive rules, in which the gamer achieves the joy of navigating through discovering these moving rules and smartly rerouting with human-specific flexibility of mind.
We posit a system that, based on simple rules implicit to the gamer, generates infinite routes, strategies, ways that the maze misorients the player and ways that the player outwits the maze. Gameability incorporates two components:
Interactivity, at a certain moment on the timeline, between the gamer and the system is the unique edge of our maze, and in our multi-player level extends to interactivity between gamer and gamer.
Adaptivity, along with the timeline, is measured by the gamer’s growth and system’s change over time.
To create a maze that moves, the first realization of a novel design method is born from the component analysis. Any standard maze is a misorienting system composed of repetitive parts. The maze is deconstructed into the non-subdivisible unit, which can propagate through replication and orthogonal rotation into a field. We are designing a computational system that reacts to the player’s movement by automatically rotating its parts. At the macroscale, this maze is a system designed to generate temporal diversity of outcomes with the simplest arbitrary principles; at the mesoscale, the maze is deconstructed into a collection of corners, junctions, dead ends, and passages; at the microscale, it is a simple, rotational unit. With each move the player makes, the interactive maze adjusts itself incessantly, while the player continues to re-navigate amidst the disorder.
