I recently read an interesting article, “Mapping Memory: Web Designer as Information Cartographer” on a prominent website aimed at web designers. The author makes a case for turning the metaphor of web designer as architect around, proposing that a web designer actually maps existing space more than he creates new spaces out of nothing.

Common sense tells us that an architect begins with an abstraction—a blueprint—and creates from that abstraction a concrete structure existing in physical space. The cartographer, on the other hand, starts with concrete structures existing in physical space and creates from that an abstraction: a map.

[…]

What we often forget is that the blueprints from which we construct a site are themselves maps of processes and flows that already exist, from verbal dialogues to the exchange of money for goods and services.

As far as I’m concerned, the question of map-maker versus space-creator is even more interesting to ask about game design and story writing than web design. So: Does a game designer rope off an area and produce a gazetteer to the stuff that was there already, or does he build an edifice from nothing and stock it with the contents of his imagination?

The game designers in the audience, I see, have their hands in the air (“Call on me! Call on me!”). Most game designers will have a pride-based stake in being creators rather than catalogers. Many designers I know personally came to the disciple through an interest in the art of the thing, and art is assumed to be a creative rather than cataloging act. And frankly, creating is more sexy than cartographating. Tell a painter he’s just painting what’s already there and you’ll receive an impolite reply in Pardon my French.

Game designers and game writers can learn a lot from architects, graphic designers, industrial designers, information architects, computer coders, and web designers—to name just a few. A List Apart is just one site related to these disciplines that I read, not because I hold a job explicitly involved in any of that work, but because I think they can inform my thinking about games. If that kind of cross-pollination interests you, also check out Signal vs. Noise, Cool Tools, and Joel on Software.

But here’s an interesting thought experiment for you game designers: Fire up the Wayback Machine and return for a moment to your first creative act as a game designer, as a subset of which we’ll explicitly include the job of gamemaster. Is there a piece of graph paper in front of you? Yeah, I’ll wager a lot of you have just gone on a mental journey to the act of creating a dungeon, a process a little bit like that is literally cartography.

But surely that was some kind of blogger mind trick. After all, there was that word creating (“creating” a dungeon) in there, too. And doesn’t there have to be a difference between cartography as it relates to the real world on one hand, and cartography as it pertains to the fantastic on the other? In the latter case, it’s maps of stuff that doesn’t even exist.

That’s an interesting place to return to the question of the web developer, because a web developer isn’t creating cartography based on an Internet-space that Is Only One Particular Way in the sense that we usually assume the surface of the earth Is Only One Particular Way. Italy pokes out into the Mediterranean; that’s not controversial.

Does Google “poke out?” Is it a river? To what does it connect? With what does it share a border? I don’t know the answers to any of those questions, but I’m comfortable saying that Google exists, and I’m also pretty comfortable suggesting that when you make a web site, you’re casting it in relation to Google. (There was “make.” More synonyms for “create” keep popping up.) Google is a feature of the Internet landscape that we still need “cartographers” to tell us about, however much is known.

To some extent, the question of creator vs. cartographer is philosophical and maybe even metaphysical, and your answer will depend in large part on how you prefer to think of the universe: Are you aesthetically inclined to believe that everything already exists in some Platonic realm of ideal Forms, or would you prefer to think that no thought exists until someone thinks it? The former leads to cartography, the latter to creation.

But enough of the mental masturbation: I think the question actually makes a difference to the act of game design. (Crap, there’s another one: “design.”) It makes a big difference, for example, for a designer making up (“making up”) a tabletop roleplaying game where a gamemaster will be invited to co-create each and every act of play.

Robin Laws has discussed how assumptions built into the game-playing landscape are brought to the table by game players even when those assumptions are excluded from the design, and that sometimes a game designer has to explicitly address the location of a major river even if his design doesn’t go anywhere near it. (I know that there’s a post on this somewhere on Robin’s LiveJournal, but I can’t for the life of me find it. Someone throw me a bone in the comments.)

While we’re on the subject of Robin’s LiveJournal, make sure you read his recent post on turning points in game and story.

If you’re still skeptical, I ask you this: Have you ever designed a card game? Did you, in the rules, define a “deck” as a pile of cards and a “hand” as a fanned collection of cards held in the hand and kept secret from the other players? Probably not, because a lot of the general territory called “card games” is well-known. Ditto the way turns are taken in the order in which players are seated around the table, the way the left thumbstick controls movement while the right one controls facing, and the way “2d6” means “roll two six-sided dice and add up the results.” The definitions are all out there, and the designer’s mostly just telling people which one to visit first, second, and third.

The ways in which the creators vs. cartographer metaphor extends to storytellers (as opposed to game designers) is left as an exercise for the comments. No need to wait to be called on.

Obviously, it’s deliberately provocative to suggest that those who design games aren’t engaged in a creative activity, and there’s additional crazytalk in suggesting that cartography isn’t creative in and of itself, because that too is hogwash. But it’s never a bad thing to take a hard look at your assumptions, whatever you’re working on. And in this case, re-casting your own acts of game design as a process of exposing new relationships between existing things can only make your work stronger.