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| Metal Gear Solid's Radar |
I remember a couple years back, re-playing Metal Gear Solid and thinking it would make a great flash game. The stealth sections, specifically, where you're perhaps in a room trying to reach the exit, and there are guards patrolling the area that you have to avoid. Because what actually ends up happening is you're playing through these sections not watching your character all that much, but instead the little minimap in the corner that represents your radar, making sure your dot never enters the cones of vision of any of the guards or security cameras. Go onto any flash game portal, and you'll see that's occurred to a lot of people. Zoom in on the mini-map, Remove all the extraneous controls outside of movement, and you have a straightforward mechanic you can replicate with simple geometric shapes, no art skills required. The radar is completely unrealistic, of course: how would a radar show you what guards are looking at? And then there’s the fact that all these guards are so short-sighted that they can only ever see several feet in front of them. Stealth in Metal Gear Solid is an overtly game-y and unrealistic mechanic, but then again, it's not like the game was particularly slavish to realism anyways. And because stealth is built around the mini-map as a central component of gameplay, these sections work, which is why even if you take out everything else and focus only on the mini-map, the game still functions pretty well.
Minimaps are a user interface component that have become especially prevalent with the advent of open world games in the past decade and a half or so. Given large maps which players can easily get lost in, a large number of collectables, enemies that can come from any direction, and multiple missions you can start at a time, there needs to be some way to convey to the player a lot of spatial information. Mini-maps are a fine tool for this. But they don’t always completely fix all these problems, and sometimes, they can introduce new ones, especially if you’re just using them because everyone else is, without thinking through how they’re being integrated into the game at large. Like, for example, in GTA IV.
