Graham A. Nelson is a British mathematician, poet, and founder of the video game community Inform Systems. In his 1995 booklet The Craft of the Adventure, Nelson traces the origins of computer role-playing and adventure games back to Stephen Bishop, a black mulatto born in 1820. As perhaps the first professional cave explorer in modern history, Bishop spent his life as a guide at MammothCave in Kentucky's Karst region. MammothCave is the longest underground cave system ever explored by man; and the story of Bishop and MammothCave is a curious intersection of the history of modern cave exploration and the origins of modern video games.
One
Mammoth Cave was discovered in the late eighteenth century when, according to legend, John Houchin, a hunter, stumbled upon the entrance to the cave while chasing a wounded bear. The cave was densely populated with bats, and during the American-British War, bat guano was intensively mined here and dissolved into nitrate to extract saltpeter for gunpowder. After the war, as the price of saltpeter fell, the cave fell silent for a time, until the discovery of a mummy.
Nahum Ward, a merchant, got a clue during a casual conversation and entered Mammoth Cave one November morning in 1815 with two guides in search of a legendary mummy. He wrote in his expedition diary: "...... When I reached the eight-acre cave chamber 'Chief City' (Chief City), I was amazed to see that there was not a single pillar supporting the entire vault. There is nothing more magnificent than this place under heaven ......"
Navigating through the cave was a challenge as there were no readily available maps. Ward's expedition lasted nineteen hours until 3 a.m. the next morning, when he finally reached a hidden cave chamber and discovered the legendary mummy's sarcophagus. In his description, it was a mummy of a woman about six feet tall and weighing only twenty pounds. She sat upright in the sarcophagus, wrapped in a wide slab of stone, with her tools, jewelry, feathers and other amulets hidden inside her rough clothing.
Of course, in the modern vision of the history of games and labyrinths, there is a simple way to tell this legend: after risking his life and going through a lot of hardships, a player finds and opens a treasure chest at the end of the labyrinth and obtains his own prize. And it should be noted that this story prototype took place in the early nineteenth century cave exploration activities before the modern game, which laid the groundwork for the later intersection of Mammoth Cave and the origins of the modern game.
The mummy was initially called the "Mammoth Cave Mummy" and later named "Fawn Hoof" in 1852. Since 1816, "Hoof" was taken on a national tour by a circus, attracting audiences from all over the United States, and Mammoth Cave quickly became nationally known for this mummy. After sixty years of touring, "Huff" was added to the collection of the Smithsonian Institution, a national museum. Half of the credit for Mammoth Cave being listed as one of the wonders of the world at the time goes to "Huff" and the other half to Bishop, the black slave who opened the book.
II
Since the early nineteenth century, cave tours have become a tourist hotspot in Europe. Mammoth Cave, despite its reputation for mummies, was not much visited in the early days. This has to do with the risk of cave exploration that comes with the sheer size of Mammoth Cave. Geologically, Mammoth Cave is a network of underground caves in central Kentucky and is considered to be one of the largest cave systems in the world.
During the War of 1812, bat guano from the cave was an important source of saltpeter, and it was black slaves who provided the primary labor for mining. After the war, the price of saltpeter dropped dramatically and profitable mining became unviable. In search of new business opportunities, work began to investigate deeper areas of Mammoth Cave for commercial exploitation for tourism. Most surveys and maps were kept secret due to commercial competition between caves in the area. In the decades that followed, Mammoth Cave became a popular tourist destination for American and European travelers, and its economic value continued to depend on slave labor. In the nineteenth century, guides who led visitors through Mammoth Cave were uniformly black, either the property of the cave's owners or leased by nearby slaveholders. In a racial scene ignored by most historians, these slaves became the guarantors of the graceful demeanor of the white men and women who traveled through the cave in the decades leading up to the Civil War.
By far the most famous of these black cave guides was Bishop. His owner, Franklin Golling, purchased the land above the cave in 1838 and he has been working at Mammoth Cave ever since. Until his death in 1857, Bishop accompanied thousands of white visitors to the cave. By any standard, the slave Bishop was a remarkable man - he taught himself Latin and Greek and was known as the "chief ruler" of Mammoth Cave. In his spare time, he explored and named most of Mammoth Cave, doubling the size of the known map in a year. Bishop pioneered a unique style of cave naming that was half-classical, half Native American - Styx, Snowball Hall, Little Bat Avenue, Dome ...... The maps he drew from memory in 1842 are still in use forty years later, and they continue to be noted for their stunning accuracy well into the twentieth century. highly regarded for their stunning accuracy.
In the first-hand cave narratives that emerged in the nineteenth century, Bishop was widely praised for his handsome and exotic appearance, his vast knowledge of cave topography and history, and his courageous personality. To this day, Bishop continues to appear in American poetry, historical fiction, and children's stories-as the forgotten romantic hero of the nineteenth century, an iconic figure of black upbringing and black self-determination who overcame the alienation of man by slavery. But historian Peter West (P e t e rWe s t ) argues that the complexity of slavery within Mammoth Cave defies simple comprehension. Although Bishop is often labeled the "Columbus of the Underground," his and other cave explorers' remarkable abilities consistently served the wealth of slave owners - and thus his remarkable achievements were also exploitative slave labor. And the complexity of the underground world is such that, given the treacherous environment, black guides had actual absolute authority over white visitors.
In this regard, West argues that racial dynamics shaped the unique role of Mammoth Cave in the imagination of the American nation-state in the mid-nineteenth century. Throughout the 1840s and 1850s, as tourism flourished, Mammoth Cave became a vibrant literary symbol in American popular culture at the time: lyrical poems evoking the "deep melancholy" of the cave; pseudo-archaeological narratives describing white civilizations of human or near-human races that lived underground for long periods of time; ghostly tales and legends telling of the spirits of Indians in the subterranean world. The cave was used as a backdrop for sensational stories of murder, sexual betrayal, and revenge in Gothic fiction. In the mid- to late-nineteenth century, Mammoth Cave not only became a popular tourist destination for American and European visitors, but also served as a vibrant symbol of national identity in a variety of media, including travel books, lyric poems, private diaries, love letters, Gothic novels, and moving panoramas. It is clear from Bishop's story that the cave of exploration, though ancient, was given a very different meaning in the nineteenth century than it had in antiquity.
As a common metaphor in ancient Greek mythology and philosophy, the physical cave was also the location of a prophet, and the cave was used as a "medium for the gods. The sensory deprivation of the cave is clearly linked to the oracle, as entering the cave can alter one's state of consciousness. More importantly, due to the special geological conditions of the Aegean Sea, the toxic gases released from caves could trigger euphoric or neurotoxic reactions. Thus, in ancient Greece, the transcendental properties of caves made the connection between prophets and caves a universal knowledge.
However, in contrast to the ancient experience of mystifying caves, modern caving attempts to bring caves into the realm of rational perception. The expedition deep into caves is in every sense of the word a decidedly modern invention. The unique challenge of caves is that they are overwhelmingly invisible, except for the entrance area. As a result, caves have typically gone unnoticed by mainstream scientists and map history researchers. With the exception of cave entrances, which are marked on some maps, most caves are not marked and shown on topographic maps, satellite imagery, or aerial photographs. Only modern cave explorers, driven by curiosity and the motivation to mark these unknown areas, have ventured into caves in an environment that lacks natural light and contains enormous physical and psychological barriers. Since the nineteenth century, the sport of physical exploration of caves and the field documentation and cartographic work derived from it have not only developed into a new discipline, "Speleology", but also provided the basis for a wide range of interdisciplinary work, such as archaeology, evolutionary biology, hydrology, geology, geomicrobiology, mineralogy, and paleoclimatic studies, etc.
Thus, in the context of modern cave exploration history, Mammoth Cave is one of the "meta-caves" where modern cave exploration originated. Modern cave exploration, however, is not only a scientific and rational process, but must also be understood as a social and political one - Bishop's story characterizes the unique place of Mammoth Cave in the history of American slavery. This work also provides a hidden genealogical trail of media for understanding the origins of modern gaming.
III
In accordance with his master's will, Bishop redeemed himself for good work and was freed in 1856. At that time, the explored area of Mammoth Cave contained two hundred and twenty-six passages, forty-seven vaults, twenty-three pits, and eight rock falls. Tragically, however, he died a year later at the age of thirty-seven, before he could redeem his wife and children. The great black cave explorer, however, is still remembered by the world and still lives on in various legends for the marks he left on the cave walls, his signature, and the precise maps he made. Bishop became the host of the white man's excursions into the underworld for his mastery of the discoverable routes of Mammoth Cave, and in this sense he can be called the earliest "Dungeon Master".
In the decades following Bishop's death, cave exploration became a big business, and nearby caves were subject to intense commercial capture. However, as slavery was abolished and commercial cave exploration became increasingly dangerous and secretive due to the changing division of labor, the U.S. government finally stepped in and designated the Mammoth Cave area as a national park in 1941, and commercial "cave exploration" by tourists began to wane. Since the 1940s, cave exploration has become a non-profit scientific activity and an extreme sport. Without the labor of slaves as guides, this extreme sport developed only in a communal and shared way, and its sunk costs and uncontrollability meant that it was difficult to commercialize.
"After World War II, a legend spread among the cave enthusiast community that Mammoth Cave was connected to the nearby Flint Ridge Cave System by a passage. In the 1960s, the caving community spent years secretly exploring the connecting entrance, trying and failing to find all possible connections from Flint Ridge to Mammoth Cave. It wasn't until September 9, 1972, that a breakthrough was made by an expedition led by slender computer programmer Patricia Crowther. She discovered a muddy passage - a hidden way into Mammoth Cave - after passing through an area named the "Narrows" (Tight Spot). Interestingly, the 115-pound Crowther found "Pete H" scrawled on the wall after squeezing through the narrow spot, along with an arrow pointing to Mammoth Cave. A review of the archives led the explorers to conclude that the markings came from explorer Peter Hanson, who arrived here in the 1930s and was killed in World War II.
The cave's fantastic encounter connects the different time periods, and the discovery of the "narrow point" in the early seventies can also be called the "narrow point" moment in the history of modern gaming, where a fantastic connection took place.
In 1972, Patricia Crowther and her husband, William Crowther, were employed by BBN, a contractor for the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the U.S. Department of Defense, where Will was a founding member of the development team for ARPAnet. ARPAnet was a precursor to the Internet, and Will's involvement in the development of the program was a key step in that process. It can be said that their work in the 1970s directly contributed to the birth of the modern Internet. At the same time, these MIT graduates became fans of the fledgling tabletop game Dungeons & Dragons in the relaxed working environment of the Cold War military industrial sector. The two were also active participants in the caving community, with Will using a program written by his wife Patricia to map Mammoth Cave and create a manual to share with the community.
Unfortunately, however, Patricia and Will's marriage ended in 1975. Patricia married John Wilcox, another soul of the cave exploration community, two years later. After divorcing his wife, a grieving Will spent his spare time in 1976 writing a text-based interactive game called Adventure in FORTRAN using PDP-10 as a platform to keep his two daughters happy during their visits and to improve their parent-child relationship - the game's stage was a computer simulation of one of the couple's favorite areas in Mammoth Cave. The stage of the game is a computer simulation of one of their favorite areas in Mammoth Cave. We can find many elements of the real Mammoth Cave in the original version of Adventure: cave explorers turning back when the mine lights flicker; mysterious markings and initials on the cave walls-some by nineteenth-century black miners and guides, others by twentieth-century explorers. The word "room," widely used in later video games, is also derived from the terminology used by the cave exploration community to name cave rooms. The game also borrowed elements from Dungeons & Dragons, adding active volcanoes, dragons, and dwarves not found in central Kentucky in subsequent iterations. The name of the game was later changed to Colossal Cave Adventure, the first adventure and role-playing game in the history of modern video games.
About this experience, Will wrote in his memories.
I was obsessed with a tabletop game called Dungeons & Dragons and had been heavily involved in cave exploration - specifically Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. Suddenly, I was involved in a divorce that was tearing me apart in every way, especially missing my kids, cave exploration had stopped, and the divorce was making the community awkward. So I decided to let myself go and write a program to recreate my cave exploring experience with my ex-wife in a fantasy world, while also incorporating Dungeons & Dragons, which I've been playing, as a gift to my kids. The idea was that it would be a computer program that wouldn't intimidate non-computer users, which is one of the reasons I made it - to let players use natural language to enter commands, rather than the more standardized language of program commands. My kids thought it was fun.
After 1976, copies of Giant Cave Quest began to proliferate in the early nodes of the Apa network, becoming one of the most popular programs in military and university computer labs. In other words, a word game about a physical cave network began to spread on the nascent digital network, Apha.com, and the game's creator, an employee of the Department of Defense, doubled as a cave explorer and modern Internet developer. Thus, in the 1970s, the "narrow point" of modern gaming history, "Giant Cave Quest" became the "narrow point" connecting the two cyber worlds, physical and virtual, and the "narrow point" connecting the history of the Cold War and the history of gaming. It is also the "narrow point" between the history of the Cold War and the history of games.
When Adventure in the Cave arrived at MIT in the spring of 1977, gamers there quickly responded by creating a more complex text game called Zork and the first new company to focus on such games, Infocom, which developed several text-based adventure games that continued to sell in the 1980s. During this time, a series of games inspired by The Giant Cave Adventure became the first genre of video games to become popular and successfully commercialized on computers and other consoles, the most famous of which was a 2D graphic game developed by Atari game designer Warren Robinett in 1980, also known as Adventure.) The game was called the first graphical version of "Giant Cave Adventure" and sold one million units in the 1980s.
However, the most important reason why Atari's Adventure became famous in the history of gaming was not because of its sales, but because the first "egg" in the history of gaming was buried in this game. In the movie "Top Gun", the hero Wade enters the last level of the Oasis Challenge, namely playing "Adventure" on the Atari 2600 console, and the way to pass the game is not to play through the game, but to reach the game's "Pixel Room" (Pixel Room) through a secret passage. Find the author Robinett secretly carved in the cave wall "eggs" - "Created by Warren Robinett" (Warren Robinett). The egg, which was buried in the game without the boss's knowledge and waiting to be discovered by the player, was a protest against Atari's deprivation of the game author's attribution rights and financial injustice.
Since then, it has become customary for the author to bury the egg in the video game. The digital signature inscribed on the cave wall of "Pixel Hall" in "Adventure" echoes the initials of Bishop and other black guides inscribed on the wall of Mammoth Cave, becoming a bitter echo of the history of slavery in Mammoth Cave in the history of twentieth century games.
IV
In adventure and role-playing games, not only the design of the game's maze corresponds to the material topology of natural caves, but also the design of its dialogue tree corresponds to the traversal exploration of the cave's branching structure in the cave exploration movement, i.e., the interactive narrative of video games is also a simulation of the traversal exploration of caves in the vision of media genealogy research. Therefore, it can be said that modern video games simulate cave exploration in the dual sense of spatial and narrative constructions.
Starting from this genealogy, it can be observed that the design of various video games has a similar mediating characteristic: the "caving" of the bare open world into some kind of connection to a series of unknown cave chambers to be opened. In this sense, it can even be argued that game worlds, in their own right, can be considered as "caves" or "dungeons". For example, in the early textual MUD (multi-user virtual space game, a generic term for text-based online games), Chivalry, sects replaced caves in the game world that the player had to traverse; and, in the graphical Legend of the Golden Age, the map of ancient China is depicted as a geographic network connected by sects, with nothing in the Middle Kingdom outside the sects. In the game, we must cave in the open terrestrial world and finite the non-traversable infinite world.
So what is it about wandering through the cave maze of a video game that is so fascinating? Returning to Nelson's opening point, he outlines the genre's origins in the fourth edition of The Information Designer's Handbook-starting with the story of Stephen Bishop, a cave explorer, cartographer, and slave who worked as a guide inside giant caves in order to buy freedom for his wife and children. Nelson writes, "It's hard not to feel sad that the underpinnings of the first adventure game were shaped by two lost souls, Stephen Bishop and Will Crowther, both of whom, like Orpheus, were unable to bring their wives back from underground." Game researcher Dennis G. Jerz argues that while it may seem dramatic to compare the cave that both men loved to slavery, divorce and death, Nelson aptly points out that it is "grief" that serves as the direct motivation for contextualizing the adventures that Bishop and Crowther experience in the giant cave. The immediate impetus for contextualizing the adventures Bishop and Crowther experience in the giant cave.
For the Crowther children, playing the game has always been a way to miss their father after their parents' divorce. A former caving companion of the Crowthers, recalling the culture of the cave exploration community in the early 1970s, described the breakup of their marriage as a disaster for the community. The mutual friend, who himself is still suffering from this pain thirty years later, says that one glance at "Giant Cave Adventure" is enough to immediately identify it as an emotional catharsis, an attempt by Will to rebuild lost love and family.
Thus, the story of the game Labyrinth is not arbitrary; the process of traversing the labyrinth is a process of restoring what has been broken and passed, a process of going back against time, and thus a process of fighting death. In the absence of a map (history) as a reference, the only way to fight death is by traversing all the branches. The archiving and reading of the game means going back to the last fork in the maze - only when there is a fork, it is necessary to archive, that is, to mark possible deaths. In this sense, the game can also be understood as an "archival medium".
In the movie "The Legend of the Demon Cat", Kukai and Bai Juyi follow the demon cat's guidance and finally piece together the tragic life of Yang Guifei at the end of the labyrinth in Chang'an City; in "Head Gamer", Wade gradually learns about the life of Halliday, the author of the labyrinth, by searching for clues hidden in the "Oasis" archives and using them to In the award-winning game "Disco Elysium", the player plays a police detective at the end of the maze and encounters a revolutionary fugitive on an island. In the award-winning game Disco Elysium, the player plays a detective who encounters a revolutionary deserter and his lost love on the island at the end of the maze.
Thus, at the end of the maze, the player (the cave explorer) often meets the author of the maze in his most secret heart. It can also be said that at the end of any game, you will eventually encounter the author. However, this experience is not necessarily an empathy with the author, and it could be just the opposite: in the vast majority of today's kryptonite games, the game author that the player encounters at the end of the desperate rechargeable internal purchase is simply the cave slave master - the owner of the kryptonite game - who exploits both the player and the programmer as slaves.
Only then can we understand the inherent "deep melancholy" of the labyrinth in role-playing, adventure and puzzle games. We must go back to the historical materiality of the modern game medium to decipher the intertwining of slave history, cold war history, material history and emotional history condensed in it. It is the "compulsive repetition" brought by sadness that drives the desperate wandering in the labyrinth - retrieving the unretrievable, redeeming the irretrievable, resisting the irresistible oppression, and escaping the inescapable death. Perhaps it is this desperation that contributes to the charm of video games as an "end-of-the-century" medium and its destined limitations.
