Mapping the maze

This is a follow-up to my last article Black Swan Hunting.

I had a few kinds of activities that I really enjoyed as a child that now, as an adult, seem somewhat interrelated. Playing with legos, reading choose-your-own-adventure novels, and doing logic puzzles. I didn't really have a favorite, though I did engage wtth Legos more than other things because they allowed more degrees of freedom. When I got a little older, I enjoyed videogames. The usual suspects. Sonic the Hedgehog. Mario. Megaman. Tetris. Pokemon. Oregon Trail. Everyone's childhood favorites (or some variation on the same theme). Yet the games that I have find that I enjoyed the most have been role-playing games. Actually, as is shown by the image above, my favorites are old-style text adventures that are turn-based and give you a new set of options ater every move. A Dark Room might actually be one of the greatest games I've ever played of ay genre.

What I enjoyed about those games was that they made it explicit. In a side-scrolling game, it is visually obvious which way you can go and the controller layout defines what you can do. In a text-based adventure, all of this occurs with words.Something distinct, and valuable, happens when you put things that are perhaps obvious on-their-face into words (more on the power of naming things in a future article). So, you wake up in a room. There are doors to the east and west, which way do you go?

In my most recent article, I wrote about the problem of finding a path to an objective. In summary, humans have a tendency to simplify and create narratives out of extremely complex situtaions. There is no nice neat, logical way for us to find out how to make a new thing work. It's messy, and wild, and unknown. So, how do we get through the unknown as quickly and efficiently as possible?

From my perspective, the task is trivially simple. Please note that I did not use the words easy, fast, or cheap (though those benefits are arrived at sideways on the longer time scale). I use the grid-based first-person RPG as a framework here. The most efficient way for us to progress from the current position to the desired end-state is to treat each step as a dungeon room. From each position in reality, (time and space), we evaluate all possible next moves, and we document this. We document the variables involved and we experiment. In the beginning, we will arrive at solutions in the same amount of time that we currently do through trial and error. The benefits of this approach become more apparent over time.

Benefit 1: Putting things into concrete forms (in some sense, exercising mindfulness) with regularity can provide insights that may ellude us merely moving through the world.

Benefit 2: It reframes the evaluation of where you're at as where you're at now rather than th cumulative results of prior choices and respective distance to the goal. if you spend too much time considering past actions taken and resources used, it will unduly influence your next steps. The most pressing question is "How do I get there from here?" and the best position to answer that from is in considering here and forward, not backward.

Benefit 3: If you are forced to backtrack, you have a clear idea of how far back to go and what to do differently.

Benefit 4: We avoid rework by not retreading ground too often.

The long term goal of an approach like this will be to create a framework that will obviate the need to continue performing this activity, a set of evidence-based heuristics relating to pathfinding that will serve yourself and those you choose to share it with more widely.