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by codebje 1862 days ago
It sounds exactly like a DikuMUD zone, where each place has an exit to another place in four cardinal directions plus up or down, but those exits do not need to be symmetrical. Loops, warps, multiple exits into the same place. The graph is not necessarily even connected as portals and triggers can teleport you into otherwise unreachable places.
2 comments
chipotle_coyote 1861 days ago
That's more or less what I was thinking -- in fact, every text adventure system I'm aware of, going all the way back to mainframes and microcomputers in the 1970s, implement a version of this. Nelson's "cells" are rooms, and "connections" are exits.

Many of the oldest microcomputer ones, like Scott Adams' adventure games (and from your description, DikuMUD), are exactly what's described here, except as you note, with more than four directions: typically there are either six or ten (adding NW, NE, SW, SE to N, W, E, S, Up, Down), and I remember some that added "IN" and "OUT" as unique exit names. Other systems allow an arbitrary number of connections defined within the node, such as MUCK rooms or links between Twine nodes. Basically, these are multi-cardinal linked lists.

At risk of editorializing, I get this sort of feeling from a lot of my encounters with Ted Nelson's work: he and his more ardent defenders are very, very insistent about how visionary he is, but I often come away with "that's neat but not terribly practical" or, like here, "aren't these new names for stuff that already existed?" (Also, about 100% of the time I read about the history of his work, I'm left with "he would have had something there if he'd been willing/able to play nicely with others.")

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hcs 1861 days ago
The point (as I think jerf explained helpfully) is that it restricts a general graph structure so that it can be more easily navigated, so no one-way teleports or multiple exits to the same place. I think the analogy to an adventure game space is apt, otherwise. There are additional dimensions, but with these restrictions navigation is hopefully comprehensible. (I'm just reading up on this today, hopefully not too far off.)
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