King Solomon’s Mines (cleared) : cartography in digital games and imperial imagination

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

The aim of this paper is to analyse interactions between the gamescape, avatar and map in digital open-world, mass-market, single-player games (The Elder Scrolls Series, The Witcher 3, Assassin’s Creed series and similar). Starting with Sybille Lammes observation about the hybrid nature of game cartography, documenting both the protagonist’s personal journey and pre-determined points of interest (Lammes, 2010), I revisit the issue with two toolsets. The first of these toolsets is derived from Mary Louis Pratt’s Imperial Eyes in which she studies the imperial period in Africa cartography (Pratt, 1992). The player and the protagonist’s relation to the gamescape is quite similar to nineteenth-century explorers: the player ventures into the ‘Great Unknown’ and creates a personal account of the journey. Simultaneously, she fills the blanks on the map using an exclusively pre-determined set of markers. This motif, quite universal in analysed genres, seems to be closely related to imperial imaginary. The act of discovery, clearly announced to the player, is purely spectacular: the protagonist has to see the place with her own eyes to validate its existence. Moreover, this kind of power is bestowed on the protagonist alone and the presence of another being (or even civilization) does not disrupt the process of discovery. But despite the power to discover, the protagonist and player has little freedom to do so: only places corresponding with pre-determined categories can be permanently placed on the map. Those categories clearly divide elements of the gamescape into noteworthy and insignificant elements: the noteworthy are useful, as even landmarks are placed on the map only when they serve some purpose in the game. The second toolset comes from an analysis of the maps in Victorian popular prose itself, inspired by Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (Haggard, 1907). Clearly inspired by explorers’ journals, such texts simultaneously represent the power the ‘white man’ holds over the world and lure the protagonists into danger. During the perilous trip, virtues of the Victorian hero are confirmed and his ingenuity established: after all, he is the only one capable of reaching the treasure. The map itself further adds a rational component to the quest: it separates superstition from geographic fact and aligns folklore with science, for instance, when tribal names for landmarks are replaced with ‘proper’ ones by the hero. This motif is ever-present in the case games, which usually put question-marks in unexplored areas on the map, marking the heroic opportunity. During the journey toward such spots, the protagonist makes involuntary discoveries, neatly combining two vocations of the Victorian adventurer: serving as an agent of the imperial cartographic effort and a fortune-seeker, able to forge his own fate in far-away land. The pervasiveness of this model is not without consequence. It contributes towards a general tendency within single-player digital games to employ imperial imaginations in developing fictional worlds as something to be wondered, explored, violently conquered and exploited. Describing this phenomenon, employing an ‘imperial-studies’ perspective to digital games can supplement the already substantial post-colonial analyses of gamescape in strategy games, as already undertaken by Magnet (2006), Lammes (2010), Mukherjee (2015; 2016) and others.