The Critical GeoWiki Experiment: Inscribing the Deeds of a Hero

Amanda Phillips

17 March 2008

    Navigable virtual space, foregrounded by Lev Manovich as one hallmark of the era of computerized society, is a primary component of many genres of digital games.  Long before the widespread application of three-dimensional gaming environments that mimic vision and movement in the unplugged world, sidescrolling platformers like Super Mario Brothers and adventure epics like The Legend of Zelda introduced gamers to the unique challenges of navigating spaces that were very much different from their own.  Indeed, navigation itself – getting from one place to the next – remains something of a universal ludic goal in games from platformers to MMORPGs, with the keys and special equipment granting access to new spaces guarded by vicious bosses and puzzles alike.  Unfortunately, maps are not always included.

    For games that rely on treasure hunting and other tropes of the hero’s quest, however, maps simply come with the territory, acting at once as tools for completing tasks as well as records of past travels.  Eventually, more thematically sophisticated games incorporate maps and mapping into their larger aesthetic framework, and in some cases, the maps even become the territory.  The early games in the Legend of Zelda series, for example, render gamespace from a top-down perspective, as if the gamer were playing directly on a map of Hyrule.  

    In recognition of the importance of maps, mapping, and space to digital gaming, The Critical GeoWiki Experiment seeks to foreground territory as a tool for analyzing a game.  Using assembled images of the Hyrule overworld from The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, the project aims to inscribe the stories and deeds of the hero Link on the territory he travels (Geo) and provide a collaborative forum for academics to mark and analyze patterns that develop on the map of one game (Wiki).  In the spirit of assembling a database of critical commentary on the game, the GeoWiki encourages breadth over depth of entries, with the intent that a mass of simple, interrelated data will foster creative in-depth analysis of the game in the future.  The following are brief explorations into some of the revelations exposed by the unique interface offered by the Critical GeoWiki.

The Map and Its Territory

    The project's mapping engine, WorldKit, can create an intuitive mapping interface using any image as the basis for the map, which is especially useful for studying virtual worlds whose territory is not documented through normal mapping channels.  The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past Critical GeoWiki uses a large image of the overworld assembled by Ian Albert from cartridge ROM data and high-resolution game screenshots, a frozen instance of the game world that preserves all character and environment sprites (except the gamer's avatar Link) in their original positions on the map.  Because of the top-down rendering of space in A Link to the Past, the resultant “map” of screenshots is more akin to satellite imagery of a territory, which offers a similar point of view.

    Beginning at the level of the assembled map, the GeoWiki already offers analytical advantages over a normal console interface.  While A Link to the Past does offer an overworld map to view in-game, this map is an abstracted representation of the land of Hyrule and does not capture the reality of the landscape like Albert's overworld assemblage.  In fact, if nothing else, the tension between these two maps demonstrates just how misleading a term like “reality of the landscape” is in the context of a fictional world stitched together under such conflicting pressures as data storage and hardware limitations, artistic vision, and narrative and ludic requirements.

    Albert's map, while composed of images presented to the gamer during play, can hardly represent the reality of the landscape as assembled in her imagination, which is perhaps better captured by the abstracted overworld map provided in-game.  Inspecting the GeoWiki reveals a number of geographical glitches that cannot exist in a coherent territory: buildings are cut off, rivers don't match up, and textures crash into each other at the borders of land constructed with the gamers-eye view in mind.  Some entire areas, such as the Lost Woods (upper left corner) and Death Mountain (top middle), appear to be superimposed on the rest of the territory entirely.  These glitches reveal from a distance just how rigidly rectangular the logic of a game's map design can be, as well as just how easily it can be masked from the gamer.

    Like other games of the same genre and historical period, A Link to the Past renders the environment as a grid of square tiles, each with its own graphical design depending on type of terrain: one picture for soil, one for water, one for grass, and so on, laid down according to the plan of the designers to make a highly efficient yet aesthetically pleasing game world.  A Link to the Past further groups the tiles into two larger categories: the scrolling screen of the gamer's field of vision, and the much larger territory square, the borders of which are marked by the inconsistent geography.  The territory squares do not scroll continuously like the field of vision, but remain fixed until the gamer crosses a border, at which point the adjacent territory square shifts into place.

    With this hierarchy of tiles in mind, it is easy to understand just how the glitchy terrain of Hyrule can remain hidden from the gamer.  Since the borders of the territory squares remain fixed until crossed, the failure of adjacent squares to match up only matters where the gamer can see the shift occur.  With such a limited field of vision, however, controlling what the gamer can see is quite simple.  A closer inspection of the regions of inconsistency confirms that the paths available to the gamer appear to be sculpted in such a way that glitchy borders are not in view at the moment of crossing and, indeed, do not come into view until long after the crossing is made.  The Lost Woods and Death Mountain regions of the map also mask their borders from the gamer, though in slightly different ways from the rest of the overworld: a transitional animation triggers the crossing in and out of the Lost Woods, while Death Mountain is separated from the rest of the map by a series of caves.

    The Critical GeoWiki lays out the territory in ways unavailable to the gamer during play, revealing all of these fascinating graphical glitches.  Attempting to resolve the inconsistent territory with the fluid experience of the world has ultimately led back to play time itself and into the design mechanics built into the game to create a coherent game world out of a highly contradictory geography.  There is much more to be said here about game worlds and the pressures that they place on the gamer's suspension of disbelief – immersiveness is after all one of the buzz words of the medium.  Is the gamer leading Link through his actual territory, or is she engaging in a highly metaphorical exercise that is merely representative of the actual journey undertaken?  

The Texty People-Objects of Hyrule

    The Critical GeoWiki makes it possible to plot temporally disparate game events on one static document, allowing a geographically-informed analysis of game events to develop.  For this run of the experiment, mapping textual data in the game was of particular importance.  Even in the latest console generation, the Legend of Zelda series remains a textually rich game world, opting for text instead of voice acting to express character dialogue and narrator commentary.

    Preliminary mapping results indicate that text containing both narrative data and game hints are overwhelmingly tied to character sprites in the game.  Clusters of textual information are mapped onto Kakariko Village and other settlements, such as Sahasrahla's hideout near the Eastern Temple.  Much of the useful text found in dungeons comes from the telepathic tiles that Sahasrahla or Zelda use to communicate with Link.  The hero himself never speaks, but the people around him have a lot to tell him in order to help him on his quest.  While in-game objects like signs and narrator commentary occasionally offer game-critical text, interviewing the townspeople is a more effective way to discover any information that the game might offer in text form about a particular task, secret, or item.  

    For regular gamers, this is something of an obvious conclusion about all of the Legend of Zelda games, which tend to rely on interaction with other characters as a means of transmitting information.  However, in the interest of a growing academic community devoted to studying the formal characteristics of games, demonstrable and quantifiable observations such as those facilitated by the GeoWiki interface will help to document and categorize the features of, for example, particular genres of games.  Some games may have text objects that map to computer terminals in the game world, or to tutorial nodes that have a geographical location in-game but are understood to exist outside of the fictional game world.  Other games might include text objects that, lacking a geographical referent, couldn't be mapped using the system in its current form.

    That the text objects in A Link to the Past could be mapped at all on the GeoWiki implies something rather curious about the villagers and other characters to whom the text is connected: they don't move much, and they don't have that much to say considering how long they spend standing around.  This observation relies partially on knowledge about Albert's mapmaking techniques.  In his own documentation, Albert states that he consulted ROM data ripped from the original game cartridge in order to verify original sprite positions in the game, meaning that all of the non-player sprites in the game, including the villagers of Kakariko, are associated with a starting geographic position.  These “starting positions” indicate that the sprites are mapped to that position on the map when a territory square loads, instead of being free to roam as one would expect a person to do.  If someone moves out of place (for instance, the suspicious women marked on the map), the gamer merely needs to load another territory square and then move back onto the previous one to refresh the square's original state and get the suspicious women out of their houses.

    Most enemy sprites, curiously enough, have a movement pattern that goes into motion when the gamer activates a territory square, but most of the villagers do not.  In actuality, the character sprites in Kakariko could be exchanged for sign sprites and have almost exactly the same impact on the game.  Clearly, there is something narratively or thematically compelling about distributing information, even in textual form, through fictionally sentient entities – a rather controversial statement given the current status of “narrative” in the study of video games.

    Albert has four versions of the Hyrule overworld map: the Intro map, which is in place before Link rescues Zelda for the first time; the Light World 1 map, which is used after Zelda's rescue and before Agahnim's ouster; the Light World 2 map, which is used after the defeat of Agahnim; and the Dark World map, which is used in the parallel dimension of Hyrule.  The differences between these maps are not geographical in the strict sense of the term (except between Light and Dark World versions), but they do showcase the differences in starting positions for character and enemy sprites, which the GeoWiki suggests are geographical in nature.  

    The three Light World maps appear in fixed sequential order, so they may be said to inhabit something of a chronological relationship to one another.  However, this chronology is triggered by significant game events, not time: the rescue of Zelda and the defeat of Agahnim.  In some cases, individual villager comments will change depending on items Link carries or minor tasks that he completes.  Depending on the skill and style of the gamer, however, hours of game time may lapse between these states.  The people of Hyrule, essentially, live in frozen chunks of time advanced by the actions of the gamer, forever repeating the same statements in response to the gamer's inquiries.

    Once again, observations made of A Link to the Past can apply to games executed in the newer console generations.  While villagers in recent games are not quite as stationary or repetitive as those from the 16-bit era, they tend to be much more localized and stagnant than we realize.  There are only so many comments non-player characters are programmed to make, and it only makes sense for them to say certain things under certain conditions.  Out of necessity, then, the stagnant game world is really something like a temporal slice of more traditional narrative, spatialized in the game environment for the gamer to peruse at her leisure – or not at all.

 Distance Gaming

Looking at the environment of the game from a distance has proven quite illuminating. Though the maps lack any image of Link and do not have an especially good way to account for individual gameplay experience, this depersonalized encounter with the game was useful to analyze certain features of the landscape without having to worry about moving through enemy territory or overcoming obstacles. In short, the map gave an opportunity to look at the game without having to worry about movement, period.

    Taking very basic observations gleaned from the GeoWiki, I have come up with some important and perhaps controversial ideas about what the territorial construction of A Link to the Past might mean for video games in general.  As more commentary accumulates on the map, more observations of this type are made possible, and can hopefully foster better discussion of this game in particular and video games as a whole.

A more extensive project that might be well served by the GeoWiki application is a comparison of A Link to the Past with other Legend of Zelda titles; as a series, one of its most common unifying variables is the land of Hyrule itself. There is a lot of debate regarding chronology and even parallel universes in this series, and one of the interesting ways to track the development of these games would be to look at the landscape. Any significant changes in the territory will, of course, mostly be due to technological constraints and game design decisions - but gamers still experience Hyrule as the same Hyrule in all the games, no matter the generation or lay of the land. Maps may help to illuminate this issue further.

Annotated Bibliography