"the Map Is The Territory": The Game World As Heads-up Display

“THE M AP I S TH E TERRI TORY” The Game World as Heads-Up Display

Sonny Sidhu Fall 2008

“The Map is the Territory”: The Game World as Heads-Up Display

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‘THE MAP IS THE TERRITORY’ The Game World as Heads-Up Display Sonny Sidhu Swarthmore College Film and Media Studies 086: Theory and History of Video Games Professor Bob Rehak Fall 2008 The heads-up display, or HUD, is gamingʼs most recognizable idiom, and in many ways the video game experience is inextricably linked with the visual regime of the HUD. In gamer culture, many games and gametypes are inextricably linked with their HUD iconography, like the iconic row of hearts in the Legend of Zelda series or the generic dual health bars associated with fighting games. In wider visual culture, the language of the HUD has become a common shorthand for the particular condition of video game avatar subjectivity, and is commonly employed whenever ʻreal lifeʼ is meant to be understood as being ʻlike a video gameʼ by an audience comprised of gamers and non-gamers alike. How did the HUD become so central to the video game medium, in the cultural imagination and in fact? Is the HUD truly necessary to a playerʼs enjoyment of and success within a game environment? If so, are current strategies of HUD representation the most effective ones available in a medium that increasingly strives for maximum immersive effect in single-player narrative gameplay? Any exploration of the role of the HUD in video game design must begin with an acknowledgment of the fact that games are a primarily visual and auditory medium. In any game, vital data regarding the state of the game environment or avatar must be made visually or audibly intelligible to the player, or it will effectively be inaccessible to her. In most cases, this limitation mandates the use of a HUD to place information within the visual frame—such as score, time elapsed or remaining, location relative to objective, health, ammunition count, inventory, etc.— that would otherwise not be consistently, visually or audibly apparent and accessible to the player. Historically, this strategy of representation was necessitated by the limitations of game graphics and display technologies, and the resultant need to clearly visually signify details otherwise too subtle to be rendered by a gameʼs graphics engine. But the use of a HUD in video game design is not solely a concession to the limitations of game graphics; rather, it also represents a game designerʼs understanding that entering even the most graphically lush game world through the most sophisticated television set necessarily entails a certain compromise in sensory, spatial, and situational awareness that must be compensated for either visually or audibly in order for the environment to be understandable to the player. Indeed, some gametypes are impossible to imagine without some form of robust HUD or menu mechanism, including realtime strategy games, combat-based role-playing games, and sports games. But the advent of high-definition display standards and the ever-increasing sophistication of game graphics opens the door for a wholesale reconsideration of the role of the HUD in gametypes not fundamentally dependent on the playerʼs access to visual representations of abstract data—particularly narrative gametypes such as single-player action games, adventure games, and first-person shooters.

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Indeed, recent years have seen the emergence and growth of a body of successful console games that engage in an active critical rethinking of the HUDʼs place in narrative single-player games. For example, in the Halo series the traditional HUD fixture of the ammunition counter is integrated into certain gun models within the game itself. In Metroid: Prime and its sequels, the in-game HUD is represented diegetically as the avatarʼs own in-helmet HUD, complete with simulated atmospheric effects, light glare, and avatar facial reflection. In Assassinʼs Creed, the in-game HUD is represented diegetically as the neural interface layer of the Animus, a Matrixlike subjectivity-displacing time-travel simulator through which the avatar is transported into the Middle Ages. In the sci-fi survival horror game Dead Space, the in-game HUD is represented diegetically as a holographic projection emanating from a device within the avatarʼs spacesuit. The representative strategies employed by each of these games have been widely hailed by game critics and theorists for their uniquely immersive effects. To G4 commentator John Manalang, the recent trend for diminished or diegetically immersed HUDs in game design is long overdue, and represents the natural next step in an evolutionary trajectory of gaming that has seen the increasing sophistication of game graphics dovetail with an increasing emphasis on immersive strategies of subjective displacement in narrative gameplay. Manalang wonders, “Game graphics and storylines are getting closer and closer to ʻreal life,ʼ so why do we accept the contrivance of the HUD? Why do we accept that the character we're playing instantly knows exactly how many gunshots he can suffer before he dies or exactly how far he has to walk to his destination?” Manalangʼs incredulity reflects a growing consensus, among game critics, that the traditional video game HUD represents an obstacle to maximum player immersion in a game environment. Greg Wilson, a critic and former game designer, describes the HUD in the essay “Off With Their HUDs!” as “an accepted shorthand, a direct pipeline from the developer to the end-user.” In Wilsonʼs formulation, the HUD is gamingʼs broken fourth wall, through which the player is able to step outside the subjectivity of her avatar and access a privileged plane of information, constructed within but transmitted outside the game world, which flows directly from developer to player. While HUD-enabled objective mastery of game worlds is, admittedly, often essential to success within them, the HUD nevertheless serves as a constant visual reminder of the video game mediumʼs hypermediated artificiality. While several recent games attack and erase these visual reminders of artificiality through the use of a diminished or diegetically immersed HUD, very few attempt to address the more fundamental artificiality inherent in the introduction of omniscient game-world knowledge to an avatar-based, subjectively grounded game. Games such as Dead Space, Metroid: Prime, and Assassinʼs Creed have not genuinely done away with the HUD. Rather, they have merely disguised it, as such, by relocating it to fit within the subjectivity of an avatar whose awareness of the game world, according to the gameʼs convenient narrative, is technologically enhanced to include HUD-like functions. These visual and narrative strategies may effectively sweep some of the obvious wreckage of gamingʼs broken fourth wall out of sight, but they make no attempt to repair it; player omniscience in relation to the game world is as crucial to success in a game with a diegetic HUD as in any other. The persistence of an omniscient HUD mechanic—even in games such as Metroid: Prime, Dead Space, and Assassinʼs Creed, which actively criticize the outward artificiality of traditional HUD representations—suggests that the HUD is in some sense an inescapable necessity in the construction of player awareness of a game world. It seems, still, that the only way to mitigate the compromises in awareness and presence inherent in the exploration of a large and three-dimensional virtual world through a small and two-dimensional frame is through the introduction of visual and auditory cues representative of abstract or offscreen information—traditionally speaking, a HUD. Indeed, according to the critic Marque Corn-

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blatt, the HUD is so central to the construction of awareness and purpose within a video game environment that it is akin in spiritual function to the mandala, a form of concentric diagram that in Buddhism and Hinduism stands as a visual metaphor and guide for the human journey towards enlightenment. In “Video Game HUD as Spiritual Mandala,” Cornblatt writes: “There is an interesting parallel between the visual language of HUDs and mandalas. Even though they come from radically different sources, there is a similarity in the use of icons and signifiers to represent elements of value or importance. I canʼt help but take the analogy one step further and imbue the HUD with the kind of spiritual relevance and guidance within the game that the mandala has in reality… In some small way, as games become increasingly relevant in our lives, the language of the HUD reflects this significance, and serves as a visual reminder of the in-game experiences and values of the player.”

Cornblatt notes that his conception of the video game HUD as a map or mandala for progress within the game immediately challenges the concept that “the map is not the territory.” This dictum, coined by the scientist and philosopher Alfred Korzybski, holds that an abstraction derived from a thing is not the thing itself. According to Korzybski, individuals and societies often limit their own understanding of things by failing to distinguish their subjective perspectives (“the map”) from objective reality (“the territory”). Cornblatt notes that Korzybskiʼs dictum resonates differently “in todayʼs mediascape, in which we visit countless digital territories, reference maps that signify maps, and have deeply fulfilling personal experiences in virtual space.” He muses: “Are there any original territories left, or has literally everything become a signifier for something else, an infinite loop of maps leading to other maps eventually leading back to the first—but not necessarily the original—map?” Cornblatt is hardly the first critic to note the potential for infinite regress inherent in any serious challenge to Korzybskiʼs famous dictum that “the map is not the territory.” Jorge Luis Borges, whose short story “On Exactitude in Science” concerns the creation, in an empire obsessed with cartography, of a map as large as the empire itself, turns to the question of infinite regress in the map-as-territory in “Partial Enchantments of the Quixote”: The inventions of philosophy are no less fantastic than those of art. In the first volume of The World and the Individual (1899) Josiah Royce has formulated the following one: ʻLet us suppose, if you please, that a portion of the surface of England is very perfectly leveled and smoothed, and is then devoted to the production of our precise map of England… But now suppose that this resemblance is to be made absolutely exact, in the same sense previously defined. A map of England, contained within England, is to represent, down to the minutest detail, every contour and marking, natural or artificial, that occurs upon the surface of England… For the map, in order to be complete, according to the rule given, will have to contain, as a part of itself, a representation of its own contour and contents. In order that this representation should be constructed, the representation itself will have to contain once more, as a part of itself, a representation of its own contour and contents; and this representation, in order to be exact, will have once more to contain an image of itself, and so on without limit.ʼ Why does it make us uneasy to know that the map is within the map and the thousand and one nights are within the book of A Thousand and One Nights? Why does it disquiet us to know that Don Quixote is a reader of the Quixote, and Hamlet is a spectator of Hamlet? I believe I have found

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the answer: those inversions suggest that if the characters in a story can be readers or spectators, then we, their readers or spectators, can be fictions (44-45).

For Borges, the possibility of a map in fact being the territory disturbingly suggests the possibility that “the characters in a story can be readers or spectators,” and “we, their readers or spectators, can be fictions.” This inversion should not, however, be disturbing to game designers because it is, after all, the ultimate aim of immersive game design—the final, perfect merging of player and avatar subjectivity. If we take, as Cornblatt does, the video game HUD to be a map representing the territory that is the game world itself, then perhaps the metaphor of map-asterritory is worth exploring as a potential strategy for subjective displacement through immersive game design. A recent and remarkably immersive example of map-as-territory, or rather, game-world-as- HUD game design is the ʻfirst-person runnerʼ Mirrorʼs Edge, developed by DICE and published by Electronic Arts in late 2008. In Mirrorʼs Edge, the player inhabits the role of Faith, a parkour expert who facilitates the private communication of individuals in an Orwellian surveillance state by literally running messages from rooftop to rooftop across a nameless and spotless futuristic city. The key to successful gameplay is the building of momentum through on-the-fly choices of the most obstacle-free route through any given area. Though there is a rudimentary combat mechanic in place, the game emphasizes evasion over confrontation, and primarily rewards players who exhibit an ability to analyze and navigate complex and unfamiliar three-dimensional spaces at a sprinterʼs pace. Surprisingly, for a game so contingent on the playerʼs knowledge and mastery of the game environment, Mirrorʼs Edge has no traditional HUD, apart from a tiny, optional aiming reticule in the center of the screen. Instead, the game employs a strategy of information-visualization that DICE calls “Runner Vision,” in which useful objects, entrances, and exits are highlighted in red so that they stand out from the rest of the (predominantly flat white) game world, announcing their importance to the player through their self-evident visual qualities. In essence, DICE has mapped the gameʼs HUD over its entire field of play, such that important locations are designated not by objective icons on a minimap but by their consequential appearance in relation to other features of the gameʼs landscape. Mirrorʼs Edge is no different from other games in that it requires certain non-visual information about the game environment to be presented visually to the player in order to be playable. What makes Mirrorʼs Edge unique is that this information is not part of a table of gauges, maps, and counters, but rather is part of the particular, subjective visual sense of its protagonist, and thus is contained within the very architecture of the game world itself. The map is the territory in Mirrorʼs Edge, and, just as Borges anticipated, this leads to an inversion in player and avatar subjectivity as the fictional character becomes the spectator and the spectator becomes the fiction. The logic of Mirrorʼs Edge holds that the player and Faith are seeing exactly the same thing at every moment of gameplay. Thus, Faith herself is the player, navigating her environment with the objective mastery of a seasoned and HUD-equipped gamer, and the player is Faith, exploring the game world in her body and viewing it through her detail-oriented eyes. The game elevates this sense of subjective unity through its convincing (and allegedly nausea-inducing) simulation of Faithʼs proprioception—the human bodyʼs ability to sense the spatial relations of all its parts to one another. As Clive Thompson notes in “Victory in Vomit: The Sickening Secret of Mirrorʼs Edge,” “When you run, you see your hands pumping up and down in front of you. When you jump, your feet briefly jut up into eyeshot—precisely as they do when you're vaulting over a hurdle in real life. And when you tuck down into a somersault, you're looking at your thighs as the world spins around you… I've never played a game that conveyed so beautifully

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the athletically kinetic joys of sprinting — of jetting down alleyways, racing along rooftops and taking corners like an Olympian. It's an interesting lesson of game physics: When you feel like you're truly inside your character, speed suddenly means something.” The gameʼs locking of the playerʼs viewpoint to Faithʼs ocular reality, by reinforcing the cross-identification of player and avatar, simultaneously amplifies the visceral thrill of the fast-paced gameplay, and justifies the use of the subjective trope of “Runner Vision” as a strategy of visual representation for nonvisual information within the game. The video game HUD has proved central to the identity of the video game medium and the experience of gameplay because it serves as a map to a world that can often be disorienting and bewildering to the human player. Idealist philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries reflected that the perfect map would be one which captured every last feature of the territory it represented in absolute detail. Unfortunately, such a map would be as large as the territory it represented, and would thus be useless as a visual metaphor for the space. However, what is impossible to imagine in real life is often simple to realize in the artificially constructed world of video games, and Mirrorʼs Edge shows that a map as large as the territory it depicts can be more useful than ridiculous in a medium already constrained by the limits of three- dimensional spatial awareness within a flat televisual frame. The implications of the map that is the territory and thus includes itself within its own regime of representation may be disturbing in the literary context of a theatregoing Hamlet and a Don Quixote who enjoys Cervantes, but in the context of video game players yearning to be one with their avatars, the slightest possibility of such subjective fluidity is cause for great hope.

Bibliography Borges, Jorge Luis. "Partial Enchantments of the Quixote." Other Inquisitions, 1937-1952. Transl. Ruth L.C. Simms. University of Texas Press, 1964. Cornblatt, Marque. “Video Game HUD as Spiritual Mandala.” The Media Sapien. 13 Sep 2008. 4 Dec 2008. . Manalang, John. “The Death of the HUD?” The Feed. 13 Sep 2008. G4.com. 4 Dec 2008. . Thompson, Clive. “Victory in Vomit: The Sickening Secret of Mirrorʼs Edge.” Games Without Frontiers. 16 Nov 2008. Wired.com. 4 Dec 2008. . Wilson, Greg. “Off With Their HUDs!: Rethinking the Heads-Up Display in Console Game Design.” Gamasutra. 3 Feb 2006. 4 Dec 2008. .

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