Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Maps!

It’s getting dark fast. I’ve only been there once, an hour earlier. I’d been in a panic, not bothering to read street signs, dodging between cars. I’d only had my pack then, a handful of books, pens, IDs and letters stating that I belong in the country. My belongings were miles away then, on the other side of the city. Now I had eighty pounds of gear, no map, vanishing light and a public largely unaware of the area they lived in. I hadn’t eaten in almost twenty hours, slept in closer to thirty. I was held together by caffeine and anxiety, my knees rolling with each stride to accommodate the weight and the speed I leant my strides.

I’d arrived in Cork only a day earlier, landing in Shannon and spending an restless eight hours on a bus to reach the city itself before navigating a foreign public transit system in order to reach a hostel, where I was entreated to a lukewarm greeting. I then learned that wireless access in the hostel was non-existent, and that to contact the person I’d be staying with I’d have to wander around the city of Cork until I found a wireless signal.

It gave me a chance to learn my surroundings, to get a sense for the place, the university campus. It was gorgeous, expansive and artfully built into the hill over the Lee. The buildings ranged from venerable aging classics to hideous modernist stucco upstarts to towering post-modern oddities of steel and glass, the campus itself lifeless for Christmas break. It seemed strangely tropical to me, having come from Minnesota days earlier. I only needed a single wool sweater to sit outside and type furiously, trying to find a single unsecured wireless network. The networks themselves were scarce in this foreign land and when I’d finally gotten in touch with my hostess-for-an-evening-to-be I’d lost the signal soon thereafter. I had no Google map to guide me back to my hostel, only my wits.

This would be nothing compared to the three mile foot trek in the dark back from her apartment. Sleepless and exhausted, carrying books, clothes, my laptop and my sleeping bag, slung across my body like some sort of apocalyptic wanderer, I shook Sarah’s hand two days later and began walking. My walkman was tucked in my bag – I didn’t want the added encumbrance of wires on my journey. All I had was the sound of cars and the occasional burst of obscenity from the locals.

I made my way to the campus with relative ease. The main thoroughfare guided my way, an easy road of concrete and stucco houses. When I reached campus the road grew more complicated. To reach my new apartment I’d have to delve into the sloping side streets of Cork, the warren of side streets and cobbled roads that make up the downtown section of the aging port. So, with my pack on my back and the river as my only guide I pressed onward.

Cork really isn’t that complicated. It isn’t laid out in a grid, so it’s not that easy to navigate, but it isn’t overly complex. All roads eventually lead to the harbor. The harbor. The markets, the museums, everything is centered around the harbor. It’s a point of natural progression in the city. If you walk and treat the city as a maze you’ll eventually reach the waterfront, which is convenient because the bus lines converge there. It’s similar to the way flags are laid out in older first person shooters, large scale games like Tribes.

So suddenly I’m back inside of the floating fortresses of Broadside, feeling my way down through the various tunnels to the flag room. The walls lack feature, the environment feels hostile even when it’s empty and I’m not even sure heading towards my destination is the best idea. What will I do when I get there? Awkwardly work towards some nebulous, pre-determined goal? What do I gain in the end? Hardship? A single flag cap, best circumstances. A motion towards a goal, nothing more.

Watching the curve of the river, I thought of the hours I spent running through tunnels, flying and sighting the curve of a hill or the dip of a river, the joy of motion in Tribes. I thought of the way that I would check my command overlay in mid air, sighting my location and heading on the map and then flip back to the game to break, desperately trying to avoid slamming into an outpost. I thought of the times I’d darted towards sounds I could hear echoing off of valleys, gently advanced on fortified positions looking for turrets whose footing I’d memorized.

I thought of the days I’d spent in the tunnels of F.E.A.R., moving towards a known destination, backtracking along indistinct passages. I thought of weeks wasted in the caverns of Halo, patches of French landscape just east of Normandy beach. I thought of all the time I’d spent as a gamer and how my sense of direction was, if not refined per sec, developed by the experiences I’d had.

When we discuss maps it is all too easy to limit our discussion to the matter of strategy games, where maps are abstractions of terrain that we as players are fortunate enough to have filtered through to us through some sort of mystical god lens. And while these maps are certainly important they are not the only maps that we have to deal with as gamers. All games are inevitably played on some sort of map, even if that map is little more than a corridor drawn on graph paper, and to toss aside the sort of maps which necessitate the immersion of the player is not only a mistake but a disservice to the discussion of the subject.

Maps in games inform us. They give us concept of space, ideas about purpose and structure and they push us towards certain types of play. In a way they’re the fundamental unit upon which all games are based. They establish the place we play the game and the rules which govern it. Sometimes the manner in which a map can be manipulated sometimes even determines the manner in which a game can be played. Look at the ill fated Fracture or the incredible Red Faction: Guerilla, both incredible games that trade heavily on being able to restructure your world.

And in the end the best way to really comprehend the importance of maps and the real impact they have on us as players is to think of them in terms of what they represent: physical places. GPS coordinates allow us to navigate the world, but without the physicality of the street, the woodland, the country road, those numbers are meaningless. They’re ones and zeroes telling us where we should be instead of informing where we are. The games most effective at establishing a sense of place and leading players through them know this.

Episode 2 of Half-Life 2 knew this all too well. Listening to the commentary you can see how the level designers at Valve took pains to make sure that each area was constructed in a fashion that would usher characters towards their ultimate goal. And when they finally chose to make their game into an open world adventure the landscape of that world was not only laid bare, it was presented prior to any sort of action so that players could become comfortable with it. It was made into a character of its own, like the streets of Cork. Faceless, cultureless, but possessed none the less of a soul that cannot be died when you walk along its roads. I still remember rushing to defeat striders as they hurried towards those buildings, scrabbling to protect my precious resources, my beautiful rocket, my gorgeous quasi-Russian woods. I remember the way it felt beneath my feet, under the wheels of my car. I remember seeking out the hidden caches, seeing where rebels would’ve considered their supplies safe.

I remember these things because the maps they made had a topography which impacted me as much as every real place I’ve ever been. I speak not as an architect or an engineer but as a hiker and a traveler, someone who has seen more of the world in his brief life than most people will have the opportunity to over the course of a life time. I speak as someone who has wandered from Victoria Station to The Globe on foot, then crossed London at night to reach the north side of Hyde Park. I speak as someone who loves the simple action of moving from place to place, who takes joy in observing my surroundings. I’ll often walk two or three miles to see something if I think the journey will be interesting enough, and in a great way my preponderance towards and ability to do so is owed to games. Games reinforced the love of hiking I found myself with as a child and made it into something greater: a love of topography.

It added joy to what I’d already found to be a practical and satisfying experience, made me better at something I was already pretty good at. Games didn’t teach me how to read or follow maps better, nor do I think they imparted a sense of direction to me. But they took the skills I already had and refined and reinforced them, made them into something greater, something infinitely less practical and, in a way, much more interesting. They helped me develop confidence in skills I had, a necessary component of being a skilled navigator. They made me consider spaces and the purpose behind their construction. They educated me in the manner traditionally reserved for students of architecture and urban planning, encouraging me to see the pencil lines defining and enclosing the places I lived in.

But I didn’t think of any of this in Cork. Instead I glanced around, searching for markers, following the river. It was pitch black by then. Night fell swiftly in Cork, and the unfamiliar streets had begun to feel hostile despite generally genial or harmless looking citizens. As I spotted bits of graffiti and gentle curves of streets recognition sparked in me. I made the last turn and saw the glass walled lobby in the distance down the street. A single light was on, illuminating the tiny elevator which formed the spine of the building. I moved forward slowly, confidently striding with my possessions still slung across my body, the surety exhaustion brings powering my even strides. When I reach the doors I stumble, searching for my keys. For the first time in almost an hour I put down my bags and search my pockets, grimacing at this irritating new challenge. I know that I will find my keys soon, that I will be up the stairs in a few minutes and sitting on my sheetless bed in a sleeping bag, feverishly sleeping off the last two days before long. But for the time I am helpless, looking through a non-space for an insignificant item without any sort of map, even one within my own mind.