The Map Screen as an Admission of Failure

Here is a test you can run on any game with a world in it. Count the seconds you spend looking at the map screen. Every one of those is a second in which the game you paid for was replaced by a diagram of the game you paid for, because the thing in front of you failed to tell you where you were.

I don’t mean that as a cheap shot. The map screen is often the correct decision and occasionally a masterpiece. But it is always a compensation, and the useful habit is to ask what it’s compensating for — because the answer sits at the exact centre of what level design is supposed to do.

The map used to be on the table

The interesting thing about the map screen is how recent it is. For most of the era I grew up in, the map was a physical object in the room with you.

The Legend of Zelda shipped in the West with a fold-out paper map of the first quest’s overworld. Ultima games came with cloth maps — actual fabric, in the box, because Origin understood that a map you can spread out next to the keyboard is a map you’ll remember. Dungeon Master, FTL’s real-time dungeon crawler that made the Amiga worth owning to a lot of people, had no automap whatsoever, and neither did The Bard’s Tale, so an entire generation of us played those games with graph paper and a pencil and a slowly filling grid that was, in retrospect, the best part.

Look at what that arrangement did. The map lived outside the fiction, so consulting it never paused the world. It was hand-made, so drawing it was encoding — you cannot draw a corridor without having understood the corridor. And it was permanent, sitting on the desk between sessions, which meant your knowledge of the dungeon survived the machine being switched off. Three real design properties, delivered by a pencil.

Lynch’s five elements, and why level designers keep rediscovering them

The theory here is older than the medium. Kevin Lynch published The Image of the City in 1960, a study of how people build mental maps of real places, and it found that legible cities are made of five things: paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks. Lynch called the property imageability — the degree to which a place produces a strong mental image in the person moving through it.

Every good game space is an imageability exercise, and the vocabulary transfers without modification. A landmark is a distinctive silhouette visible from elsewhere. A district is an area with a coherent material and colour language. An edge is a wall, a cliff, a river that tells you a region has ended. Get these right and the player builds the map internally, at no cost, as a by-product of looking at things.

Which gives us the sharp version of the thesis. A map screen is what you install when imageability has failed. It is an external memory prosthetic for a place the player’s brain declined to store, and the reason it declined is almost always that the place had no landmarks, no edges and no districts — that it was, in the literal Lynch sense, unimageable. Beautiful and unimageable are entirely compatible, which is why so many gorgeous open worlds are navigational mush.

Dark Souls ships without one

The strongest evidence is a game that simply doesn’t have the feature. Dark Souls has no map screen. None. There is no diagram of Lordran anywhere in the software, and the game is celebrated above all for its sense of place.

That’s Lynch, executed with unusual discipline. Firelink Shrine is a node — everything radiates from it. Anor Londo is visible from the Undead Burg as a distant golden landmark long before you can reach it. The Undead Parish, the poison swamp, the tomb: each district has a colour, a material palette and an enemy grammar that tells you where you are the instant you arrive. And the whole thing interlocks vertically, so the level design folds back on itself in a way that teaches the geometry through shortcuts. Players who finished it in 2011 can still draw Lordran on a napkin. Ask the same people to draw the last open world they finished with a full automap and a compass.

FromSoftware could have shipped a map. The absence forced every other system to carry the load, and the systems carried it.

Super Metroid found the compromise and nobody copied it properly

Between the pencil and the prosthetic sits one very good idea that the genre has been slowly ruining ever since.

The original Metroid had no map, which was a nightmare, and let’s be honest about it: Zebes in 1986 was a maze of near-identical rock corridors and the game was substantially improved by a hand-drawn chart or a magazine pull-out. Super Metroid in 1994 fixed it with map stations — terminals you find inside each region that reveal that region’s layout when you touch them.

Look at how much design is in that one decision. The map is a reward, so getting it is progression. It’s regional, so the world stays chunked into districts you learn separately. It shows room outlines and the doors between them while withholding what’s in the rooms, so it tells you the shape and keeps every secret. And it’s optional — you can clear a region before finding its station, and plenty of speedrunners do.

A map you earn, that shows structure and hides content. Thirty years on, most of the genre gives you a complete map for free at the start and then draws icons on it for the things you haven’t done yet, which inverts all four properties at once.

Etrian Odyssey makes the labour the point

The other end of the argument is Atlas’s Etrian Odyssey, which in 2007 looked at the Nintendo DS’s two screens and did the only genuinely clever thing anyone has done with an automap since: it made you draw it.

The dungeon is on the top screen. The bottom screen is graph paper and a stylus, and you lay the walls, doors and staircases in yourself as you go. There is no automatic option worth the name. It’s the Bard’s Tale pencil, digitised and made the core loop, and it works for exactly the reason the pencil worked — the drawing is the understanding. A player who has hand-drawn floor three of the labyrinth has floor three in their head permanently, and the map screen has stopped being a prosthetic and become a record of labour.

That’s the pivot the whole essay turns on. A map you were given is a substitute for knowing. A map you made is proof of knowing. They look identical and they do opposite things.

When a map screen earns it

So the feature is conditional rather than damned, and a handful of games show the conditions.

Return of the Obra Dinn has a book rather than a map, and the book is the entire interface: a cross-section of the ship, a crew list, sixty faces to place. Lucas Pope’s design works because filling it in is the deduction — the masterpiece in two colours is a game about turning a diagram into knowledge, one confirmed guess at a time. The ship itself is small enough to hold in your head, so the book never has to navigate for you.

Animal Well hides its map as a findable item and then hands you stamps to annotate it with — a puzzle you can’t solve yet, a door you couldn’t open, a sound you didn’t understand. The map becomes a to-do list you wrote, so the metroidvania as a locked room stays a room you are solving. Compare that to the standard version, where the game marks your unopened doors for you and the dopamine of the locked door becomes an errand list somebody else wrote.

Elden Ring makes the map a collectible — the fragments are scattered, so a region is blank until you find its stele, and you have to read the land before you’re allowed to summarise it. That ordering is everything. Explore, then diagram.

The test

I’d put it this way. A map screen that arrives before the exploration is a substitute for the exploration. A map screen that arrives after it is a souvenir, and souvenirs are lovely.

The uncomfortable part for a lot of modern design is that this cannot be fixed in the map screen. You can’t UI your way out of an unmemorable world; you can only paper over it, and the paper is what most games ship. If the players are living on the map, the map is the game now, and the beautiful thing you built behind it is set dressing for a menu.

And the minimap is the same disease with the symptoms hidden. A map screen at least announces itself — you press a button, the world stops, you’ve made a decision to consult a document. A minimap in the corner is a map screen that never closes, running at all times, quietly training your eyes to live in a rectangle the size of a stamp while the world you’re moving through plays out in your peripheral vision. Every landmark the environment artists built is being rendered to an audience that’s watching a radar blip instead. If you want to know whether a world is imageable, turn the minimap off for an hour and see whether you can still find your way home.

Give me a landmark on the horizon and I’ll never open the diagram. That’s the whole ask, and it’s been in the literature since 1960.