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| 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.
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:
