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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVXSuqILVeE

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ve_iZT4Huuo

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This book showcases labyrinths both real and fictional mazes throughout history.

Reference:
Tucker, E. (2018). Get lost in a compendium of mazes. [online] Creative Review. Available at: https://www.creativereview.co.uk/get-lost-in-a-compendium-of-mazes/?cmpid=crnews_6300069&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=cr_news [Accessed 25 Jan. 2023].

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Written by Angus Hyland and Kendra Wilson, The Maze: A Labyrinthine Compendium proves there's far more to the story of the labyrinth than just the Minotaur and Ariadne's ball of wool.

The book covers a diverse set of examples of mazes, featuring everything from a mosaic labyrinth in an Algiers church that dates back to AD 324, to the Baroque-style yew maze of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining.

Each labyrinth has its own double-page spread, which delves into the story behind it and how it fits into the maze tradition, for example the oft-repeated seven-circuit layout. French artist Thibaud Herem has contributed illustrations to the book, drawing aerial views of mazes' various layouts that are shown alongside a useful feet and metres scale.

Examples come from all over the world, and are accompanied by key facts about the history of the maze tradition, including why they were built - apparently for several reasons including pagan or religious purposes, and in one case to keep a wealthy family's 12 children entertained. The book also clarifies the difference between maze and labyrinth - the former being a multiple choice puzzle, and the latter having only one path.

There's some juicy titbits to be gleaned, for example how Kubrick made his Overlook maze look much bigger than it really was, or how a Paris yew maze labyrinth was planted to cover a medieval rubbish heap (later becoming a safe haven for clandestine meetings).

Some, such as the black and white marble labyrinth in Cathedrale de Notre-Dame d'Amiens, have a more obvious link with graphic designers' work, but there's still pleasing connections to be found in the geometric grids that underpin the more traditional hedge mazes.
The Maze: A Labyrinthine Compendium is published by Laurence King; laurenceking.com

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Written by Angus Hyland and Kendra Wilson, The Maze: A Labyrinthine Compendium proves there's far more to the story of the labyrinth than just the Minotaur and Ariadne's ball of wool. The book covers a diverse set of examples of mazes, featuring everything from a mosaic labyrinth in an Algiers church that dates back to AD 324, to the Baroque-style yew maze of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining.

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Inception ''a dream-sharing technology'' a world of dreams. This movie talks about how a person can take or implant information from another's subconscious.

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How snakes and ladders survived throughout the centuries.

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How snakes and ladders survived throughout the centuries.

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It is a timeless game with moral teaching tools and has survived centuries with the same idea but different style and themes.

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Chances are you've played Snakes and Ladders. Rebranded in 1943 by Milton Bradley as Chutes and Ladders, most of us have sat with a version of it at some point in our young lives, but its origins involve much more than just child's play. The game is a potent teaching tool whose simple design has been used for centuries, arguably even millennia, as a way to embody and reinforce religious teachings and cultural values. Along the way it's evolved and adapted to incorporate the themes and aesthetics relevant to each culture that played it, from ancient India to Victorian England, to the US and far beyond.

Chutes and Ladders Boardgame. Flickr / Ben Husmann

Surviving game boards suggest Snakes and Ladders emerged somewhere in Northern India or Nepal. In its earliest identifiable form it was called Gyan Chauper, though other versions have gone by names like Leela, Moksha Patamu, and Paramapada Sopanapata. These titles translate roughly to terms like Game of Self-Knowledge, Ladder to Salvation, or Steps to the Highest Place, showing the weight of the content it was meant to convey. Over centuries the game traveled and evolved, its basic design serving as a durable chassis for any culture that took it up, containing and transmitting their moral and spiritual beliefs.

For the one among you who hasn't played some version of it, Snakes and Ladders progresses players in a zig zag pattern up a grid of about 100 squares by the roll of dice, or cowry shells originally. Planted on various squares are ladders that move players further up the board and snakes (or chutes) that slide them back down. The first player to reach the final square, entirely by chance, is the winner.

Jnana Chaupar: A Game of Knowledge (19th century AD) from the Rajasthan Oriental Research Institute, Jodhpur

Bookending each ladder and snake is a moral lesson, whether in the form of an illustration or explicitly written out. This is where a lot of the game's most obvious moral and religious didactics happen. But in playing, people are also made to experience the course of fate, and the consequences attached to virtues and vices. The experiential and communal nature of games is what makes even (maybe especially) the most basic of designs so effective at reinforcing culture.

"They are meant to teach us in a way that is very different from oral history and storytelling," says Colleen Macklin, director of New School's PET Lab, which designs games around social engagement and education in underserved communities around the world. "Without the players, the game doesn't even really exist - I mean, you could say that there's a board with some images drawn on it, or some dice, but it really isn't anything until we play it."

Play predates any formal system of language, education, politics, even our species itself. For us and our fellow primates, play is as much a way of being entertained as a way to work out how we interact and negotiate with the world. With that in mind, it's really no surprise that evidence of humans playing games goes back thousands of years. But in an age when many of the newest games become unplayable within a decade of their invention, we still have something to learn from games as old as Snakes and Ladders - and its relatives like Pachisi - that have stuck around for thousands of years.

Jain version Game of Snakes & Ladders. Gouache on cloth, India, 19th century,

Jain, Hindu, Islamic, and Buddhist Versions of Snakes and Ladders are well documented. Often made simply of painted cloth, few boards have survived from any earlier than the mid-18th century. But some scholars think the earliest form of the game may have emerged from ancient Jain mandalas, in which various squares were illustrated with karmic concepts and progressions, connected by religious scribes with lines to underscore their relationships. The leap from those connective lines to ladders and snakes isn't a big one - both are symbols common to many religions' spiritual stories.

Jain Gyan Chaupar on cloth, National Museum (India, 19th century)

Devout laypeople would play these games as a form of meditation or communal exercise, reinforcing the teachings of their religion in a form of study that didn't involve books or sermons. As such, the contents of each square were carefully considered, their connections intended to invite contemplation about specific tenets and the larger worldview they reflected when taken together. Predictably, landing on a snake square for 'drunkenness' would drop your piece a few spaces, but that square's relationship to those around it was also relevant to the message of the game. Their groupings would divide and classify various spiritual concepts, or outline a religion's cosmology. It's possible that even the ratios of snakes to ladders (one version had 40 to 22) were a means of communicating how fraught and narrow the righteous path could be.

"My impression is that some boards (including Jain ones) seem more pessimistic in that they include a lot of snakes and fewer and shorter ladders to aid the upward path," says Andrew Topsfield, keeper of Eastern art at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, and a leading scholar on the game. "This may reflect the very highly developed nature of Jain karma theory and the many subtle spiritual pitfalls that the Jain scholars identified. The bhakti or devotional worship-based boards (Hindu and Muslim) can seem a little more balanced in this respect, though not without generous provisions of dangerous snakes of their own."

The designs were also beautiful. Many boards have squares adorned with elaborate illustrations of religiously relevant phrases, figures or architecture, framed by flora, fauna, and symbols of spiritual planes. Rows of squares are sometimes arranged by levels of enlightenment, even in shapes suggesting the human body, simultaneously reflecting concepts like karmic paths, chakras, or other conceptions about various levels of the spiritual realm. One surviving board is even divided into sub-games corresponding to distinct spiritual or earthly states of being, an elaboration on the basic mechanic that enhances the religious content. Many of the old boards are genuine works of art, as telling as any manuscript or painting (and in a sense, they're both).

Calico Museum of Textiles

"Games are an art form, and the aesthetics are important," Macklin says. "It's kind of like ritual - and of course games are very tied to ritual. The way that a church looks for instance, or the weight of the goblet you might be passing around in some kind of ceremony, all matter as much as the meaning behind it."

Nomenclature is another major distinguishing factor between versions of Snakes and Ladders. The final square of a rare remnant of a 200 year old Sufi board, for example, speaks of 'extinction into God,' echoing the Sufi doctrine of "death before death." Though distinct, these notions aren't dissimilar from the Jain and Hindu versions' goal of reaching Moksha - the ultimate release from the cycle of life and death-in their terminal squares. In the American version, we "win" a blue ribbon.

Modern adaptations of the game are much less rigorous in the messages they try to impart. In a popular American version, moral lessons are illustrated as comically simple drawings that anyone born in the '80s will recognize - a boy rescues a cat and makes a new friend at the top of the ladder, a girl eats too many chocolates which, as shown at the bottom of the connected chute, makes her ill (confusingly, at the top of another ladder, a girl is apparently preparing to eat an entire cake as her reward for baking it). There's no apparent plan in the arrangement of these messages, their relationships to one another, or their correspondence with the number of squares a given ladder or chute advances a player or sets them back.

Imperial Britain is largely responsible for any of us in the west being exposed to this game. It was imported to Victorian England and soon caught on, even keeping the Indian iconography in its boards until around the 1930s. The virtues and vices became more generalized, endorsing grace and success under the ladders with warnings of poverty and disgrace adorning the snakes. Pregnant religious inscriptions were replaced by the two-part cartoon dramas, separated by a ladder or a serpent (and eventually a chute), as the snake to ladder ratio was generally evened out.

"It was probably thought that US infants would be frightened by all those snakes," says Topfield. "Perhaps this might reflect some deeper cultural predisposition, going back to when the first West-bound settlers had to watch out for rattlesnakes."

It did well in the UK and US, retaining its potency as a childhood game that, at least in part, furthered the moral vision of its host culture. These games are vehicles for culture, another reason the chameleonic nature of Snakes and Ladders is so interesting - it provides a window into numerous places and times in world history. In their look, feel, and design, we see the priorities, values, aesthetics, and mentality of people we'll never get a chance to meet.

Today the game continues to demonstrate its value as an educational tool, in promoting linear thinking, and concepts of sequence. It's a format that's still being innovated upon. Versions have been designed to educate communities facing the consequences of climate change, on how to face conflict, or to learn local farming cycles. The PET Lab mentioned earlier uses the cultural adaptability of simple games to foster disaster preparedness education in places where people have little access to technology, or even weather forecasts.

Games like these aren't designed to be won, but to teach and communicate through experience. In our time, games are still as much an amplifier of culture as films, music or literature. A game like Grand Theft Auto probably says a lot about our culture - not all of it good - but little of that message really comes from the mechanics or design of the game itself.

As a design, this game model is robust enough to last for centuries precisely because of its simplicity and adaptability. The reason today's most popular video games are unlikely to survive for another century, let alone another few decades, is largely because the complexity of their underlying code renders it impossible to adapt them to new ideas and perspectives. They're closed systems, whereas games like Snakes and Ladders - whose underlying mechanism is akin to guided reading - allows any message or idea to be tooled to fit its time and place.

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Chances are you've played Snakes and Ladders. Rebranded in 1943 by Milton Bradley as Chutes and Ladders, most of us have sat with a version of it at some point in our young lives, but its origins involve much more than just child's play.

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Making a zine for a map within the boardgame.

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Making a zine for a map within the boardgame.

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Monument Valley

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Ken Wong, who modeled puzzle game Monument Valley after the works of Dutch artist M.C. Escher, doesn't think we need more "art" games. There are plenty of niches to fill.

"I believe what we as an industry and culture need is better discussion, better ways to talk about games," the designer and artist said.

The "games as art" debate isn't it.

For developer Ustwo, one mode of communication comes through Monument Valley 's symmetry and towering design, each screen a collection of "little worlds"-microcosms surrounded by empty space, Wong called them. Escher used similar techniques to convey the images in his often bizarre lithographs and woodcuts.

"Life would be simpler if it was made up of simple geometric blocks and straight lines," said Wong. "That's why people feel so comfortable with Lego and Minecraft and why pixel art is enjoying a new appreciation."

Escher's influence is visible in countless other titles of recent years, like Fez and Echochrome, but it's also left its print on older classics like Sonic the Hedgehog, Lemmings, and Diablo II. Hidden in these ordinary games are strange dimensions: stairs ascending and descending at odd angles ( "Relativity" ), transforming backgrounds ( "Sky and Water" ), and overlapping patterns-illusions that confuse the player's perspective. Not first-person or third-person like we're used to, but something altogether different and curious.

"I also think game players like figuring out the rules of a universe, but they love finding ways to break those rules," said Wong. Escher's paintings did just this: setting up rules very clearly, and then breaking them.

In Monument Valley (due early April for iPad and other mobile devices), players break rules by doing the impossible: navigating their way through sets of impossible spaces and shapes in the maze-like paintings that Ustwo has created. Wong said he sees Monument Valley more as an interactive experience than a traditional game.

" Monument Valley 's design is intended to be very open-ended," he said. "We present a world and a journey to the player, and it's up to them to challenge themselves if they want to."

The surreal design isn't based on Escher alone. "What games are is too broad to have one idea of what is important," Wong said. He took inspiration from poster designs and low-poly 3D art, environments and objects "with distinct silhouettes" like Japanese flower arrangements, and architectural styles from North Africa, India, and the Islamic world.

Still, Escher is at the heart of how these disparate styles come together.

"Escher found a way to convey mathematical and geometric ideas to a wide audience through skillful illustration," said Wong. "He took familiar elements like buildings and birds and landscapes but arranged them in surprising and challenging ways. Having this as a touchstone was a good way to keep Monument Valley grounded and relatable."

"All computer graphics are illusions."

Those ideas seem to be why Escher's vision has guided so many developers over the years. There's something natural about the way it intersects with game design.

"All computer graphics are illusions," said Wong. "We discovered that a lot of the tricks we used to make Monument Valley were built into graphics systems all along. Escher's work embraces art for what it is-representation. The way he shows that representation is false is the same way we deconstruct game spaces and game logic."

Wong doesn't have a favorite Escher piece. His interest is more in understanding how the artist viewed the world, which is rarely captured in a single image, he said. By delving into the unfamiliar, we can change our perception of what something can be and how we can engage with it.

That's what Wong wants Monument Valley to do for game experiences.

"Examining Escher's works as a whole reveals a curious, imaginative, analytical mind and a precise, articulate hand. It would be truly magnificent if Monument Valley could reach people in a similar way."

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How M. C. Escher's "little worlds" inspired the gorgeous upcoming Monument Valley - Kill Screen - Previously

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Ken Wong, who modeled puzzle game Monument Valley after the works of Dutch artist M.C. Escher, doesn't think we need more "art" games. There are plenty of niches to fill. "I believe what we as an industry and culture need is better discussion, better ways to talk about games," the designer and artist said.

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50 black stories, 31 crimes, 49 corpses, 11 murders, 12 suicides and one deadly meal. How could that have happened? Black Stories are fiddly, morbid and mysterious riddles for teenagers and adults. The players try to reconstruct the crime by asking, guessing and fiddling about. A spooky card game...

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Reference:
www.youtube.com. (n.d.). Event Horizon Trailer 1997. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUMbZ6z71ew [Accessed 25 Jan. 2023].

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Within this article, it showcases 15 creative board games that could be used as inspiration for my final outcome.

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Zach is an international writer, photographer, filmmaker, martial artist, and creator of Creative Enso, the Zen art of creative living. His goal is to empower and inspire creatives to live healthier, happier, and more creative lifestyles.

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15 Fantastic Board Games To Boost Creativity

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Play isn't just for childhood development. It's also a great way to boost creativity for all ages. Here are 15 fantastic board games to challenge the mind and boost creativity. Board games have been entertaining people since ancient Egypt, but only recently have the benefits been studied.