I can’t honestly say which game was the first to use this mechanic, but in the last few years, this little thing has become a ubiquitous tool across the board. It can be found in first person shooters, in open world games, roleplaying games, your odd action-adventure, in short – in pretty much ever conceivable genre. It’s a mechanic that draws a lot of player attention away from the gameworld, towards itself. I have witnessed myself playing this mechanic rather than the game itself. I am talking of course, about the minimap.
The minimap is a little map window in a corner of the screen, displaying the nearby surroundings and interesting points. It has become something of a quick and dirty way of designers abandoning clever signposting within the gameworld, putting all signposts into the minimap instead. I found this especially distracting and damaging to Red Dead Redemption, with its beautifully rendered gameworld, which in itself offers a plethora of visual clues and markers as to where the player is at any given time.
The problem however is, that oftentimes specific quests are built in a way, that just de-activating the minimap makes those quests very, very hard. So hard that they almost become unplayable. Timed quests that need the player to go into specific direction, hunt after specific characters in a large game world. In Red Dead, I had this problem especially when it came to catching fugitive thieves and robbers. Instead of providing any kind of clue or marker inside the actual gameplay window, all of those things were put into the minimap. Which is in fact a thing quite a lot of games and their designers do even today.
So when playing a game that relies that heavily on a minimap, my experience is that my view tends to drift and eventually get stuck on the minimap portion of the screen. Instead of playing the game itself, I play the minimap. I play an abstraction of the game within the game. And that’s just awful.
Especially since there are other ways of doing this. Far Cry 2 also had a minimap, but that had to be equipped and actively looked at and was neither present, nor needed at almost every single instance. The Bethesda games have an overhead compass, which essentially serves the same functions as minimaps do, but in a much less intrusive way. Skyrim luckily has a mod that removes the “nearby sites” markers, turning the compass into just a plain old compass, requiring the player to explore the game world without that piece of handholding meta-game mechanic guiding the way. And then there are things like Bioshock’s quest arrow and Fable’s “golden path” which also are a bit of a cheat, cheapening the games’ exploration quite a bit, but still, those are better ways of doing things than having a piece of the screen taken up by a little distracting piece of lazy signposting.
That’s just the thing, minimaps supposedly are a tool for the player, but in truth they just open the way for designers to be really lazy about the way they signpost their games. Instead of providing additional information, the main game quickly starts taking place within the minimap screen, the visual rendition of which – the main game world – then just becomes something of an afterthought.
Which is not to say that minimaps or similar mechanics should never ever be done. Both Metal Gear Solid and the recent Deus Ex game (which essentially uses a very similar approach to the minimap as MGS) implement this in a way that it adds to the main game instead of detracting. This way, the minimap becomes something of a sixth sense, a welcome addition to the main game, instead of becoming the main game itself.
To some extent, even the modern day navis for real life cars are something of a minimap, oftentimes replacing the real world for a lot of drivers, who sometimes end up anywhere but where they wanted to be due to relying on this piece of equipment.
Jean Baudrillard would have a field day with this topic. The simulation has become reality, the simulacrum of a game has become the game itself.
