Fantastic Cartography: Memories and Maps

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Written by BuckGB on October 13th, 2011

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There's one physical object that came to define the area around my computer desk though. Not tiny figurines, as with many of my friends. They've never interested me particularly because they have an opposite effect to the Lurking Horror's student ID card. Figurines highlight the imaginary nature of the world. If I am holding a statuette of the player character, no matter how finely crafted, it serves to emphasise that the people of that world are collectible objects in the real world. It places me, as the player and collector, in a different relationship with the game world and it's an entirely different sort of buzz to owning things that appear to be from that game world.

So, no figurines for me. The items that dominated my childhood gamespace were maps.

If I looked up from my monitor, I could see, pinned to the walls, many of the lands I'd explored, as well as the new ones that were still nothing more than ink on paper, great unknowns populated by who knows what or who. Like a good manual, a good map primed me for the game. I'd wander digital realms and discover locations only to realise, I've read about this. I've seen it. Being able to connect the map on the wall to the city on the screen added a layer of integrity that I felt but didn't understand at the time. Even when I wasn't playing the game, I could see the map, over my mum's shoulder as she busied about while I prepared to leave for school in the morning, one last look back to confirm what I knew. Other worlds were always waiting.

I've still never seen a finer collectible than the cloth map from the complete Ultima VII collection. I studied it so much and played that game so long I could probably draw it from memory, and every location, every building and every fork in every road, has a hundred tales associated with it. All my own.

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