On, off and in the map: materialising game experiences through player cartography

This chapter builds on my analysis of role-playing game character sheets (Webber, 2019) extending my engagement with the materiality of the ‘aftermath’ of gameplay. Here, I focus on maps, not as paratextual elements supplied by game developers, but rather maps produced and used by players – the output, then, of player productivity. My aim, in this research, is to understand maps as more than instrumental tools or devices created to be used for orientation, for example, and employed as such in the ‘moment’ of the game. Instead, I seek to understand maps as recording devices, which capture narratives and experiences, and preserve them subsequently. I take the position that the materiality of maps not only emerges in their very existence and relation to place, ‘as part and parcel of the material world’ (Palmer and Lester, 2013: 2), but also in that way that, in charting progress through a gameworld, they chronicle experience and record a past. In the space of fictional gameworlds, this distinction is arguably emphasized because the relation to ‘real’ place is weakened or non-existent. Cartographic practices in games are, however, enmeshed not only in discussions about materiality, but also those about colonialism. Mapping, and relatedly naming, are part of a set of (player) activities which can be understood as ‘imperial acts of taking possession’, and as re-enactments of empire (Fuchs et al., 2018: 1482, 1495). In many games, this exploratory process is connected with conflict, and associated with what John Rieder (2008: 31) has referred to as ‘the discoverer’s fantasy’, in which a land and its inhabitants are only given structure and meaning by the arrival of the adventurer or protagonist. Mapping in games, then, often represents the objectification of space, in the service of player narratives. Yet if we accept Daniel Miller’s (2005) perspective that materiality is produced in the relationship between subject and object, such objectification surely limits the forms of narrative which can emerge. So what narratives – and what pasts – can and do such maps record? How do they offer an account of experience? And what is it that is made material in their materiality?