New Publication: ‘Mapping Imaginary Spaces: From Database to Folk Cartography’
Front cover of Daniel Punday’s (ed.) volume, Digital Narrative Spaces
Manchester Metropolitan Game Centre co-director Paul Wake’s chapter on mapping in adventure gamebooks, ‘Mapping imaginary spaces: From Database to Folk Cartography’ has just been published as part of the new volume, Digital Narrative Spaces: An Interdisciplinary Examination edited by Dan Punday.
Taking Gabriel Zoran’s suggestion that there is a lack of ontological clarity in the total space of fictional texts as its start point, Wake’s chapter examines the interrelation of storyworlds and the contextual spaces in which storytellers, texts, and audiences are situated. Applying insights from geography, narrative theory, new materialism, and interface studies to the analysis of reader-made maps of Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone’s gamebook The Warlock of Firetop Mountain (1982), his chapter suggests that a focus on mapmaking as process, and on the objects with which maps are made, reveals a continuity between, rather than the separation of, technology, user and world. Mapping, Wake argues, involves readers in a process of orientation as integration.
The chapter proceeds through a reading of reader-made maps of Jackson and Livingstone’s Fighting Fantasy gamebook, maps which are categorized under the headings of ‘database maps’ and ‘folk cartography’, both of which are afforded two aspects. The database map offers a spatial representation of the entire text, while the ‘solution map’, a subset of the database, represents a single realization of the encounter with the text. The alignment of these two maps, one the property of the text, the other of the reader, indicate successful or failed navigation. Maps placed under the heading of ‘folk cartography’, further recognise the creativity of the reader-player while drawing attention to the network of actors involved in the process of that creative endeavor, drawing attention to the tension inherent in definitions of folk art, a form regarded as both highly individualistic and as a form of community practice and representation.
Through his reading of these maps, Wake argues that the mapping of fictional spaces has at its core two defining and seemingly antithetical impulses: extraction (the goal-oriented pattern matching by which readers recognize texts as complete) and entanglement (the connections that immerse readers within a storyworld by placing players within networks of objects that form and reform, de-centering the imaginative world of the text and exploring the fluidity of the constellation of author, text, reader and world.
The book is currently available with a 20% discount (now £23.99) in Routledge’s End of Year Sale.