. The maze could be composed not only of spatial twists but of moral and psychological choices.
A maze in a sense can include not just the physical navigation of a winding, twisting area, but also the traversal of societal and systematic confromtations.
This kind of narrative structure need not be limited to such simplistic content or to an explicitly mazelike interface.
I think the concept of non-traditional mazes is really interesting - as long as the setting is confusing and complicated enough so that the player/hero has to jump through hoops to do what they want, I feel like it is sufficient enough to call if a "maze". However, there is a fine line between an interesting, convoluted, yet nice to navigate maze and a straight up boring, monotonous maze. I feel like for a maze to be successful, it must introduce new concepts that not only refresh and keep readers/players from being bored, but also be enough of a challenge to invoke backtracking, strategy, and overall move the story forward. For example, in PJ Book 4, our main characters frequently leave the maze to do some crucial quest that both stops the story from becoming a monotonous cycle of obstacle after obstacle, and moves the story forward so that new obstacles within the maze feel refreshing and exciting in a different way.
Like all fairy tales, the maze adventure is a story about survival.
I think this sentence basically sums up the previous two paragraphs. The maze format is a great way of telling a story, as it is the one big obstacle the hero has to face. Nobody truly wants to enter a maze, if not for a particular goal/prize at the end. With mazes, stories have many different ways of expanding, for example the maze in Percy Jackson and the Battle of the Labyrinth utilizes the maze in a fundamentally different way, than say the Maze Runner.
As I move forward, I feel a sense of powerfulness, of significant action, that is tied to my pleasure in the unfolding story. In an adventure game this pleasure also feels like winning. But in a narrative experience not structured as a win-lose contest the movement forward has the feeling of enacting a meaningful experience both consciously chosen and surprising.
Maze based games give a sense an agency as they are often moved forward directly by the player's actions. There's a sense of progress that can be called winning even if the game is not structured as a binary win or loss.
It ties back to their original definition of agency and how it shows up in entertainment.
However, there is a drawback to the maze orientation: it moves the interactor toward a single solution, toward finding the one way out. The desire for agency in digital environments makes us impatient when our options are so limited
Maze based games are often linear in that they funnel towards a single solution. While they provide agency they also create impatience to find the way out.
Maze orientation is not universal in all games and stories, despite the agency it gives. The author shows the downsides of the maze orientation.
serotonin has another function: It can act as one of those molecular Post-it notes. Specifically, it can bind to a type of histone known as H3, which controls the genes responsible for transforming human stem cells (the forerunner of all kinds of cells) into serotonin neurons. When serotonin binds to the histone, the DNA unwinds, turning on the genes that dictate the development of a stem cell into a serotonin neuron, while turning off other genes by keeping their DNA tightly wound. (So stem cells that never see serotonin turn into other types of cells, since the genetic program to transform them into neurons is not activated.)
Serotonin can bind to H3 Histone and cause stem cells to become serotonin neurons.
This research led the same team to wonder if Dopamine might act in a similar way.
The serotonin paper is here: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30867594/
they showed that the same enzyme that attaches serotonin to H3 can also catalyze the attachment of dopamine to H3 — a process, I learned, called dopaminylation.
The same enzyme that helps serotonin bind to H3 can also help dopamine bind to H3.
Paper found here: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32273471/
What you get is a mess.
OR A MAZE?