h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Inspired by the recent video game Portal, I've got this idea for an H2G2 adventure in which the participant or participants are, essentially, human rats-in-a-maze, facing obstacles and solving puzzles (kinda like we do normally), except that the motivation is not to save the world, or any material gain apart from survival, but as part of an Experiment controlled by a computer.

One thing about this kind of setup is that it frees the puzzles from making any sort of realistic sense, since the answer to virtually any "why" is "because Shodan/Hal/Eddie/Durandal/GLaDOS set it up like this and wants to see if you can solve the puzzle". I know it's not unique in that regard -- we've had to run through artificial obstacle courses before, after all -- but it's just a sort of idea that's been taking root in my brain for a while now, and I'm interested in seeing what you thought about it, or if it's anything you'd be interested in doing.

What's the difference between this and real life?

Well, real life *probably* isn't governed by a glitched-out and possibly deranged computer.

It could work, but the difficulty would be to come up with a plausible explanation for the death traps and why the adventurers would go into it in the first place (if they didn't know it was a deathtrap, that might help. Or possibly if they knew about it and were just offering to test the deathtraps for a substantial payment.)

Oh, why-they're-there would be reasonably easy, at least for the type of adventurer who cheerfully waltzes into a building that was apparently abandoned in a hurry, without a trace of hesitation (once they know the air's safe). Or "sent by someone else to investigate it" works too.

As for the experiment itself: it doesn't have to be a deathtrap. I was thinking of puzzles that mostly *weren't* deadly. The bits that *were* deadly would be rather ... benign, or at least obvious and reasonably easy to avoid (less-so as you got closer to the end, but still relatively easy).

Ah, I see.