Maze

"Maze is a book that my brother and I have adored since early childhood. I don’t remember a time when we didn’t have it. It was published in 1985, and it’s a children’s puzzle book (more literally so than the other books in this list) in which you’re the guardian of an enormous mansion that a group of schoolchildren come to visit on a school trip. At the first entry room, which is illustrated alongside some text from you (as the narrator), the children and you (as the reader) must choose between four doorways that each have numbers above them indicating which page to turn to. Each room contains tons of cryptic clues, visuals, and riddles that are supposed to lead you to make the right choices. In theory, you can reach the end of the game—the book, the house—in sixteen steps. I have never done it, and I’ve never known anyone who solved this book. I remember in the early days of the internet, one of the first things I ever searched was ‘how do you beat Maze ?’ Only a handful of people had solved it, and they were really bad at describing exactly how to do it. I like that it is overtly a puzzle book , and that it’s heavily implied that you, as the narrator, are a ghoul or the guardian of some type of underworld. The book is illustrated in a style that reminds me of Venetian etchings. There’s something very Paradise Lost about it, something very spooky throughout the whole thing. Now, when revisiting it, I approach it as a novel. Similar to Hopscotch , by Julio Cortázar , it’s a game in which you have options about how you consume the work. The other thing that sticks with me about Maze is that there’s one room that’s a true ‘game over’—you shouldn’t have gone to this room. It’s completely black, and all you can see are the little eyes of the schoolchildren. No doors; you’ve simply lost the game. I won’t say which page number it is, in case anyone wants to track down this book and try it out, but it left such an impact on me that to this day I superstitiously avoid this number in all areas of my life. I think that ergodic fiction is the most fun type of fiction there is. I’m tempted to say it’s the most important type, especially if, as an author, your goal is to deeply affect the reader. There’s nothing like being a reader and suddenly feeling complicit in the story that’s unfolding. Take a book like Nabokov’s Pale Fire . I doubt that everyone who picked it up in 1962, when it was published, knew the shtick with that book. Realizing that you’re participating in the story you’re reading—through narrative metalepsis, which is movement between story layers—is just the coolest thing on earth. It’s hard for me to enjoy straight fiction now. Like I mentioned, my PhD is in this territory of gamified fiction, so I think about it a lot! “There’s nothing like being a reader and suddenly feeling complicit in the story that’s unfolding” I also grew up in a video game studio. My dad is one of the first video game designers. He worked with Gary Gygax and other Dungeons & Dragons people in the 1970s, and has carried on making games to this day so video games were always a part of my childhood. I play a little bit of this and that, though I’m not a huge gamer. But I still find this form – something ‘game-like’ embedded in literature – to be more engrossing. I love the idea that you don’t know the dimensions of a game in the pages of a book; you have to read it to figure it out. There’s something very exciting about that."