We don't make maps of games anymore. Is that bad thing?
If you've been playing games since the ZX Spectrum era you'll remember there was once an essential piece of gaming kit that didn't need to be plugged into the back of your machine. It was a pad of blank paper. In the early days of interactive entertainment, making your own maps was a vital tool for progression. With the classic text-based adventures ? from Will Crowther's Colossal Cave, through the Zork series and Scott Adams' cryptic quests ? it was the only way players could visualise the experience amid the onslaught of verb-noun inputs and endless compass references.
Later, with the dawn of the graphical action adventure, the homemade map remained an important navigational device. Fans of Ultimate's classic isometric quests, Knight Lore, Alien 8 and Sabre Wulf, would pride themselves on their elaborate cartographic creations (at least in my school), while attempting to accurately chart Mike Singleton's epic Lords of Midnight, with its 4000 unique locations, was the eighties equivalent of Waldseem�ller's Universalis Cosmographia. Keen gamer/mappers would compare techniques and send their works into the tips sections at magazines like ZZap 64 and Crash. Some favoured naturalistic approximations of the game environments, creating miniaturised ordinance survey maps. Others, like myself, used graph paper and went for a more diagrammatic approach, inspired by the topographic purity of Harry Beck's tube map.
But in the late-eighties, game design changed. The big home consoles from Nintendo and Sega brought an endless stream of slick arcade conversions ? no one needed to map Altered Beast or R-Type. And while early Japanese RPG titles like Final Fantasy and Legend of Zelda initially required some mapping skills thanks to their burgeoning use of open world 'overmap' environments, later iterations brought in a variety of navigational aids. Breath of Fire II, for example, introduced world maps that opened up new sections as the player gained fresh abilities, effectively allowing the micro-management of exploration and lessening the chances of getting lost (a theme that would later expand into the whole hub world concept, championed by Super Mario 64). Then there were teleportation zones, and the ability to set waypoints across a map screen ? somewhere along the line, travel became an inconvenience rather than the point of the game.
Elsewhere, CD-Rom technology allowed the birth of the cinematic adventure, complete with FMV and CGI story sequences. This heavily story-based form of design required a linear structure, with choke points and bottle necks to host key plot changes. That's pretty much where we are with big action adventure titles like Tomb Raider, Uncharted, Batman: Arkham Asylum and Call of Duty. The whole concept of exploration has changed; we no longer need to explore to progress, we explore to find power-ups and hidden extras, and in this overtly stage-managed form of freedom, cartography isn't really necessary. The pictorial map has been replaced by the didactic walkthrough.
Even so-called 'open world' titles are map-free experiences. There will usually be a mini-map or radar display in the corner as well as an HUD that paints your required destination with big arrows and a distance read-out. In games like Doom and Resident Evil, which require endless revisitation of old map sections, exploration becomes a sort of neurotic dance, an insect triangulation, in which the route maps are burned on the memory like rhythm-action button presses.
Do we really, truly explore game worlds anymore? Can we? I think in some ways, this goes deeper than mere changes in game design. It's interesting that GPS technology has evolved into a mass mainstream phenomenon at the same time as games; both are now about ridding us of the need to understand and read our environments. There have been a few titles that have attempted to engage us in map-making again ? the DS RPG Etrian Odyssey requires you to draw your own map on the touch screen, while Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass lets your customise and add notes to the pre-designed map display. But these are rare novelties.
I miss game maps. There was something fundamentally immersive about creating your own interpretation of the virtual environment, of relying on your own systems and diagrams to get you through. I could be wrong of course, there may be dozens of titles I've missed that positively invite cartographic interaction ? if so let us know in the comments section. I suspect not. We are, as a race, moving toward a guided, systematic form of orientation in which anything worth seeing has already been geo-tagged, reviewed and Google mapped. Getting lost in a game, or in a city, is now a completely unnecessary annoyance. It was once a means of discovering amazing things.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2010/oct/19/mapping-video-games
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