Stop Getting Lost: Make Cognitive Maps, Not Levels

[Music] hello my name is nick awaijin i'm a game designer at that game company and today i'm going to talk to you all about cognitive maps and how to prevent your players from getting lost in your levels so as i said i'm a game designer at that game company but before i was a game designer i was actually in architecture and so a lot of the references and imagery um and knowledge that i'll be using in this presentation actually come from the domains of architecture and urban planning one of my big interests has always been wayfinding and navigation which is how we get here so we're going to jump right in and let's first start by defining what maps are so firstly a map is a tool a map helps you achieve something most of the time it's orienting yourself in relation to other things a map is made so

i can't go out into nature and find a map just sitting there on the ground it's either made by me or by somebody else it represents spaces or concepts it's pretty self-explanatory and it's relational so if i show you a piece of paper and it's got a dot on it and that dot is labeled paris that isn't a map just yet however if i show you that same piece of paper with a dot that says paris another dot that says cairo now we're beginning to form a map and those two dots can begin to anchor each other in space also a map has edges or limits even if it's a globe which is a map of the entire earth you're going to be limited by how much information you can get at particular scales etc there are a couple things maps aren't so maps aren't quote the truth uh they are not always orthographic so that kind of top-down view of something without any perspective that we associate with maps

maps don't always have to be that they're not always flat that polynesian stick chart that i'm showing on the top right is an example of a kind of three-dimensional very tactile map that maps ocean swells and islands to help navigators navigate wide expanses of ocean for example they're always not they're also not always physical which means they can take place in our minds which is as you guessed what a cognitive map is and it's prescriptive so if i show you a map of a part of the world that you're unfamiliar with and i label something incorrectly as far as you're concerned that's that incorrect label is is reality to you [Music] so let's talk about cognitive cognitive mapping this term was originally coined by edward tulman in his lab in 1948 so if you've seen imagery of rats in a maze running around trying to get a

piece of cheese that's where this is where it comes from so the experiment was as follows they would take a rat and place a rat in the apparatus that you see on the top left this kind of circular room and they would hide a piece of cheese where that letter g is located in that yellow diamond and the rat would eventually find that piece of cheese and then once consumed it would once the cheese was consumed they would put the rat back in the circle um and have the rat do this over and over until it was almost like muscle memory you know the rat would go in and knew exactly what routes to take and it would get the cheese then they would take that same rat and put it in the apparatus that you see in the middle so it's that same kind of rounded room but that original pathway was now blocked the researchers wanted to know would the rat once it realizes that path is blocked uh have some sort of intuition as to where this piece of cheese was and if it did it would probably bias channel 6

which is geographically where you would go if you just wanted to get the cheese but if it didn't we would if the rat didn't have a kind of understanding of what its world was in its own mind it would just bias all of the paths equally and as the researchers and tolman found out rats did create some sort of mental map of their environment as you can see on the bar on the right hand side that really tall the really tall bar is uh how many times those rats picked uh avenue six so that is uh what these cognitive maps are for rats but of course we're not rats we are people uh we have our own people brains and uh we inhabit non-trivial spaces we live in cities suburbs uh all all kinds of different environments that demand us to use our own cognitive maps on a daily basis so we can do a little exercise um to help you understand what your own cognitive map is like so

take five minutes and draw your neighborhood from memory on a piece of paper don't look anything up just try to just try to let your your mind guide your hand and just spend five minutes to do that so if you want to do that exercise go ahead and pause the video now if you've done that exercise you might have a drawing similar to the illustrations we see here on the top these illustrations actually came from the image of the city which is a book that urbanist kevin lynch published and kevin lynch went to a bunch of cities and asked people to do this very same thing hey can you draw me your neighborhoods and after parsing through all of those different illustrations he was able to discern five elements that people use to make sense of the spaces around them paths landmarks districts edges and nodes the rest of this talk is going to explain each one of these elements in detail and how we can use those to make really strong cohesive cognitive maps

but of course this talk is also about not getting lost so we need to explain what getting lost is now that we have a clear idea of a cognitive map getting lost is simply a misalignment of your cognitive map with what the world around you is with your surroundings it's that feeling of feeling like an area or a space is new but knowing for a fact that it isn't and it's generally a bad time this can result from changes in your environment or changes in your place within the environment or it can result from insufficiently broad or uh insufficiently clear cognitive maps because you're unable to respond to those changes in an adequate way similar to this image which is a map of the world you know it's upside down we might be able to tell it's a map of the world but i mean i'd be really hard-pressed to identify any particular country with the map upside down so let's talk about the first element uh the first are paths this is also the

most self-explanatory element it's a linear space that directs movement and travel and it also tends to be dominant in cognitive maps if you did the exercise earlier one of the first things you might have done was started diagramming all of the paths that uh you are aware uh in your neighborhood and these are things like sidewalks streets trails etc travel tends to be concentrated on them and because of that we tend to treat them differently you know we pave our roads uh we cut channels to make sure that water can flow through correctly that sort of thing and interestingly enough paths are the most temporal element so uh a path isn't useful to you if you're not you know moving along it and moving along that isn't moving along a path is inherently tied to time and so that process of incrementing your way along a path is what lynch called scaling there are a few limitations though when we're dealing with paths uh we kind of

digest them and use them in two day two ways uh one is dead reckoning and the other is path integration and they're technically different but for the sake of this presentation we can just think about both of these concepts as knowledge that where i am now is where i was previously plus all of the steps that i took uh since that last reference point this relies on continuity a proprioception or you know a good understanding of your own body and its movement throughout spaces a calculation intuition etc um however it can be difficult or impossible um to properly utilize a a map using using these techniques without knowledge of those things and a lot of times in games in particular you know i might not be fully aware of the movement mechanics i might not be fully aware of how how the camera or the player or what have you that i'm controlling can

experience that space and so my sense of proprioception there is really limited so we should keep that in mind when we're using paths so how can they help us you know prevent players from getting lost paths are really good at catching lost players you can think of you know being lost in a desert you're lost in a desert you really just need to pick a direction and start walking because you don't know where to go but once you come across a path or a street you've automatically eliminated one vector from your field of possibilities so now you either you just have to choose am i going to go left or am i going to go right so having a path is a really good way to catch players who might be deviating away and starting to get lost obviously paths also do great level design things like establishing player flow and connecting large areas together etc inadequate pathing in your space can make it difficult to connect areas of the cognitive map together and we have those limitations from dead reckoning and path integration that manifests that

manifest themselves even more in games one of the things to look out for as well with paths is that moving one way along a path does not necessarily mean moving the other way if you've had the experience of going on a hike reaching the end destination turning around and going back and not being fully sure if you're going down the same trail you've experienced this so just because you've placed paths inside of your level doesn't automatically mean that players suddenly won't get lost you need to make sure that you're addressing that concern as well the next element are landmarks also super self-explanatory and loved by level designers all over the place uh they're single localized and memorable features you know paths were these linear elements now we've got point references with these landmarks they tend to be things you want to take pictures of and they're recognizable either visually excuse me narratively or experientially you know it can be this randy's donuts shop or it could be the

bench that the character had their first kiss in for example landmarks can be useful in a number of different ways one of those is orienting players from a distance a lot of the times landmarks uh uh are tall and so you can see them from far away which is great um but they're also useful for orienting players when they're going down new paths and new journeys so if i'm going to an area that i haven't been to before but i maintain a reference point in a previous landmark that i've already established that'll help anchor the new information that i'm receiving in relation to that previous landmark also they tend to situate elements of this of the of your spaces um among themselves which is super important but also to note landmarks are essentially only useful if they're stationary so if you've got a large creature let's say that is walking around a big map um that creature is no longer that useful as a landmark because

it's moving all the time also they're much better when they're directional so i have this statue of liberty here on the eiffel tower the eiffel tower is radially symmetric so if i'm north of the eiffel tower looking back or i'm south of the eiffel tower looking back the eiffel tower is basically going to look the same to me but if i'm north of the statue of liberty and i'm south of the statue of liberty the way that the statue of liberty is made makes it very easy for me to discern that hey i'm in a different spot now so whenever you can if uh you know making sure that uh people can use that landmark to situate themselves around it is important to you try to make your your landmarks directional lastly uh photogrammetry is the process of taking multiple pictures of an object and then making a 3d model from that you want to think of your landmarks in a similar way if a landmark is only referenced one time it's not really going to be useful for the player to create their own cognitive map you want to make sure they're able to reference it as many times as

possible so that that reference point can be continually reinforced next up we have districts uh this is also self-explanatory a district is a region identified by a characteristic or quality and we have a point references with landmarks linear references with paths and now we've got these zonal references with districts here are a bunch of examples industrial zones downtowns nature preserves et cetera a good way to identify districts is to do what i call a squint test so if you look at your map and you squint your eyes and everything gets all blurry if you can start to distinguish different parts of that map you know like this area is a little red this area is you know looking a little different you can most of the time assume that those are your districts districts have edges and you go through them so you enter into these new kinds of spaces they tend to be mid to large scale and another good way of

thinking about districts is a color by number image so a color by number image is a kind of cohesive and consistent portrait as a whole but it's comprised of these unique and recognizable colors that work together to make it all work out likewise in our cognitive maps having cleared districts really helps to differentiate areas from each other [Music] an important thing with districts is the concept of clustering so i have two clusters here i've got a set of five clusters on the left and a set of five clusters on the right and the set of clusters that are on the left are way easier to remember than the ones on the right and that's because they are grouped with like objects um this type of clustering can be semantic or mechanical not just visual so you know it doesn't just have to be you know three pyramids here and three box buildings over here it can be you know

this is an area that i uh can jump really high this is an area where i get in cars and drive around et cetera isolating these uh these qualities in different areas like this is just generally good practice for world building and game design but it really helps reinforce a cognitive map because i could probably navigate away from this slide and because they're clustered in such a way the image on the left might still be something to remember whereas the image on the right you might forget the moment that i move away from it second to last we have edges so an edge is a linear reference but it's not a path these tend to control continuity or they separate things examples are gates walls cliffs borderlines etc and they tend to be elevational simply because we tend to move around the world horizontally so if we were if we you know flew around a lot or climbed a lot of trees uh edges could be barriers that are horizontal but most

the time uh they're vertical things it's stuff that you tend to go around or go along or things that you all you go through for example being on the outside of a building opening a door and entering inside of that building you want to be deliberate when you're working with paths you know crossing that threshold of a path or bling uh sorry of an edge uh crossing that threshold of the edge and um or being blocked by the edge are are really memorable experiences if that edge is really crisp and clean i noticed that sometimes we have this tendency to want to blur things like we don't want these like hard hard lines cutting through our landscapes and this isn't to say that you need to make hard lines but you should be deliberate in the limits and boundaries of these districts in the form of these edges because if the edges are blurred the cognitive map

of players is also going to reflect that blurred nature and it's not going to be as good at anchoring them when when they do start getting lost these occur a lot in games there's level transitions level boundaries mechanical boundaries portals ledges walls cliffs etc so we have plenty of opportunity to liberally use edges and we want to take full advantage of those and lastly we have nodes so annoy a node is a convergence of paths it's a point reference but uh it's a point reference that is defined by pads which is the other element most of the time these are things like traffic intersections transit hubs or home spaces or hub spaces that allow you to access multiple different locations of the game from from one spot if there is a place that has many ends or many outs that's usually a node um they tend to be denser uh than the

adjacent areas just because you know these are places that players and people flock to when they're uh navigating in general so they're good to have um excuse me you know there's that expression all load all roads lead to rome um and in this example rome is a node having uh having a location that is repeatedly used by people on their way to get somewhere is really important and really valuable so when you're making a node or when you've recognized that you have created a node in a game that you're working on you really want to start working on place making there in order to make it as recognizable as possible these nodes can be destinations they don't just have to be things that you go in or go through and a good way to to facilitate that is just make sure that people can spend some time there as opposed to just you know be transient and move move through

something i've been on plenty highway intersections uh having grown up my whole life in la uh but if you were to drop me in one of these big highway interchanges i might be hard-pressed to know where i am without all without all the signage so if you want if you're gonna make a node uh try to turn it into a place and not just some you know arbitrary thing you pass through so those are the five elements you know what they are how you can identify them how you can leverage them and why they're useful but now let's talk about more specifically implementing them in our design practice so the first thing i like to do is do an audit try to look at levels and spaces that i've already made and identify existing paths landmarks districts edges and nodes in those areas then once i've done that i want to assess the clarity and readability of those things if i'm kind of doing this audit and then i'm saying that could be a landmark or that looks like a good enough district et cetera it

probably isn't a good enough landmark and it probably isn't a district so that's a key for me to go back and uh you know clarify those things you know really uh really not be shy about these design decisions that i'm making uh then i want to organize uh my space so i tend to work because the architectural background i like to work in plan first and i like to think of plan as the organization or structure for everything i think the plan should be clear and legible and by looking at that plan you should be able to easily recognize almost all of these elements there once the plan kind of really pops with all of these elements and the really distinct then i like to move on to section and section is where i think the emotion comes out where the storytelling happens where the experience really takes place just because i've got you know one of these elements in my plan it doesn't mean it's actually going to come through in my section when i'm experiencing the

game so if i see on my plan there's this really strong landmark but then when i start playing the game that landmark isn't really reading that's a key to me to go back and edit that landmark to make sure that it's legible uh when i'm playing the game speaking of playing the game it's super important to test if you can without a hud or a mini-map or ui etc why is this a couple of things using tools like a radar gps or a mini-map can lead us into digesting spaces using an egocentric frame of reference as opposed to an allocentric frame of reference so what do these mean egocentric frame of reference means i'm the center of the universe and the universe kind of revolves around me as i go through it if you've used a gps navigation system on your phone that's egocentric this can be difficult because you're navigating in this piecemeal fashion

where you're primarily focused on what your next maneuver is going to be you know i need to turn right in 500 feet and turn left et cetera and breaking down the journey in that way uh has been shown to result in a decrease in route memory it can also disengage you from the environment because you're exploring the uh the map or the ui or the hud instead of the space itself what you're trying to do is actually take that triangle and move it to that circle and your character moving through the world is just a byproduct of you trying to get those shapes um to align however if you test without the aid of a heads-up display etc um you tend to do more allocentric uh uh mapping allocentric mapping is i am not the center of the world the world exists and i am simply moving through it it's this kind of big picture navigation and when you when you do things this way there tends to be an increase in route memory uh you're engaged more with your

environment and you're exploring the space instead of just exploring the map itself i have this uh image here of the fish in the lake and the bird in the trees so the fish in the lake can see the bird in the trees and it can see the trees but it can't see the lake because that's that's where it is likewise the bird can identify the fish and the lake but not the forest because it's understanding things egocentrically what we want to do to get a clear picture of everything is try to get what the image in the center is which is essentially an allocentric frame of reference which is you know this is the environment and the player is simply moving through the environment so the tldr of this talk is one there exist things called cognitive maps it is the digestion of uh the environments that you go through that uh exist in everybody's head getting lost is when that cognitive map

is misaligned with the environment with misaligned with what the environment is currently telling you so how can we how can we prevent players from getting lost well we can try to foster clear cognitive maps and how can we do that we can use a toolkit uh using paths landmarks districts edges and nodes to make sure that our spaces are robust and can actually foster these robust cognitive maps and a good way to do that is just be deliberate i've included this uh lovely uh food tray here because yeah i could take the same food tray with all of those same ingredients and just kind of like mix it all up in there and everything's you know all up on top of each other and blended um but it wouldn't be as appetizing first of all and secondly uh it wouldn't be as memorable to me excuse me it would have the same nutritional value but by virtue of the way it's organized it's

not going to read as clearly and with this one you know i can do my squint tests you know and i can begin to start making out districts i can kind of start to make out landmarks even with this food so you can really apply these design strategies to nearly everything lastly i wanted to just show you and all of these different references that i have used and to try to you know understand these things for myself um these are all people who are way more intelligent than i am and if you're interested in pursuing this topic further i would encourage you to go here um here are a bunch of more names uh that you should continue to take a look at go ahead and pause the video and any one of these is going to be an exciting paper for you to enjoy so i will go back thank you very much i hope that this helped enlighten you and helps you understand uh how to prevent your players from getting lost and introduced

a new paradigm for understanding how you can design your levels specifically for that use case my name is nikai jin i hope you have a great day and that's it thank you so much all right bye [Music] you