On The Map: Why the world looks the way it does
Page 30
The celestial behaviour of Mars had been studied since before Ptolemy, while its orbital movements were carefully plotted by Copernicus and Tycho Brahe. But the first maps we know of were probably made by Francisco Fontana in Naples 1636, and they were fairly disastrous, consisting of little more than a shaded black dot in the middle of a sphere. Fontana called this shaded area a ‘pill’, but it turned out to be nothing but a common optical illusion. In 1659, however, there was genuine progress, as Christiaan Huygens, a Dutchman, drew a sketch of what we now recognise as Syrtis Major, a triangular shaped area roughly in the proportions of Africa. The polar caps of Mars were first detected by Giovanni Cassini (an Italian in France, the man who began the mapping dynasty responsible for the triangulation of France), and each decade brought more refined telescopes and more accurate drafting, until the early nineteenth-century German astronomers Wilhelm Beer and Johann von Mädler made the first attempt at a full map based on the Mercator projection, and set a prime meridian point at zero longitude in the middle of it.*
Giovanni Schiaparelli’s map of Mars, made in Milan in 1877 – and introducing the planet’s canali.
Beer and Mädler declined to name the key areas on their map, but others were less timid. A map by the British amateur Richard Proctor upheld the imperial tradition by naming the majority of what was commonly perceived as seas, islands and continents after prominent British astronomers, a system that held good until Schiaparelli constructed his own gridded map in 1877, attaching more than 300 names to the planet’s surface, the majority of them inspired by earth’s geography and classical myths so Proctor’s Herschel II Strait became Sinus Sabaeus, and Burton Bay (named after Irish astronomer Charles Burton) became Mouth of the Indus Canal. 1877 was clearly a fine year for observation, with Mars close to both the earth and the sun; its two dwarf satellites, Phobos and Deimos, were first seen that year. Inevitably Schiaparelli’s map was wide of the mark, and he had a particular problem with perspective; what we now know as volcanoes he called lakes. But it was based on scientific principles and the basic shape was roughly accurate. Intriguingly, its form looked not unlike the Victorian imagining of Eratosthenes map of the earth from 194 BC.
And then the canals came into view. In The Worst Journey In the World, Apsley Cherry-Garrard mentions that in 1893, just before the onset of golden Antarctic heroism, it was believed that ‘we knew more about the planet Mars than about a large area of our own globe,’ but this wasn’t true; certainly the biggest uncertainty was still raging. Astronomers and some journalists travelled to Flagstaff with the hope of seeing what Schiaparelli and Lowell had seen, and some did indeed detect faint tracks and the hint of arid vegetation. But the most influential of them all, the Greek astronomer Eugenios Antoniadi, drew the most detailed pre-space age map of Mars in Paris in 1930 and concluded there was no sign of intelligent life. However, he did leave the door slightly ajar, stating that the canals ‘have a basis of reality’, for there were clear ‘streaks’ visible on repeated observations. And so the enticing prospect prevailed until 1965, when the Americans sent orbiting probes, and NASA began piecing together collaged maps based on grainy photographs that showed a barren rock-strewn landscape covered in a thin dust that invited no form of life and showed no form of canals.
One of the first views of Mars from Mariner 9, showing grooves, craters and flat-topped mesas. The image is roughly 400 km across.
NASA’s first official Atlas of Mars, published in 1979, relied heavily on images from Mariner 9, the first spacecraft to completely orbit another planet in 1971–72, as well as the Viking craft that landed on the planet in the mid-70s. But it also depended on the airbrushed artistry of a cartographic team from the United States Geological Survey which had based itself at the Lowell Observatory at Flagstaff. No modern map, and certainly not those of the moon, relied so much on photo-mosaics and artistic interpretation for its ‘true’ accuracy, although with the mass of new images now available from the continual patrols of the Mars Exploration Rovers, the latest maps and Martian globes are stitched together by computer.*
‘For some reason I regret that the canals are not there,’ Patrick Moore told me. ‘But that’s science for you.’ One can see his point. We are grateful for the digital accuracy and the new names, as well as the huge dark volcanoes that once appeared on early maps as dark seas. We have relearnt more about its atmosphere, its colour and its dust clouds in the past fifty years than anywhere else in the universe. And of course we should be happy to know this about a place we may one day visit despite the intolerable cold, a place that may indeed once have contained life and may yet conceal water below its surface. But the mapping of Mars had shown us the true romance of cartography, and perhaps only scientists have unreservedly welcomed its realities.
Chapter 21
Pass Go and Proceed Direct to Skyrim
For the lucky few with time on their hands and a desire to escape their immediate surroundings, maps of Mars with deep canals can still be part of the daily routine. So may maps of the Moon, and maps of occupied France, and a map that recreates the experience of fighting in Iraq in 2003, and a map of a godforsaken urban landscape called Liberty City where you drive around doing terrible things to passers-by. For map fans interested in where the most intricate and beautiful maps have gone (now that museums and libraries have snapped up all the old ones and phone apps and live 3-D maps have done for the rest), this is where to start looking – in video games, the bold future of cartography.
How can this be? Aren’t video games the object of scorn and derision, not least from fretful parents who fear their children are wasting the best part of their lives playing them? Aren’t they addictive, mindless, repetitive and violent? All this may be true, although perhaps not quite as true as it was when video games took hold in the 1990s. For these days we may acknowledge other attributes, and, far from being a cultural nadir, you can make a decent case that video games are the most creative form of screen entertainment we have. Do they not stretch the young creative mind? In assigning a series of challenges, do they not demand new forms of exploration and problem solving, and a sense of achievement when levels are attained? Do they not also encourage perseverance and patience, and promote cooperation? And more to our point, for a young cartographer in the twenty-first century, is there a more demanding or defining industry within which to work?
u v w
Exhibit A: Skyrim. This is the fifth part of the Elder Scrolls series that began in 1994 and is the most popular digital role-playing game in history (ten million copies sold in the month of release in November 2011, with a sales revenue of $620m). It is an ‘open-world’ game that lets you either pursue a vast array of quests and skills, or just wander around without purpose, losing yourself in the lush dewy landscape of valleys and mountains, or in the ice of the tundras, encountering enveloping strangeness wherever you go. There is a story at the heart of it – your usual everyday battle against dragons and other foes in a dystopian Nordic-Medieval kingdom – but it is the geography that enthrals, a 3-D dreamworld both familiar and alien, a pixellated Mappa Mundi with a choice of pilgrimages and viewing angles. It is certainly not a place where one can function without an atlas.
Indeed, the game comes with a fold-out map, printed on textured faux parchment, but it’s more of a mood-board than anything that will help you navigate beyond your first half-hour. Proper help comes in the form of a 660-page official game guide. This comes with 220-pages of maps, which gives you an idea of the complexity of the game, the hundreds of digital cartographers involved in its creation, and the endless days in which you may lose yourself in the Skyrim world (a world inevitably far more detailed than Cyrodiil, the country where Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion took place, which was itself more detailed than Vvardenfell, the island at the centre of Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind).
The 3-D dreamworld of Skyrim – a videogame whose appeal rests primarily on geography and maps.
Skyrim itself is a country in the continent of Tamri
el on the planet Nirn (keep with this: after playing the game enough, it’s Earth that becomes weird). Skyrim is divided into nine Holds, although their borders are inexact during gameplay. They have names such as Haafingar, The Reach and Eastmarch, and each Hold has its Primary Locations (large spaces requiring interior exploration, such as the vampire hideout Movarth’s Lair), and Secondary Locations (seldom in need of further exploration, such as the Shrine of Zenithar in the Rift.) The locations are spotted with camps, mines, strongholds, dens, lairs and crypts, all with their own names and purpose – horse trading, food supplies, dangerous areas with enemies to be slain if one hopes to gain new skills and rejuvenate one’s combative health.
To take one map alone: The Reach occupies the entire western edge of Skyrim, and judging by the ruins it was once a more populated and happier place, but something awful happened here. According to the guide, ‘Karthwasten and Old Hroldan provide some degree of safety, and the Blades hideout known as Sky Haven Temple is another beacon of tranquillity surrounded by hard terrain and harder adversaries. Fort Sungard and Broken Tower Redoubt are both fortifications to explore, and two Orc Strongholds (Mor Khazgur and Dushnikh Yal) are also here for you to find. To the northeast is Hjaalmarch, but the majority of the Reach borders Whiterun.’
This is either your thing or it isn’t, but the mapping of this imagination is original and impressive. As with a Blaeu atlas of old, the cartography of Skyrim should be credited to many hands, a team of perhaps thirty or forty employed at Bethesda Game Studios; the maps in the guide are credited to a firm called 99 Lives. If you were a mapper, why would you not want to meet this sort of challenge? And if you were a player, why would you not want to believe you were wandering alone in that free-form world with only a map and your wits to save you, an adventure in barely charted territory, one of the latest, greatest, and most underrated cartographical landmarks.
u v w
Until Skyrim came along the hottest map-within-a-game was Grand Theft Auto 4 (GTA4). Its release in 2008 was an event anticipated by gamers in much the same way as a previous generation anticipated the new Beatles album, and the sales on the first day broke all records. Sales of the whole GTA series have surpassed 100 million copies, and its three main creators (one Scotsman and two Englishmen) have taken on the mantle of impossibly wealthy celebrities, a role they may have been aiming for when they named their company Rockstar Games not long after they opened for business in 1997.
It is clearly a thrilling game to play, the experience enhanced by the fact that everyone who isn’t playing it is outraged by it (Uniting Conservatives and Liberals in Hatred since 1988 as one of the GTA online trailers proudly has it). Certainly, the GTA series has generated a lot of bad press – real-life crimes were apparently inspired by it, there was a pornographic game hidden within its layers, questions were asked in Parliament – all of which boosted sales no end. It is indeed a violent adult game, but at its heart lies a simple pursuit of cops-and-robbers: you steal a car and outwit those chasing you. But as with Skyrim, the game is as much about navigation as it is about quests. As a player you are free to speed through the sequence of loosely disguised dystopian urban environments – London, New York, Miami, San Francisco and, coming soon with GTA 5, Los Angeles – as if you were truly at the wheel in a very vivid city.
Many of the cars in GTA 4 have satellite navigation installed, which one operates in much the same way as a real system – you put in the address and off you go. In the Liberty City Guidebook it states, ‘GPS was invented because real men do not ask for directions. Now you can get automatically re-routed when you handbrake past that last turn at 150mph.’ But you may also spend some time on foot and in the subway, which is where the provision of the large folding map comes in handy. This splits the city into five boroughs, each more unappealing than the last. The central one is Algonquin, a carbon copy of Manhattan with its Middle Park in place of Central Park and the Grand Eastern Terminal close to where Grand Central normally lives.
Liberty City can be a very bad place to make your way around: this is Algonquin, modelled on Manhattan.
The grid system remains, although the streets are all named after jewels and the numbered avenues have been replaced by Galveston, Frankfort, Bismarck and Albany. The designers know their mapping history: Columbus has been upgraded from a Circle to an Avenue of his own, an island-long stretch from Amethyst Street in the south village to Vespucci Circus in the heights. Of the other boroughs, you’d probably want to live in Broker, where the Brooklyn-style brownstones and leafy streets offer beaches and boardwalks and respite.
GTA navigation takes two forms – how to map your way through the various urban wastelands, and how to get around the architecture of the game itself. Both are handled by the controllers, which on the Sony PS3 means an entire knobbly dashboard with different buttons for accelerate, brake, steering, headlights, game radio station and mobile phone operation, and of course Fire Weapon. That’s in the car. If you’re on foot, there are buttons and sticks for walking, running, jumping, mounting a ladder and of course Fire Weapon. You begin by fumbling, but pretty soon you learn that a cautious mastery of maps is what you need to get you furthest. The canny player learns that the more you familiarise yourself with your environment, the more you benefit from it (the alley your pursuers don’t know, the back-route that will shave eight seconds from your journey). It’s a primitive skill, but is it taught as compellingly anywhere else?
u v w
Before computers, back in the analogue world, maps and games hit it off rather well too. The association stretches back at least to 1590, when the counties of England and Wales were displayed on a deck of cards (we can’t be sure of the rules, but it may have been the very first example of Top Trumps). The top quarter of the card features the name of the country, the suit and the value; the middle section shows a map of that county, while the lower quarter shows the various properties, including length, breadth and distance from London. (Whether being nearer to London or further away was a game-boosting advantage is unclear.)
Another game, with the familiar 52 cards, was published in Paris in 1669 by Gilles de la Boissière. Les tables geographiques reduites en un jeu de cartes was truly international, featuring a small illustration of a country or state, including America, Virginia, Florida, Mexico and Canada. A variation appeared a year later, now with each suit representing a continent: America is clubs, Asia is diamonds, Europe is hearts, and, in a category choice that would these days provoke wrath and hand-wringing, Africa was spades (this may have contributed to the racial slur ‘as black as the ace of spades’).
Scotland and Holland go missing on one of Spilsbury’s jigsaws, from 1766.
But the map would find no more natural home than two other types of pastime gaining favour in the middle of the eighteenth century: jigsaws and board games. The first ever jigsaw is believed to be an engraved map on wood made by the English cartographer John Spilsbury in the 1760s. The idea proved so popular, not least as a way of making school geography tolerable, that he printed and sawed his way not only through maps of the world, but also each of the four continents and the British Isles. A few years before, J. Jeffreys had produced a similarly learning-is-fun pastime with A Journey Through Europe or The Play of Geography, a map board over which you would advance with dice and rules.
We have continued to play derivations of this game for more than two hundred years, among them Lincoln Highway from 1926, in which players moved coloured pins coast to coast over a map of the US (the game was endorsed by the Automobile Club of America, the roads on the board apparently so accurate that they could have been used in a real journey), and Hendrik van Loon’s Wide World from 1933, in which airplane and steamship pieces raced to complete remote voyages.
And then there was La Conquête du Monde, invented by a French film producer Albert Lamorisse in the mid-1950s, and renamed by a salesman at the US game maker Parker Brothers named Elwood Reeves. The word ‘Conquest’ was already on too many othe
r games, so the salesman picked an initial from each of his grandchildren and named it – initially with an exclamation mark – Risk!
The rule book from an edition in the early 1960s has a simple claim – ‘You are about to play the most unusual game that has appeared in many years’ – and an equally simple purpose: ‘The Object of the game is to occupy every territory on the board and in so doing eliminate all other players.’ You had armies, you had dice, and gradually, if you had the time, it was hoped you would engulf the world. The game could take as long to set up as other games take to complete, while playing it could annex the kitchen table for both dinner and breakfast. The board was a large and colourful map of the world, although there was clearly something wrong with it. Six continents were each allocated a colour, and each contained several anomalous territories (Asia, for example, held Siberia, Yakutsk, Irkutsk, Afghanistan, China, Middle East and Kamchatka). ‘The sizes and boundaries of the territories are not accurate,’ the rule booklet explained. ‘The territory marked Peru includes, in addition, the country of Bolivia … It should be noted also that Greenland, Baffinland and a section of the Canadian mainland make up the territory marked Greenland.’
A long night of world domination ahead.
Risk! was a hit in many of the provinces it featured, although some countries got bored with its slow progression and speeded up play by amending the rules. In the UK the game was manufactured by Waddington’s, the company that had enjoyed a special relationship with Parker Brothers since 1935, the year the British had licensed the word-play game Lexicon and the Americans had returned the favour by licensing something called Monopoly.