Three Video Game Maps

05/05/21 • 44 min

urhere

Links

Zelda, Breath of the Wild [2:08]

Ori and the Will of the Wisps [15:53]

Animal Crossing [28:22]

Zelda, Breath of the Wild

One of the first things you notice about this game map is that it has a lot of green hues and resembles camouflage, giving you the immediate sense that this will be a nature-based type of game. Multitudinous contour lines further this outdoorsy feeling but also provide much needed assistance to the gamer, since in this game you need them, just as you would in real life, to determine how easy or how difficult navigation will be in certain areas. An action-adventure game that was released in 2017, this game is still really popular today. It’s an open-world type of game, which means you discover things as you go and at your own pace, making the map an important piece of the gaming experience. Critics called this a “landmark open world design,” which is literally based off the map. The character you play, Link, doesn’t know who he is. He needs to learn who he is as he explores and also, by the way, has to try and save the world as well.

Interesting features on the game map include a labyrinth and volcano, both easily understood from the symbology and coloration. Dark green is used for the land at sea level and a lighter green is used for the tops of the hills and mountainous regions. This kind of gradual color scheme that corresponds to the elevation contours is called hypsometric tinting: a technique whereby you aid the map reader’s understanding of the isolines (in this case the isolines are specifically contour lines) by tinting within the bands or groups of bands with a graduated color scheme. This visual reinforcement helps when you are zoomed out and, given the level of detail on the map, it helps a lot with context. You see this with the water coloration as well, which is called bathymetric tinting. In the major digital basemaps of today you’ll see that bridges usually have some sort of special treatment, whether it is a darker casing or a darker line color, and that is just what we’re seeing here: a very dark green on the bridges whereas the main road is in a lighter green. They are also shown with posts and other structural features that help you understand what they are.

Building outlines and other built structures are also shown when you zoom quite a bit in, giving the player clues as to where towns or cities are for talking with other characters and making purchases. By contrast, forested areas are fluffy puffs of polygons denoting overlapping tree canopies. These are essentially merged polygons and were probably intentional in that the generalization probably helps to keep performance optimal by lessening the amount of data and thereby load time.

Ori and the Will of the Wisps

This is a platform adventure game, not an open-world game, and was very well received, especially for its visual quality. It emphasizes exploration. There are cartographer characters in this game! As a player, you get maps from these cartographers, which, while you can explore the game without a map, help you to have a reference point for where you’ve been. Players also don’t know certain places exist without the maps and, as in real life, they help you see what areas could be dangerous. Looking at the tunnels closely you see they are very detailed and have a certain vibrancy. The color of each tunnel in general aligns with the played-world, it corresponds with the color hues.

The whole aesthetic of the glowy, white, wispy character and the vibrancy of the colors against a dark background reminds us of Firefly Mapping, where you take a point based dataset and create glowy dots that appear on top of a dark, maybe black, background. These subtle design choices with the soft glows are really special as the glowing serves to highlight things like when a symbol is selected. We also see a line that shows you where Ori moved and jumped, basically a path that shows where you just were. This is a useful animation technique for mapping to show where things have been. Remember the Harry Potter map with the footprints that we discussed in Three Pop Culture Maps? This is a similar concept. You can see this type of animation in today’s journalism maps, such as animations of flight paths that trail and slowly dissipate.

Animal Crossing

These are some very square islands! The maps for this non-story-based game are very simple and cartoonish, both aesthetics mirroring the simplicity and cartoon nature of a game where you interact with other cute villagers, make some trades, and socialize. This game really took off during the pandemic as it gave people a ...

Links

Zelda, Breath of the Wild [2:08]

Ori and the Will of the Wisps [15:53]

Animal Crossing [28:22]

Zelda, Breath of the Wild

Ori and the Will of the Wisps

Animal Crossing

Previous Episode

Three Natural Resources Maps

Links

Map of the Rivers Huallaga, Ucayali & Amazon [1:53]

View of the Panamint Range Mountains, mines, mills and town site [14:30]

The Melting of Antarctica [31:20]

Map of the Rivers Huallaga, Ucayali & Amazon

This is a very wide map due to the shape and length of the river system, leaving the rest of this composition sparsely designed, excluding the graticule, and therefore quite unique. Hernon William Lewis, the main cartographer for this map published in 1851, was in the U.S. Navy and was an explorer, exploring “uncharted territory” of the Amazon. We note that the phrase “uncharted territory” is very specific to where the cartographer is from and here what it means is that it was yet to be explored by the United States.

The mountains here are another example of caterpillar mountain relief styling, a term brought up in a previous episode, and which we now assume is part of the permanent lexicon of the cartographic elite. We also see a nice technique whereby dotted lines allude to the continuance of the tributaries onward upstream even though their entireties are not drawn. Some figure-ground issues could affect the reader as there aren’t a lot of visual cues such as water ripples, trees, or other symbols to cue the land versus the water, though there is a thickness to the upper-bank of the river that helps.

In the literal big-picture, this is a river line that travels from one side of South America to the other, starting from the Amazon Basin in the east and going to Lima, Peru in the west. It’s akin to a map with a single road where all the places along it help you travel on that road but not deviate from it, such as the Itinerary from London to Beauvais, discussed in the Three Tourist Maps episode. Note that to accommodate the span of this river system, the overall map is made from 30 different pieces of paper that are mounted on a cloth.

View of the Panamint Range Mountains, mines, mills and town site

This is a very unique informational/poster layout because we see the mountain range from a front-view and then we also see a top-down map view of the area at the bottom (though this characterization is debated at the end of this section). Panamint was a short-lived town and is now a bonafide ghost town. In fact, it was a town for only a couple of years before the whole place flooded.

The texture for the salt marsh patterning is really amazing and ties in with work that cartographers do today since modern vector maps often employ repeating patterns for various landcover types. There is realism shown in the mountains as well as that salt marsh.

This map is from 1875 and may be a lithograph, but hark! there’s the caterpillar hashing again! There’s a level of depth, color and texture variance that is smoother than in copper plate and woodblock prints as can easily be seen in the various sharp line-stops and the detailed smoke/steam emanating from the train. Just as today when we see differences in cartography due to what we can do with newer software, the “software” of that day had changed to lithography, and we see the changes reflected in these stylistic abilities that they were able to achieve here. Lithography generally employed the use of hydrophobic dyes applied to limestone to achieve this greater mastery of the straight-edged line among other advancements.

Panamint, California, was a silver and copper mining town, with the mines indicated with numbers on the top half of the map. As the story goes, silver was discovered by three bandits who were hiding in a cave here and subsequently laid claim to it. Senators Stewart and Jones bought the claim from them and further developed the mines, though it did not yield as much riches as some of the more famous mines of this era. A couple of years later? The town of about 2,000 was washed out in a flood. Does anyone else feel as we do that this story should be turned into a movie?

The Melting of Antarctica

This beautiful, contemporary, infographic-type map from National Geographic is primarily blue and white. Cynthia Brewer, in one of her cartography books, says that people really respond positively to blue (while not liking yellow too much) and this blue is indeed what lends beauty to this map. The ice shelves in their purplish color a...

Next Episode

Three Food Maps

Links

This Porcineograph [1:45]

Farmers Markets: Accessible to All? From Food: An Atlas [22:40]

Les Grands Vins de Bourgogne [35:20]

This Porcineograph

This is a weird one. As a fan of weird art, Vanessa’s first impression was that this map is pretty cool, weird, and creepy, and that it would go well in an Orwelian universe. This map is the United States, but as a pig. Yes, that’s right. The word “gehography,” possibly the best geographic pun ever, is used in the sub-title text and gives a sense of the humor that went into it. Aesthetically, we’re looking at a lithograph and this is shown by the level of detail and the way that different textures and colors stop in clear and straight lines. It was commissioned by an eccentric entrepreneur who had built a successful sewing machine company and then poured his money into a pig farm, the opening of which was being announced by way of this map poster. This map was made to announce the opening of his pig farm. This guy had a cause, which was to eradicate foodborne illnesses to make the food market of the 19th century safer with good animal husbandry. To kick things off he made 2,500 copies of this map for a party. It was a “good cheer souvenir,” as it calls itself.

This is a relatively accurate depiction of the United States except where it isn’t. For example, Florida is the front right leg of the pig, which seems to fit pretty well but the tail isn’t part of the country. What should we call maps that look like animals, of which this is just one of many others that could be placed in this genre? On twitter, Robert St. John suggested that they should be called mapaphores, which seems quite fitting.

Other highlights on this map include a hog pouring itself a drink, a reference to brain sauce, a dodo look-alike bird, and a pig eating shrimp. Forming the frame of the map is a ribbon for each state, a pig, and a reference to the state’s favorite pork dish. Colorado’s is something called roast chines, a kind of stuffed bacon apparently and an old dish imported from England. But returning to the main map, you see the utilization of Canada as a supporting feature that creates parts of the hog shape, such as parts of Canada represented as tufts of hair, but there are also parts of Canada that are intentionally maintained in their true geographic shape. The same goes for Mexico.

The state colors have a different color in each such that, for the most part, each state has a color that makes it look visually separated from its nearest neighbors. The Four Color Theorem, which states that a planar map of polygons only needs four colors such that no adjacent polygon has the same color, is an obvious cartographic factoid to bring up in relation to this. Upon closer scrutiny, however, we notice that the map maker has cleverly altered the color scheme to suit the purpose where color was needed to convey the idea of the country as a pig, such as Wisconsin and Michigan both being shades of red where they are supposed to form part of the pig’s ear. A discussion of mitten-shaped states ensues.

Farmers Markets: Accessible to All?

A free book called Food: An Atlas was put together by an organization called Guerrilla Cartography. This map, by Margaret Raimann, is one of the maps in the book. It’s on an important food topic in that it shows farmers’ market accessibility for those who are on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), essentially showing us the proportion of farmer’s markets that accept SNAP in each metropolitan area of the U.S. It shows that there is a large disparity across the country. The circles that are used to show this were really effective in terms of instantaneous understanding of the data even for people who have never seen this kind of data presentation. The labels that curve along the circles of the metro areas are super unique, meaningful, and helpful. The curvy feel on the labels carries over throughout the map and the marginalia and lends to a cohesive look.

The grayscale basemap is notable for its ability to be pulled backward in the visual hierarchy. Pushing yourself cartographically by making grayscale maps is a good exercise. Daniel Huffman, in fact, hosted a monochrome mapping competition a couple of years ago, and its winners are good to look at for inspiration. Speaking of circles though, a lot of cartographic software makes it easy to create proportional circle symbols out of your data to show that there’s more here and less there but we caution that circle size can be difficult for the human eye to differentiate (Meihoefer, The Utility of the Circle as an Effective Cartographic Symbol, 1969). Howev...