The web's first magazine devoted to stories about life in giant artificial structures created by forces beyond human comprehension

Raised in Captivity: "Minotaur China Shop"

Flashbang Studios' Minotaur China Shop raises an issue important to this issue of Labyrinth Inhabitant Magazine: once you've lived inside a labyrinth, is it possible to reacclimatize yourself to the real world? Labyrinths are designed to be explored, which means they're designed to support life. Once you've lived in that environment, was does it take to go back to a world that wasn't designed with you in mind – a world you have to adapt to, rather than the other way around?

Minotaur China Shop suggests the adjustment process would be difficult. In this game, the Minotaur has been allowed to leave the labyrinth, and he's now trying to eke out a living for himself by starting a modest business. He's also clumsy, half-mad from solitude, and simmering with rage. The one aspect of the Minotaur's work that allows him to cling to his sanity is that all his customers have very specific ideas about which of the Minotaur's wares they want to buy. Like the restrictive corridors of the labyrinth he called home, the customers' requests leave him with only one correct course of action.



The game exists mostly to let the player experience how the Minotaur's efforts to live a self-directed life inevitably degenerate into frustration and failure. He's ill-equipped to function in a capitalist economy, and he lacks the coping skills he'd need to accept his own shortcomings. He lashes out at the shop he's created, as if his environment was still an enemy to be defeated rather than the source of his livelihood.


As a game, I found it nearly unplayable. This is a browser-based game, but when I loaded it up in Google Chrome or Internet Explorer it inevitably crashed the browser window. In Firefox I fared a little better, but every time I finished the first of five business days the game froze up on a blue "Level Complete" screen. I banged on the keyboard and the mouse trying to move on to the next phase of the game, which presumably would have involved leveling up and ordering dwarves to chop down trees to build more chinashops, but all I was able to do was make the Minotaur shuffe around very feebly, barely visible in the shadows in the background. Sad.



For more on the issue of reintigration into the natural world after life in an artificial environment, see Norma and the Fiddler of Gurg, by T. M. Crone, in which intergalactic preservationists gather up members of endangered species (including humanity) and encourage them to propogate until someday in the future when they can be reintroduced to the wild. And Micronations; or, How We Became the Mole People, by Timothy Mudie, in which the humans have built a wildlife preserve for themselves because the rest of the scorched surface of Earth is uninhabitable. Having lived in this protective shell all their lives, the heroes pursue a gambit for freedom with dangerous naiveté. In Jaine Fenn's Angel Dust a young woman who grew up as a member of a literal underclass is tapped to carry out a mission in the normal, topside world, and in Kristine Ong Muslim's The Last Stranger humankind is awakened from its deceptive world-simulation again and again – not that humankind pays any attention.

Thanks as always to everyone who submitted their work this issue!


Matt Carey is the editor of Labyrinth Inhabitant Magazine.