Paths in Tabletop Games

 (this is the second element in the Cognitive Mapping for Tabletop Games series. The other posts are Intro, Landmarks, Nodes, Districts, Edges)

Element 2: PATHS

    In life, and video games, paths are useful for mapping in a few ways, all fairly obvious.

• They are the simplest way to mentally connect two spaces. (Think about the difference between following a highway between New York and Philadelphia, and following the moon and tides to make the same trip.) As a result, a direct path between two places is the fastest, most effective way to add that space to travelers' Cognitive Maps. 

• Also, paths are usually labeled (or distinguished in a clear way), which lets them serve to catch lost folks wandering in the wrong direction. I can't count the times a street sign made me realize I was pointing the wrong way!

• A quality that makes paths handy is a process called path integration, when someone guesstimates the distances between path landmarks and path directions to guess how far/in what direction the starting point was.

    However, paths also have interesting qualities which limit their value. 

• Weirdly, they are unidirectional! That is to say, when you walk a trail, turn around and return, your brain thinks of that one trail as two paths: one for each direction. Any hikers know the quandary of getting lost while staying on the paths, and this is why?

• Secondly, paths are temporal in nature, meaning the amount of time you spend on them is tied to their identity in your mind. Anyone who walks a road they usually drive or bike is familiar with feeling confusion at seeing many more landmarks on their trip than usual, not to mention how crazy slow it is.

    This series of landmarks is often the key that lets people remember the paths! 

    As an example of all these ideas, let's look at my daily walk to school as a child! I knew my trip rather simply: First, the short trip to Happy Bodega on the first corner, then the long long walk to the red trashcan across the avenue, then passing the pigeon-poop tree immediately after the trashcan, and finally a short walk with school in sight. I remember the walk back separately. The first leg of the journey on my walk home was to the old junky car next to the hair salon, then to the same red trashcan, Happy Bodega, and finally to my building's green front door. The trip always felt longer going home, and as you can see, I didn't use all the same landmarks. However, because I was so familiar, if you asked me to tell you which direction home was from any one of those landmarks, I could point, and guess how many blocks away!

Paths for tabletop

    I don't think we need to match all the qualities of Cognitive Map paths for the table! For one, I can't imagine how we could model path integration without gridded or hexed paper. Not only that, but designing paths as unidirectional seems difficult to achieve, and unnecessary! We're trying to improve the players' understanding of their region--not confuse them.

    So, what does that leave us with? 

1. If it's very important to have the players get from one spot to another, put a direct path there. (It's much easier to remember the stone road between the Iron Door Saloon and Witchville than it would be to remember 4 leagues northeast, then turn southeast and walk 1 league. If the road is labeled Saloon-Witch Rd., even better--now the players can stumble upon it and know exactly what's on either end.) 
2. If it's important the players have a lifeline when they get lost, put a path there. (For instance, the old elven road in Mirkwood.)
3. When describing the path, describe it as a series of steps, from one little landmark to the next.
4. When the players travel slower, describe more landmarks. When they travel faster, describe fewer.

Other posts in the series:

1. Intro
2. Landmarks
4. Nodes
5. Districts
6. Edges

Landmarks for Tabletop Games

 (this is the first element in the Cognitive Mapping for Tabletop Games series. The other posts are Intro, Paths, Nodes, Districts, Edges)

Element 1: LANDMARKS

    The first, and simplest Cognitive Mapping element is the landmark. Anything we use as a reference point when we navigate is a landmark--anything at all. For me, the landmarks that identify the end of my street are a big track next to a high school. and the empty shell of a building that is labeled Braddock Cafe. However, my partner remembers the bike rental station, and the restaurant on the other corner. These landmarks were burned into our Cognitive Maps through many, many references, and they tell us where we are from a distance.

    Landmarks are...

1. ...Recognizable from a distance, usually because they are distinct from their surroundings, or simply huge.
2. ...Asymmetric at their best, since that allows you to tell not only how far you are from them, but which direction you are. For example, if you saw a familiar, red, round spire from a distance, all you would know is roughly how far you were from it. However, if the red spire had a billboard on it that said "CHEESE?", you could also figure out where you were based on the direction the billboard faced. 
3. ...Reference many times, before your mind integrates them into a Cognitive Map.

Landmarks for tabletop

    Tabletop games are spoken games. That's no surprise to anyone, but it does change the nature of landmarks. In life, a landmark is drawn onto our Cognitive Maps like a sketch done in many short strokes. The first time we use it as reference, our mind blocks in its shape; the second, its texture. By the fifth or sixth time, it looks like a real drawing, and by the hundredth time, a photorealistic painting. It only takes a moment in life to recognize a familiar landmark and add a new detail to memory, but at the table, the narrator hefts this burden! 

So how do we reduce this process to something simple for the table?

    First, the narrative description of any landmark must be repeated from many locations in-game, since players cannot actually experience their characters' senses! Practically, a huge, region-wide landmark should be mentioned all over the place, while a local one should only be mentioned in a smaller area.

    This implies a scale of landmarks: (this will make more sense at the end of this series, so maybe return when you're done)

1. Regional, seen from anywhere in a region. Will tell you what district you're in,
2. District-scale, seen from anywhere within a district. Will tell you what familiar nodes you're likely near.
3. Node-scale, seen from paths connecting to the node, making the node distinct. Will tell which paths you're likely on.
4. Trail marker, inserted as part of a series of trail markers to define a path in the cognitive map.

    Additionally, since these big landmarks will be the key to players' navigation in unfamiliar areas, they need to be simple to picture in the mind's eye, and easy to describe 1000 times. Examples of easily-pictured, asymmetric landmarks include: 

• Huge statues of people in unique poses (that you can mimic), 
• big faces making expressions, 
• hands making gestures (rude or otherwise), 
• boats, 
• arrows, 
• billboards, 
• common animals, 
• a waterfall
• a huge key, etc...

Apparently you can buy these on Etsy for your garden. Very helpful for the chipmunks' navigation!

    It's more important that huge, regional landmarks be easy to than for trail markers! The more times you'll reference it, the clearer it needs to be.

Other posts in this series:

1. Intro
2. Paths
3. Nodes
4. Districts
5. Edges

Cognitive Mapping for Tabletop Games

From Image of the City by Kevin Lynch (1960)

Raise your hand if this has happened at a game of yours: 

    Partway through a game session, as the action comes to a close, the jokes and excitement begin to simmer down. The group knows what they're trying to do, but nobody says a word.

    "Okay, where to next?", the GM asks the table, but they may as well be asking a wall.
    "Well, the (goal) is still to the north, want to head there?", they prompt, and the response of half-hearted agreement and nods feels like a slap in the face, compared to the rousing excitement not 5 minutes prior.
    These players are lost in this game. Each scene is an island of clarity, but between it and the next, the group drifts through hazy game-space, latching onto the first option that gives some form of direction. This problem isn't anyone's fault, but it sure isn't fun.

    Every tabletop game I've played at (or run) has at some point stumbled through the same roadblocks when navigating the setting; either nobody knows where the party is in the world, or (more commonly) only a few players take interest in the navigation piece of the game, but they have contradictory understandings of the environment. Both these scenarios are common, and lead to big disconnects between the referee and the players, as well as between the players themselves! 

    Luckily, there's many ways people try to solve this player mapping problem, and I've seen most of them. The simplest way that comes to mind is to hand a map to the players for reference. Yet somehow, even this effective solution doesn't come close to the players and the referee all having a similar map in their head. The map built of familiarity and experience. A shared Cognitive Map. This series is about the pursuit of that goal.

Before I get ahead of myself, thanks are owed to Sigve for sharing the following video: Stop Getting Lost: Make Cognitive Maps, Not Levels - YouTube. (The presenter in the video does a superb job explaining the origin and theory behind cognitive mapping, but he is a video game designer, talking to other video game designers. Needless to say, tabletop games are a different animal.)

Cognitive Maps

    Back in the USA era of office structures connected directly to highways, and the building of the interstates through historical minority neighborhoods, some old guy named Kevin A. Lynch studied the ways that people navigate their neighborhoods. He came up with a neat abstraction that more-or-less matches our brains' method of mapping familiar physical spaces. It's called Cognitive Mapping. Effectively, we simplify our environment to a sketchy map composed of five basic pieces: landmarks, paths, nodes (path intersections), districts, and edges (the borders of districts). The cool takeaway from the video above is that environments which are already organized into clear and distinct elements allow people to learn them faster and more thoroughly! The results in video games and amusement parks are clear, so let's try to apply this idea to tabletop!

The next posts:

1. Landmarks
2. Paths
3. Nodes
4. Districts
5. Edges