(Not) Seeing the World Through a Mini-map - On Mini-maps in Sleeping Dogs, Grand Theft Auto, and Metal Gear Solid

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.

GTA III: Vice City.  Pink dot is the objective, and the blue
spray paint icon there is for a nearby spray shop.

Grand Theft Auto III, released in 2001 by developer DMA Design and publisher Rockstar Games, is pretty much the game that started the wave of open world games that we’re still seeing today.  Its mini-map worked well at the time: overlaid on the road map in the corner of the screen was your location, any nearby enemies, and police cars if you had a wanted level.  If you were a mission, you’d get a coloured dot showing where the objective was.  7 years later, we got Grand Theft Auto IV.  Liberty City in GTA III was a very straightforward to navigate area, with three smallish islands with a lot of grid-based streets and easily discernible, discrete sections, like Chinatown, the Red Light District, and Saint Mark’s; it didn’t take long for you to familiarize yourself with the general layout.  In GTA IV, Liberty City is a whole lot more intricate; there are tunnels and overpasses, highways and on/off ramps, bridges, and a lot of alleys leading to dead ends, and the map is a lot bigger and a lot more confusing.  And to guide you through it, the ole’ dependable minimap in the corner was back, except it wasn’t as reliable anymore.  Just like in playing Metal Gear Solid, my eyes often drifted to the mini-map in the corner, and just like in that game, it was during a core mechanic of the game, in this case the driving.  But unfortunately, the mini-map, just like in III, only ever shows you the roads, the enemies, the cops, and, by now, also a GPS route to your destination; it doesn't show the cars on the road, or the lamp posts, or the street dividers, or any of the other things that I'd often crash into while I was checking to see if I'd passed my turn yet.  The mini-map is there to help you navigate the city, so until/unless you completely familiarize yourself with the map, you're probably going to have to check the corner of the screen every few blocks or so, but you're not doing this hidden in the corner, away from where the slow patrolling guards can disturb you, like in Metal Gear Solid; you're doing this while weaving in and out of traffic, sometimes with cop cars chasing you or bad guys shooting at you, sometimes with a ticking timer, sometimes trying to chase down moving targets.  So yeah, crashes came often.  The mini-map in both MGS and GTA are conveying vital information.  But GTA is a series that's continuously trying to rebuild the real world and then exaggerating certain aspects of it, while MGS has never shied from revelling in its video game-iness.

Sleeping Dogs

Sleeping Dogs is another open-world game, this one published in 2012 by Square.  If GTA is part of a specific genre, then Sleeping Dogs definitely also counts itself as a member (crime simulator?); it’s obviously following in its footsteps: a city, lots of driving, a semi-open mission structure, shooting, fighting, and carjacking.  Sleeping Dogs is also a fantastic game, and one of the biggest reasons for that is that it's so clearly a game designed with the user experience in mind first and foremost, especially when in a car, belying the kart racing genre background of its game developer, United Front Games.  The streets are wide, the intersections are great for powersliding through, the alleys are all shortcuts and not dead ends, traffic on highways is sparse enough to not completely block you off while giving you lots of cars to dodge, car handling is quick and responsive, and everything on the sidewalks can be driven through.  Their mini-map also shows your destination and a route there, but United Front also thought of a solution for mini-map fixation: if the GPS route showed that you should take the next left, they simply draw a marker in front of you, on the road itself, pointing you left, and they also place a floating marker at your destination that even indicates how far away you are.  It's completely unrealistic and completely unexplained in the game itself, but it also makes driving in Sleeping Dogs so much more fun than it would be otherwise.  United Front isn’t just following every other developer’s lead in developing Sleeping Dog’s user interface; they actually sat down and thought about the information they’re trying to convey to the player, and the best way to do so.  And they’re also building the city, the missions, and everything else, around what makes sense for the game, and not just in replicating the real world.

The biggest issue I can think people might have against the floating markers Sleeping Dogs uses is that it's unimmersive, and that it takes you out of the game.  For those people, there's probably an option to turn it off in settings if you really want to.  And maybe there's a better solution out there, but I like United Front's approach to fixing it.  And this issue of becoming too fixated on a smaller screen, of multi-tasking and looking at two different things at once, of not looking up, and missing the bigger picture, well those are all issues that have become increasingly prevalent with the rise of smartphones and GPS systems.  

A minimap is just a way to convey information to the player about their surroundings and enemy positions.  They've become a staple of open world games, because linear level design can't be used to lead players to mission objectives anymore; the player must always have the option to go in any given direction, while still being given guidance towards the places they might want to go.  GTA and Sleeping Dogs both have larger maps you can pause and pull up, but its useful always having the mini-map in the corner for the player to glance at.  At what point though, does the minimap become a crutch, for both the player and the game developer?  On the higher difficulties, the minimap is disabled in Metal Gear Solid.  It's absolutely possible to play through that game without it.  It's also possible to do so in GTA; you can always bring up the map in the pause menu to check where you're going, and you could possibly play through the game that way.  But the game is designed with the idea that the player always has the mini-map to look at; that's been the go-to solution since GTA III, but the maps have gotten larger and more complex, and the user interface hasn't evolved along with them.  There's a reason why so many shooters and action-adventure games use linear point A to B level design, with lots of narrow corridors and little chance to get lost.  It's an easy formula to get wrong, but you also have revered classics such as Half-Life and Halo using it because it's generally a good idea for the player to know where they should and can go next, and for level design to support that.  Grand Theft Auto's maps don't seem like their built with the user interface in mind, either.  Does it make sense to have underground tunnels, roads, and areas, in a game where the minimap can't convey such information?  I've increasingly run into issues in open world games in recent years, where I'm at the destination marker or target on my minimap, but my actual objective is below or above me and I have to wander around a bit before I find it.  Which isn't to say that all open world games should have completely horizontal and flat, maps, just that their design should keep in mind what the players are experiencing.  Sleeping Dogs does that, and they also keep in mind that realism shouldn't trump fun when it comes to game design, and so does Metal Gear Solid.  Hopefully Grand Theft Auto remembers this as well in future iterations.