Cartographic Cartwheels
In one of his Designers Notebook articles on Gamasutra, Cartographic Cartwheels, Ernest Adams talks about how cartography/mapmaking has some useful things game designers/developers could learn. He mentions important ideas about maps, such as they should have a specific purpose/audience, and they needn't be accurate in scale or space as long as they communicate symbolic relationships, and cites the London Underground Map as one of the best examples "where a map is easier to read if it expresses symblic relationships rather than physical ones".
Descent is given as an example of a game in which (he thinks) the map is difficult to understand, whereas Adams believes games like Interstate '76 and text adventure games, while not having overly detailed maps, give the player a better idea of where they are and what direction they're facing, and thus where they can/have to go: "The maps in Interstate '76, for example, looked literally like pencil scribblings on the back of a paper sack, but they were enough to get you oriented and explain the mission", and "the maps made by text adventure gamers [...] were usually boxes with names of rooms inside them, plus lines from room to room, indicating which direction you go from one room to reach another. (This is called a directed graph by mathematicians.) The size of the boxes and the lengths of the lines were completely irrelevant, as long as the relationships were accurately conveyed".
Adams recommends the series of books about graphic design by Edward Tufte: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information and Visual Explanations, about designing graphics to communicate, respectively, numbers, nouns and verbs. Adams illustrates Tufte's "data-ink" idea with an example table he'd presented at a Computer Game Developers' Conference, and then transforms it from what he says Tufte would call a "data prison" into a table that is much clearer and more concise. He does this by erasing grid lines, and replacing "Y" with "X" and using whitespace instead of "N", resulting in a better "data-ink" to "non-data-ink" ratio. Adams then suggests that the warning label on cigarette packets could be improved, and shows an example.
He goes on to explain two problems he sees with the map in Descent: "Looking back on Descent, I think it made two major cartographic mistakes. First, when you popped up the map, it always appeared with you oriented the right way up, and the world oriented with respect to you. Since the orientation of the world changed every time you opened the map, the rooms were very hard to identify - they all look different when slanted at odd angles. One of the first things we learn about maps as children is that north is at the top, regardless of what direction you personally are facing. Descent's maps would have been much more usable if they had kept a standard orientation and showed which way you were facing. Secondly, all the rooms were displayed as white wireframes, making very little use of the PC's capacity to display color. As a result, they often looked alike, especially long, narrow corridors. On the computer monitor, unlike on paper, color costs you nothing and contributes greatly to readability. Nobody would buy a black-and-white globe; why should you have to put up with a black-and-white map? Obviously you don't want a tacky, eye-popping mishmash, but a sensibly-chosen palette".
His final statement, that a map is "vital part of the user interface, and deserves just as much design attention as any other part" made me think that perhaps these other parts aren't given as much design attention, in terms of "data-ink" and other visualisation concepts, as they could be.
Descent is given as an example of a game in which (he thinks) the map is difficult to understand, whereas Adams believes games like Interstate '76 and text adventure games, while not having overly detailed maps, give the player a better idea of where they are and what direction they're facing, and thus where they can/have to go: "The maps in Interstate '76, for example, looked literally like pencil scribblings on the back of a paper sack, but they were enough to get you oriented and explain the mission", and "the maps made by text adventure gamers [...] were usually boxes with names of rooms inside them, plus lines from room to room, indicating which direction you go from one room to reach another. (This is called a directed graph by mathematicians.) The size of the boxes and the lengths of the lines were completely irrelevant, as long as the relationships were accurately conveyed".
Adams recommends the series of books about graphic design by Edward Tufte: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information and Visual Explanations, about designing graphics to communicate, respectively, numbers, nouns and verbs. Adams illustrates Tufte's "data-ink" idea with an example table he'd presented at a Computer Game Developers' Conference, and then transforms it from what he says Tufte would call a "data prison" into a table that is much clearer and more concise. He does this by erasing grid lines, and replacing "Y" with "X" and using whitespace instead of "N", resulting in a better "data-ink" to "non-data-ink" ratio. Adams then suggests that the warning label on cigarette packets could be improved, and shows an example.
He goes on to explain two problems he sees with the map in Descent: "Looking back on Descent, I think it made two major cartographic mistakes. First, when you popped up the map, it always appeared with you oriented the right way up, and the world oriented with respect to you. Since the orientation of the world changed every time you opened the map, the rooms were very hard to identify - they all look different when slanted at odd angles. One of the first things we learn about maps as children is that north is at the top, regardless of what direction you personally are facing. Descent's maps would have been much more usable if they had kept a standard orientation and showed which way you were facing. Secondly, all the rooms were displayed as white wireframes, making very little use of the PC's capacity to display color. As a result, they often looked alike, especially long, narrow corridors. On the computer monitor, unlike on paper, color costs you nothing and contributes greatly to readability. Nobody would buy a black-and-white globe; why should you have to put up with a black-and-white map? Obviously you don't want a tacky, eye-popping mishmash, but a sensibly-chosen palette".
His final statement, that a map is "vital part of the user interface, and deserves just as much design attention as any other part" made me think that perhaps these other parts aren't given as much design attention, in terms of "data-ink" and other visualisation concepts, as they could be.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home