In Graphs, Maps, and Trees Moretti explains, "you reduce a the texts to a few elements, and abstract them from the narrative flow, and construct a new, artificial object... and with a little luck, these maps will be more than the sum of their parts: they will possess "emerging" qualities, which were not visible at the lower level." (53) For literary texts like Moretti's village stories this is a form breaking exercise, it transforms a story, words, ideas into something visible, and in this visualization a pattern becomes identifiable. The map produced allows a visualization of the world of the stories that must otherwise be imagined by the reader. For movies and games, this visibility is already part of the medium's essential quality. More, for videogames, the map is a frequently employed device for understanding the players location within a textual world. These are rendered in little bubbles in the bottom corner of the screen, found in pause menus, and sometimes integrated into the dieresis of the game as PDA screens or pip-boys. This might be as simple as hi-lighting formal distinctions between these media, but it also might be cause for thinking about narrative arrangement in games relative to DH mapping for literary works.
A Google Image Search of “Controller Mapping” returns a page of schematics.
The ‘map’ is a recurring motif in video gaming’s formal imaginary. We might think of the multiplicity of ways that the term is deployed. Levels are alternatively called maps so that when a new set of levels for a game are released the bundle is called a map-pack. Button functions on a game controller are discussed as controller mapping- a representation of the virtual effects of haptic inputs. The process for pinning details, texture, or images to a 3D Model is called texture-mapping. And most obviously there is the game’s world-map which we might identify in two ways. The representation of the game-world that the player moves through. This is roughly level-map association, a visualized representation of the player’s position relative to the objects in the game. Alternatively we may think of maps for navigation as they appear in games in pause menus, HUDs, and even as separate texts. These are an abstraction of the world that highlights only certain information relevant to play. The Grand Theft Auto series is an example of this.
These are three kinds of maps for GTA 3: the pause menu,
in the HUD, and in the printed game manual.
Pausing the game brings up a world map complete with a legend and a changing set of objectives and location's marked on the map. This is an abstraction of the world that the player moves through but it responds to the players’ location in the game. During regular play a small portion of this map (the area directly around the player) is visible in the lower left corner of the screen; this helps the player locate himself in the level relative to the larger game-world. Finally, printed in the game’s manual is a large fold-out map of the world this functions similarly to the pause menu map, only it’s not interactive.
Unlike the literary maps, that Moretti’s work produces these maps do very little for text analysis. Although the in-game map of GTA 3 resembles, for example, Moretti’s figure “Protagonists of Parisian Novel’s, and objects of their desire,” (55) there is comparatively very little that is transformed by an attention to GTA 3’s map. Perhaps this is because the DH maps that Moretti produces challenge the formal structure of the texts that they analyze where the game map is already so integral to the medium. For players of GTA (or Fallout, Far Cry, Final Fantasy, Etc.) the map doesn’t reveal an element of the narrative world otherwise difficult to visualize, it simply points players to new objectives and streamlines their travel to these points. Many of these games even use the map as a way of excising the experience of distance in the game world- you may select and travel from distant locations in order to arrive more quickly at waypoints. So, unlike the DH map which aims at something transformative, the deployment of game maps seem to work in the opposite direction. They simplify and consolidate the formal experience with the games listed here.
More than illuminating otherwise easy-to-miss structural elements these maps work in the opposite direction. They tell “white lies” as Jason Farman citing Mark Monmonier explains, “The various ways by which maps arrive to users in locative media projects serve either to obscure the sedimentation of historical and cultural forces that constrain how we interact with maps or, conversely, serve to expose those forces as a form of critique.” (89) In either instance, Former would like to suggest that this is a generalization of information in the interest of utility. For games this goes a bit further. They operate not simply as a generalization of the world but in many respects build into this representation operational functions that facilitate the players’ movement through the text. More than simply telling players how to get to an area, it tells them which areas are priorities, using the map in GTA or Fallout players can transport themselves instantly to these locations. What’s crucial about these functions is that they direct the players’ attention – inward and towards key locations. This discourages play that finds the user bumping up against the edges of the game world or wandering into areas where the action isn’t. It’s here also that the alignment between these functional maps and texture mapping and controller mapping seem most complete. The texture map obscures the rough 3D model beneath the games visual appearance. Likewise, the controller map streamlines an interface. Configuring inputs in such a way that they become invisible to the player once they are familiar allows for a haptic experience at the interface that feels natural. Ideally the controller fades but even failing this, a controller hides the computational processes that transform physical inputs to digital action.
The question that this begs is whether this kind of mapping can be disrupted and if this level of disruption might allow for something transformative in the sense of Moretti’s DH maps. One instance we might consider is failed texture mapping. The image below is the result of a missing texture in the game Team Fortress 2, the purple checkerboard is the grid onto which the texture ought to be placed and in its absence it is exposed to the player.
A Missing Texture in Team Fortress 2
This example is more the work of a glitch than a map deployed as its intended. However, the result is that the undergirding structure of the game becomes visible. The grid and the 3D wireframe peeks through in the absence of the texture. It’s a failure of code, or more precisely missing assets, and its effect is to direct the player’s attention away from the seamlessness of the game’s world. This is a crack in the map’s totality but the critique that it enables is less a matter of production than Moretti’s maps, which facilitate new critical visualizations.
A hopeful, proof of concept for games and critical mapping might be the story flowcharts produced by fans for visual novels. These games adopt a stripped-down ludic structure where players make a series of decisions to advance the story, rather than taking control over an avatar or units. There is no world map for players of these games. Rather they unfold as a series of comic book panels with certain choices opening certain paths and closing others. The flowchart then allows players to spatialize and visualize choices that are otherwise rendered invisible by the game code. Unlike glitching which peals back the seamless exterior of TF2, this flowchart lifts the curtain on the narrative arrangement of this game. It transforms a text which resists a visual map (there is no-world map for this game) into one that makes the game easily navigable. Where this does align with the TF2 Glitch or Moretti’s maps is in its exposure of code and form. The narrative is laid bare here but only by work of identifying where decisions branch into different directions. This revelation re-values the choices offered to the player in game. It demonstrates that some choices are empty while others are of vital importance to the story that the player reads.
A Flowchart for Katawa Shoujo
This kind of critical analysis allows us to turn back towards literary work. Particularly, around Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) books. KS and most visual novels adopt this CYOA format and both are made accessible by this type of visualization. Samizdat Drafting Co.’s visual analysis of these books demonstrates this compatibility.
Samizdat Drafting Co.’s Story Map for The Cave of Time by Edward Packard
Here we begin to see a formal/structural congruence between the visual novel and the CYOA book. In both instances the map disrupts the code of the text by making its branching paths totally visual. In this respect perhaps it is possible to imagine mapping in games not simply as a tool for producing seamlessness but also for pealing at these seems.
Farman, Jason. "Map Interfaces and the Production of Locative Media Space." Locative Media. Ed. Rowan Wilken and Gerard Goggin. (New York: Routledge, 2015)
Moretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, Trees. (London: Verso, 2005)
Samizdat Drafting Co., "COYA," http://samizdat.cc/cyoa/#/_
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