My Minimap Problem

Hey folks, I’m back to writing blog things. I’m sure you were heartbroken while I was off writing in other places (my attempt to start a website), but no need to fret. So, how about them video games, huh?

By their very nature, video games of every stripe have to communicate volumes of information to the player. In most games, elements like health and equipment are placed around the borders of the screen in an handy dandy heads up display (or HUD as I’m going to continue calling it. Handy dandy heads up display is just too much to type more than once.) In many open games, with larger worlds for players to explore, the designers will add a small map to the HUD. This minimap shows where the player is in the world around them. The main functions of the minimap are exploration, enemy placement, and GPS directions. Each of these functions is helpful but they all lead to the same issue, which is the focus of this article. Every function of the minimap, where useful, creates the potential to distract the player (namely me) from the gameworld that the level designers and artists worked so hard to create.

Note: In this piece I will be detailing my own problems with the minimaps used in video games. First, I will explain the minimap function then I will go into the issue this creates for me. I am not a game designer. I am writing this because it’s on my mind, and I believe we should be constantly analyzing and discussing all facets of game design. I am coming from the direction of an academic fascinated by the narrative forms and mechanical devices of video games.

Exploration

Open world games are vast digital landmasses. Were they only populated by the missions that develop the main story, the game would be dreadfully boring and hardly worth the open world design. To keep players exploring and engaged with the world, many designers will fill their worlds with side quests, secret areas, surprises, and collectables. Most of this game content is displayed on the minimap with whatever iconography the developers see fit to implement. These icons give the minimap some added utility, as instead of just showing the player the map layout of the surrounding area, the game can clue players into areas to explore or items to find. Games like Farcry Primal and The Witcher 3 use iconography on their minimaps to clue the player into harvestable materials, treasures, monster dens, and the like.

The icons on the map make finding materials in the world easier, but their placement on the map draws my eyes away from the world and to the map. I’ve found myself on many occasions moving my character’s arrow to the icon on the map, instead of finding the items by looking at the gameworld and all the game assets the designers worked so hard to make. In many cases, the game developers put in the extra effort to make crafting items and potion components into distinct looking trees, rocks, flowers, and herbs, but those minimap icons linger just inside of my peripheral vision, threatening to take my attention away.

Look at that map in the bottom corner. Distracting me from the pretty game. Jerk.

Enemy Placement

Combat is a feature of many a game, as it serves as an easily digestible and designable shorthand for conflict. However, it is occasionally difficult to see the enemy. Sometimes, the enemy combatants are obscured by lighting & smoke effects or just a detailed environment. Sometimes, I just cannot see them because my character is hiding behind a wall, lacking the ability to see through it. Either way, the minimap will helpfully point out where enemies are, in relation to my player-character, by representing them with little dots or sometimes arrows to indicate which way the enemy is facing. Showing the placement of enemies is a helpful feature. If you’re sneaking around in a Deus Ex game (which does offer the ability to see through walls, but that costs energy) or surrounded by hostile ghouls in the Witcher 3, knowing where the enemies are is vital information to the player-character’s survival.

The problem with displaying the enemies on the minimap, especially in stealth games, is that I end up paying more attention to the minimap to navigate around people and objects in the environment. The screen-filling game with its beautifully detailed environment becomes reduced to the simplified circle of dots and shapes, which only represent that world. It’s less of a problem for combat because I have to look at the screen and world to make sure that my attacks, be they swords or bullets, are hitting the targets I want to hit. The presence of the minimap is still a problem, though, as it divides my attention between the red dots of the map and the enemy combatants on the screen.

Dots and vision cones all over the map. What's a little yellow arrow to do?

GPS Directions

Open world games come with many varieties of missions that require the player to travel across the gameworld. These gameworlds, especially lately, are densely packed with details like forests, city blocks, mountains, etc. More linearly designed games can design their worlds to subtly guide the player to their destination, but open worlds do not have this benefit. Until the player is intimately familiar with the layout of the game, which is super difficult with the sheer size of the current crop of open world games, they will need help finding their way around from one location to another. This is where the minimap comes into play.

Like the map app on your phone (is Mapp at thing? Mapp should be a thing), the minimap can be used to give the player a clear path to their destination. Sometimes, they are arrows, dots, or marks that glow from just outside the map’s borders until the player gets close enough to see the destination in the minimap. All the player needs to do is select whichever mission they want to accomplish and the game will put the necessary directional indicators in the minimap. This is a common feature in games because it eases the travel necessary for players to accomplish missions, but it has the same significant downside of the rest of the minimap’s functions.

As, I am following the GPS path to my destination, I am not looking at the gameworld, with it’s streets & trails that wind their way through beautiful and lovingly rendered environments. Instead, I’m looking at the little line in the map, to make sure that my character arrow is following it. In games that use this feature, I have to make constant efforts to look at the surrounding environments because otherwise I feel like I’m being taken out of the game. It hurts my immersion.

Where the little dots lead, I shall follow.

I like exploring gameworlds. My playtime for games like Bioshock, The Last of Us, and Bloodborne is well above the average because I have to look at everything (and Bloodborne is super hard), and those are more linear games. I want to look at every nook and corner of the game environment, even if there is nothing to collect, because I want to take it all in. The minimap makes that difficult for me. There are, of course, solutions for these issues. Just Cause 2 uses directing lines on the roads, instead of the minimap, to guide players around its world. Uncharted 4 makes its items shimmer so the player knows what they can pick up from what they cannot. And Deus Ex: Mankind Divided gives the player-character the ability to see through walls, which is helpful for figuring out where enemies are, without having to rely on the minimap’s arrows. However, not all of these design elements are going to work for every game. I am not a designer, but I do understand how tricky game design can be.

I’m sure the developers try their best to make these elements as helpful as possible, and there is no reasonable way that they can cater to everyone’s needs and desires, but I still think it’s useful to talk about elements of design. Keeping the discussion of art going is how art improves, and I think we can all agree that we would like to see this medium continue to grow and better itself.