i think the original DOOM games were great examples of interactive variety, even tho almost every level looks the same (same textures and what not). i still remember maps like “Phobos Anomaly” from Doom1 (with the barrels at the beginning…then the bridge to horrifying twin barons)…and from Doom 2, “Barrels of Fun”, “Tricks and Traps”, “Gauntlet”, and “Sewers”..and some others i can’t remember by name. each of those maps had pretty unique personality in their lay out and monster placement. hard to find in modern FPS’s…

You’re right about GTA. That was a probably a poor example on my part.

In Doom I, I do remember now going back and forth across some of the maps, but still very uninteresting from a landmark point of view. Part of the puzzle seemed to be to find your way through a maze of similar corridors and rooms.

GTA, not so much. In the course of a typical play session you crisscross older routes quite frequently. Most of the people I know who’ve played those games develop a decent mental map of the cities.

And actually Doom1&2s’ levels are less linear than you may remember. They’re kind of like more complex versions of Tempest levels to me, variously-shaped prisms for the core mechanics.

The modern games that really defeat landmark formation are linear, single-player FPS games where every environment is just a tunnel of scripted sequences. You get to the end of the current tunnel and never look back, so all the layouts and flow of the spaces slide out of your brain like teflon. That there are so many such games on the market today probably goes a ways towards explaining the lack lamented in the original article.

Valve did a good job establishing the HL2 citadel as a persistent visual landmark, but it’s always just skybox – there’s never a point where you move right up to it in contiguous physical space like you can walk up to a particular building in a real downtown city area. So it’s not a landmark to me in any of the ways that various buildings here in Boston are.

In a sense, a game landmark is only a landmark if you have enough agency in the space to situate yourself relative to it. Multiplayer maps have it easy in that regard.

That’s sort of missing from a lot of modern games. If you’re playing in a GTA game or Doom and such you are just zooming through locations and not really exploring them. I was just playing Saint’s Row again and was struck buy how beautiful some of the locations are in that game. I was thinking, um, why didn’t I notice how cool this looks before? I mean, I think I sorta noticed it from the screenshots before but while playing it I was so busy following the path on the radar or shooting enemies that it was mostly lost on me at the time. All the gameplay overshadowed the locations so there is no concrete sense of space. It just all became something like “you got to go about half-away across the city to location B to gun down so-and-so of such-and-such gang” in my mind.

If you spend a lot of time in one location you start to notice how the location itself can help in your gameplay goals. That’s one reason that de_dust is such a great example of a location. In order to play that map well you have to know that map well because that’s the first thing that players will exploit usually.

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