For the lucky few with time on their hands and a desire to escape their immediate surroundings, maps of Mars with deep canals can still be part of the daily routine. So may maps of the Moon, and maps of occupied France, and a map that recreates the experience of fighting in Iraq in 2003, and a map of a godforsaken urban landscape called Liberty City where you drive around doing terrible things to passers-by. For map fans interested in where the most intricate and beautiful maps have gone (now that museums and libraries have snapped up all the old ones and phone apps and live 3-D maps have done for the rest), this is where to start looking – in video games, the bold future of cartography.
How can this be? Aren’t video games the object of scorn and derision, not least from fretful parents who fear their children are wasting the best part of their lives playing them? Aren’t they addictive, mindless, repetitive and violent? All this may be true, although perhaps not quite as true as it was when video games took hold in the 1990s. For these days we may acknowledge other attributes, and, far from being a cultural nadir, you can make a decent case that video games are the most creative form of screen entertainment we have. Do they not stretch the young creative mind? In assigning a series of challenges, do they not demand new forms of exploration and problem solving, and a sense of achievement when levels are attained? Do they not also encourage perseverance and patience, and promote cooperation? And more to our point, for a young cartographer in the twenty-first century, is there a more demanding or defining industry within which to work?
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Exhibit A: Skyrim. This is the fifth part of the Elder Scrolls series that began in 1994 and is the most popular digital role-playing game in history (ten million copies sold in the month of release in November 2011, with a sales revenue of $620m). It is an ‘open-world’ game that lets you either pursue a vast array of quests and skills, or just wander around without purpose, losing yourself in the lush dewy landscape of valleys and mountains, or in the ice of the tundras, encountering enveloping strangeness wherever you go. There is a story at the heart of it – your usual everyday battle against dragons and other foes in a dystopian Nordic-Medieval kingdom – but it is the geography that enthrals, a 3-D dreamworld both familiar and alien, a pixellated Mappa Mundi with a choice of pilgrimages and viewing angles. It is certainly not a place where one can function without an atlas.
Indeed, the game comes with a fold-out map, printed on textured faux parchment, but it’s more of a mood-board than anything that will help you navigate beyond your first half-hour. Proper help comes in the form of a 660-page official game guide. This comes with 220-pages of maps, which gives you an idea of the complexity of the game, the hundreds of digital cartographers involved in its creation, and the endless days in which you may lose yourself in the Skyrim world (a world inevitably far more detailed than Cyrodiil, the country where Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion took place, which was itself more detailed than Vvardenfell, the island at the centre of Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind).
The 3-D dreamworld of Skyrim – a videogame whose appeal rests primarily on geography and maps.
Skyrim itself is a country in the continent of Tamriel on the planet Nirn (keep with this: after playing the game enough, it’s Earth that becomes weird). Skyrim is divided into nine Holds, although their borders are inexact during gameplay. They have names such as Haafingar, The Reach and Eastmarch, and each Hold has its Primary Locations (large spaces requiring interior exploration, such as the vampire hideout Movarth’s Lair), and Secondary Locations (seldom in need of further exploration, such as the Shrine of Zenithar in the Rift.) The locations are spotted with camps, mines, strongholds, dens, lairs and crypts, all with their own names and purpose – horse trading, food supplies, dangerous areas with enemies to be slain if one hopes to gain new skills and rejuvenate one’s combative health.
To take one map alone: The Reach occupies the entire western edge of Skyrim, and judging by the ruins it was once a more populated and happier place, but something awful happened here. According to the guide, ‘Karthwasten and Old Hroldan provide some degree of safety, and the Blades hideout known as Sky Haven Temple is another beacon of tranquillity surrounded by hard terrain and harder adversaries. Fort Sungard and Broken Tower Redoubt are both fortifications to explore, and two Orc Strongholds (Mor Khazgur and Dushnikh Yal) are also here for you to find. To the northeast is Hjaalmarch, but the majority of the Reach borders Whiterun.’
This is either your thing or it isn’t, but the mapping of this imagination is original and impressive. As with a Blaeu atlas of old, the cartography of Skyrim should be credited to many hands, a team of perhaps thirty or forty employed at Bethesda Game Studios; the maps in the guide are credited to a firm called 99 Lives. If you were a mapper, why would you not want to meet this sort of challenge? And if you were a player, why would you not want to believe you were wandering alone in that free-form world with only a map and your wits to save you, an adventure in barely charted territory, one of the latest, greatest, and most underrated cartographical landmarks.
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Until Skyrim came along the hottest map-within-a-game was Grand Theft Auto 4 (GTA4). Its release in 2008 was an event anticipated by gamers in much the same way as a previous generation anticipated the new Beatles album, and the sales on the first day broke all records. Sales of the whole GTA series have surpassed 100 million copies, and its three main creators (one Scotsman and two Englishmen) have taken on the mantle of impossibly wealthy celebrities, a role they may have been aiming for when they named their company Rockstar Games not long after they opened for business in 1997.
It is clearly a thrilling game to play, the experience enhanced by the fact that everyone who isn’t playing it is outraged by it (Uniting Conservatives and Liberals in Hatred since 1988 as one of the GTA online trailers proudly has it). Certainly, the GTA series has generated a lot of bad press – real-life crimes were apparently inspired by it, there was a pornographic game hidden within its layers, questions were asked in Parliament – all of which boosted sales no end. It is indeed a violent adult game, but at its heart lies a simple pursuit of cops-and-robbers: you steal a car and outwit those chasing you. But as with Skyrim, the game is as much about navigation as it is about quests. As a player you are free to speed through the sequence of loosely disguised dystopian urban environments – London, New York, Miami, San Francisco and, coming soon with GTA 5, Los Angeles – as if you were truly at the wheel in a very vivid city.
Many of the cars in GTA 4 have satellite navigation installed, which one operates in much the same way as a real system – you put in the address and off you go. In the Liberty City Guidebook it states, ‘GPS was invented because real men do not ask for directions. Now you can get automatically re-routed when you handbrake past that last turn at 150mph.’ But you may also spend some time on foot and in the subway, which is where the provision of the large folding map comes in handy. This splits the city into five boroughs, each more unappealing than the last. The central one is Algonquin, a carbon copy of Manhattan with its Middle Park in place of Central Park and the Grand Eastern Terminal close to where Grand Central normally lives.
Liberty City can be a very bad place to make your way around: this is Algonquin, modelled on Manhattan.
The grid system remains, although the streets are all named after jewels and the numbered avenues have been replaced by Galveston, Frankfort, Bismarck and Albany. The designers know their mapping history: Columbus has been upgraded from a Circle to an Avenue of his own, an island-long stretch from Amethyst Street in the south village to Vespucci Circus in the heights. Of the other boroughs, you’d probably want to live in Broker, where the Brooklyn-style brownstones and leafy streets offer beaches and boardwalks and respite.
GTA navigation takes two forms – how to map your way through the various urban wastelands, and how to get around the architecture of the game itself. Both are handled by the controllers, which on the Sony PS3 means an entire knobbly dashboard with different buttons for accelerate, brake, steering, headlights, game radio station and mobile phone operation, and of course Fire Weapon. That’s in the car. If you’re on foot, there are buttons and sticks for walking, running, jumping, mounting a ladder and of course Fire Weapon. You begin by fumbling, but pretty soon you learn that a cautious mastery of maps is what you need to get you furthest. The canny player learns that the more you familiarise yourself with your environment, the more you benefit from it (the alley your pursuers don’t know, the back-route that will shave eight seconds from your journey). It’s a primitive skill, but is it taught as compellingly anywhere else?
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Before computers, back in the analogue world, maps and games hit it off rather well too. The association stretches back at least to 1590, when the counties of England and Wales were displayed on a deck of cards (we can’t be sure of the rules, but it may have been the very first example of Top Trumps). The top quarter of the card features the name of the country, the suit and the value; the middle section shows a map of that county, while the lower quarter shows the various properties, including length, breadth and distance from London. (Whether being nearer to London or further away was a game-boosting advantage is unclear.)
Another game, with the familiar 52 cards, was published in Paris in 1669 by Gilles de la Boissière. Les tables geographiques reduites en un jeu de cartes was truly international, featuring a small illustration of a country or state, including America, Virginia, Florida, Mexico and Canada. A variation appeared a year later, now with each suit representing a continent: America is clubs, Asia is diamonds, Europe is hearts, and, in a category choice that would these days provoke wrath and hand-wringing, Africa was spades (this may have contributed to the racial slur ‘as black as the ace of spades’).
Scotland and Holland go missing on one of Spilsbury’s jigsaws, from 1766.
But the map would find no more natural home than two other types of pastime gaining favour in the middle of the eighteenth century: jigsaws and board games. The first ever jigsaw is believed to be an engraved map on wood made by the English cartographer John Spilsbury in the 1760s. The idea proved so popular, not least as a way of making school geography tolerable, that he printed and sawed his way not only through maps of the world, but also each of the four continents and the British Isles. A few years before, J. Jeffreys had produced a similarly learning-is-fun pastime with A Journey Through Europe or The Play of Geography, a map board over which you would advance with dice and rules.
We have continued to play derivations of this game for more than two hundred years, among them Lincoln Highway from 1926, in which players moved coloured pins coast to coast over a map of the US (the game was endorsed by the Automobile Club of America, the roads on the board apparently so accurate that they could have been used in a real journey), and Hendrik van Loon’s Wide World from 1933, in which airplane and steamship pieces raced to complete remote voyages.
And then there was La Conquête du Monde, invented by a French film producer Albert Lamorisse in the mid-1950s, and renamed by a salesman at the US game maker Parker Brothers named Elwood Reeves. The word ‘Conquest’ was already on too many other games, so the salesman picked an initial from each of his grandchildren and named it – initially with an exclamation mark – Risk!
The rule book from an edition in the early 1960s has a simple claim – ‘You are about to play the most unusual game that has appeared in many years’ – and an equally simple purpose: ‘The Object of the game is to occupy every territory on the board and in so doing eliminate all other players.’ You had armies, you had dice, and gradually, if you had the time, it was hoped you would engulf the world. The game could take as long to set up as other games take to complete, while playing it could annex the kitchen table for both dinner and breakfast. The board was a large and colourful map of the world, although there was clearly something wrong with it. Six continents were each allocated a colour, and each contained several anomalous territories (Asia, for example, held Siberia, Yakutsk, Irkutsk, Afghanistan, China, Middle East and Kamchatka). ‘The sizes and boundaries of the territories are not accurate,’ the rule booklet explained. ‘The territory marked Peru includes, in addition, the country of Bolivia … It should be noted also that Greenland, Baffinland and a section of the Canadian mainland make up the territory marked Greenland.’
A long night of world domination ahead.
Risk! was a hit in many of the provinces it featured, although some countries got bored with its slow progression and speeded up play by amending the rules. In the UK the game was manufactured by Waddington’s, the company that had enjoyed a special relationship with Parker Brothers since 1935, the year the British had licensed the word-play game Lexicon and the Americans had returned the favour by licensing something called Monopoly.
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Designed by the Philadelphian Charles Brace Darrow, Monopoly began life in a modest white box with vaguely educational claims on empire building, but it wasn’t long before it was bringing out the greedy worst in all of us. It also rapidly became the impressionable mind’s proper introduction to urban geography. The game was a smash worldwide, the street names easily localised: out went St Charles Place, Boardwalk and other locations in or near Atlantic City, in came Mayfair, Rue de la Paix, Parco della Vittoria and Wenceslas Square. The board provided a shamelessly corrupt impression of the ease of both rent collection and travel, scrambling true and relative distances in rather the same way as the map of the London Underground. And as for Free Parking, it was clearly made in a simpler universe.
But the Monopoly board also has a secret map history, and it is one that may have transformed lives. In the late 1930s Waddington & Co was making more than playing cards and board games. It was also printing silk maps to fight the war. Air men and women would have them sewn into their jackets or concealed in the heels of their shoes as they flew over Europe: the maps wouldn’t crease, spoil or betray themselves during searches, and they might help to get them home after a parachute mission or capture (the maps were based on world maps printed by Batholomew in Edinburgh and divided into country sheets as required).
The Americans were making similar maps, but it was only at Waddington that its maps and games divisions combined in this unique way. With the approval of the secret British ‘escape and evasion’ unit M19, silk maps were inserted between two pieces of the Monopoly board, the game pieces were adapted to include a compass, real money was shuffled into the playing notes, and the games were sent to European prisoner of war camps by dubious charity organisations such as the Licensed Victuallers Sports Association and the Prisoners’ Leisure Hours Fund (the special access afforded the Red Cross was conditional on an agreement not to assist escape). Not all the games were so modified; the special ones were marked at strategic points on the board, and there must have been a great temptation to place a mark on the Get Out of Jail Free card.*
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Inevitably, Monopoly is now available online, and you may play with people you will never meet from places you will never visit. But computer games with maps have been around since the end of 1961, when a group of young hackers at MIT were trying to find a way to show off the capabilities of a newly arrived machine, the PDP-1 from Digital Equipment Corporation. The word ‘hacker’ meant something else then, more like ‘geek’ today. The students were proud of their new machine’s potential (and with a $120,000 price ticket this was just as well), but they were a little bored with its applications, including an early word processor. So they decided to build a game, something that’s now regarded as the grandfather of all computer shoot’em-ups: Spacewar! (Precisely why so many early names of games had exclamation marks after them is hard to say! Perhaps it has something to do with the esteem in which their creators held them.)
Spacewar! was a simple two-player idea featuring a couple of spaceships trying to blow each other up with missiles. A star added a gravitational pull that threatened to set the spaceships off course, but an early version had something missing – a realistic background that would provide a proper sense of dimension and velocity. So another program called Expensive Planetarium was crashed into the game, a map of the night sky above Massachusetts. The game was copied for other institutional owners of the PDP-1, and the addictive powers of computer gaming were experienced for the first time.
Thereafter almost all screen games required some sort of map for effective play – either a basic backdrop for ‘shooters’ such as Space Invaders and Doom, layouts for multi-level platform games such as Super Mario or Prince of Persia, a broad perimeter plan for simulation games such as The Sims or Farmville, or a cheat-sheet atlas to aid navigation through open-world challenges such as Myst or Skyrim. The maps sometimes come in the box with the game, but more often they are the game, and the cartographical interpretation of the landscape is the ultimate challenge. In this way, maps continue to tell a story in much the same way as they did with Mappae Mundi, and nowhere is this more true than in the mythical and magic world of Dungeons & Dragons.
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D&D is a role-playing game involving Dungeon Masters, elves, wizards and the proud and relentless allegiance of those who play it, and no matter that the rest of the world regards them as one orc short of a moondance. Those whose imaginations were first sparked by the mental maps of Lord of the Rings will have little difficulty understanding the appeal or gameplay (gaining life experience, defeating opponents, mastering skills).
As with Skyrim, real-world abandonment is all, and unlike the tactical model-army war games that share the game’s inspirational credit with fantasy fiction, the liberating pleasures of inhabiting an imaginary character may stretch well beyond the hours spent playing the game with friends (ultimately perhaps into the online avatars of the once-huge Second Life). The basic (pre-computer) D&D game, created in 1974 by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, requires a map for successful gameplay, though it may be little more than an unlabelled grid over which polyhedral dice are rolled and representational game pieces moved.
One Orc short of a moondance: welcome to Flanaess, home of mystery and the names of the creator’s children.
In 1980, the American artist Darlene Pekul designed a 34-by-44-inch multi-sheet map of Flanaess, the easterly part of the Kingdom of Oerik, for the D&D World of Greyhawk campaign. Set on a one-centimetre hex grid, Pekul took Gary Gygax’s original vision and created an entirely workable parallel universe. Regions such as Grand Duchy of Geoff contained the Valley of The Mage, and Oytwood and Hornwood forests, while the Kingdom of Keoland lies between the rivers Javan and Sheldomar, and has a distinctly aristocratic flavour with its many baronies, duchies and earldoms. The names on the map are rarely found within the Times Atlas, and are often anagrams or homophones of Gygax’s children, friends or favourite things: Celene, Flen, Urnst, Linth, Nuthela. But the sea is still blue and the forests still green, and the margin of the map contains a key to the colour-coding and symbols that wouldn’t look too out of place on an OS chart: a red dot for a castle, a red square for a walled town, three bars across a river denoting rapids.
The transition from dining room table to computers was a natural one, with programmers able to eliminate a lot of the game’s more tiresome calculations and in so doing speed up the action. Zork! and Alakabeth: World of Doom were primitive 1970s combinations of role-playing games and treasure hunts, and they relied on punctuation marks and other text graphics rather than the 3-D images we are used to today. But the development was swift, and the black-and-white line drawings in such things as Ultima and Wizardry soon gave way to faster graphics and colour in Tunnels of Doom, the improvements aided by the code-writing possibilities of the first home computers, and the excited exchange of floppy discs in Ziploc bags at video and computer stores.
And so an entire generation of potential television viewers and scale model builders were lost to a more modern and exciting way to spend their time and money. And in this way, with no fanfare and very little resistance, a whole generation of parents were alienated, and (many years before mobile apps on phones) maps stealthily entered the lives of young people in an entirely new way. For what is Skyrim if not a huge, playable imaginary atlas? Would Ptolemy and Eratosthenes not have recognised it as a thing of wonder?
