My most successful maps were the ones that didn’t have to look like anything recognisable, particularly the ones I drew of the locations in text adventure games such as Zork or Planetfall (right).
Despite having drawn these maps over 30 years ago I still have them all (22 of them) along with the odd transcript of key pieces of text.
If
you’ve never played a text adventure then you might not know that they describe
a location “you are in a mysterious wood”, some objects “there is a rusty
dagger here” and tell you where you can go “there is a path heading north and
south. There is a spooky cabin to the east.”
You
interact with the game by typing commands “take dagger”, “go east”, “kill ogre
with dagger”, etc. The trick to success often relies on getting back to a place
that you have been to before to pick up a crucial item that you left behind.
Hence, the need for a map.
If
the game mainly uses the four (or eight) compass points to move between
locations it’s relatively easy to make a map but as soon as you come across
“up” and “down” things get tricky. You can’t draw the “up” location above the
current location if there is a “north” and worse what if there is no “north” so
you draw the “up” location there only to discover the new location has a
“south” where the previous location is already drawn on your map.
Where
to draw the first location on the page is also tricky. I always started in the
middle of the page but if you were on the west side of the world then you might
run out of space on the right and end up with a huge blank space on the left. I
have a few maps made on two pieces of paper stuck together with yellow perished
sellotape.
Years
later in the late noughties I went back to drawing geographic maps when I
discovered OpenStreeMap. This is a service like Google Maps but where the maps
have been created by volunteers. The map was very sparse in the early days
which left lots of scope for me to add to it.
I
attached my GPS to my bicycle handlebars, put my camera around my neck and
cycled around all the residential streets in Epsom. Back at home later I
uploaded my tracks and used the photos to annotate the map with street names –
you can’t copy them from commercial maps because they create intentional
spelling mistakes to identify copyright infringements.
When
I approached 40 my wife suggested we went on a significant holiday and the
first place that came to mind was Machu Picchu. When she asked if I was serious
I said no, but after a lot of thinking I couldn’t come up with anywhere else so
that’s where we went.
Why
am I telling you this in an article about map making? Well it turned out that
nowhere in Peru existed on OpenStreetMap so I took my GPS with me. When we went
on the train from Cusco to Machu Picchu I propped it in the window and recorded
the train line all the way there. When I uploaded it after the holiday it was
the only thing to exist apart from the waterways which had been donated by a
mapping company to seed the project. Today there is a complete map of Cusco and
the train line has probably been improved by others, removing my authorship
from the notes – but I know I was there first, not quite like Hiram Bingham but
you know what I mean.
