About This Project

tl; dr

In order to make this map, I sent out a Google Form to Random Hall’s mailing list, asking for distinctive memories set on campus. I also asked some of my friends for their own memories of campus, as well as incorporating some of my own. I then used the Inform language to write a parser (interactive) fiction version of Main Campus, where every memory I received was associated with some physical location, and exported this to a final browser game!

To add a memory, fill out this form https://forms.gle/QNwyfbskXeV7GYRr7. I’m especially looking for memories from cruft! (For prefrosh, a cruft is someone who’s already graduated.)

What is this map, exactly?

It’s a way to explore the MIT campus through the medium of a browser game. You can walk around and look at different objects and areas in Main Campus. (If you’ve never been to campus, there are a lot of different buildings in different areas, but Main Campus is located at the center and has most of the classrooms. It’s also publicly accessible.) It’s a game in the sense that you have a lot of control over what to look at and where you go. It’s not a game in the sense that there are no set goals or destinations, and the interactivity is somewhat limited- you can’t directly affect most objects.

This map is open to anyone, but the target audience is prefrosh and potential students as well as cruft- in other words, both the past and the future of MIT. For cruft, I wanted to provide a way of returning to campus- maybe not physically but mentally: to experience a digital mirror of campus as it is now. For prefrosh, I wanted to show you one of the things that’s so special about MIT, and provide another way for you to explore MIT before you come here in the fall.

Motivations: Any map is a representation and a simplification. Maps are models, and as models they lose some information: if a model is completely accurate, it’s no longer a model, it’s just reality. In the process of making a map, you have to choose what information to lose and what information to keep.

Standard maps are very concerned with spatial characteristics and distance and layout. What does a standard map tell you? You learn about the approximate size and layout of rooms; you learn where places are situated in respect to each other. You learn about the intended uses of rooms (“Women’s Bathroom”, “Math Department”) and the routes you can use to get between them. A map like this can answer questions like How far is Building 10 from Building 2? and What’s the fastest way to get from Stata to the Hayden Library? and What’s the location of every piano on campus?

But you might have other questions.

The experience of being in a place involves not only the layout and spatial characteristics but also something more. A physical place acts as an anchor for the experiences you’ve had there; any object has a series of associations and implications in the observer’s head.

When you go somewhere you bring your entire history with you. Your past is a lens. It focuses reality into an image in your head, which is something else, something that carries your history and memories and desires. An ordinary map is stripped of all of this. By making this model, I wanted to convey the extra-spatial information instead; I wanted to convey something about the experience of being a student on campus, both to other students and to people who have never visited MIT at all. The goal of this map is to answer questions like How does the light fall in Lobby 7? and What is it like to walk through the Infinite? and What memories do you associate with these stairs?

This map lacks a strong sense of size or layout or distance. There are no visuals or audio; you have to imagine every place yourself, based only on the descriptions. It is very spare on details compared to other forms of representation. On the other hand, you can experience other people’s memories, embedded in the prose. It might be interesting to open a standard floorplan of MIT while exploring this map. Together, maybe they add up to something closer to the whole thing.

[This project was heavily inspired by Invisible Cities,¹ which discusses the internal experience of being in a city, as well as some of Emily Short’s writing on the sense of place in traditional interactive fiction and the effect of digital tools on storytelling.² Some of the literature on the purpose of digital mapping and the components of a map also inspired my methodology.³

Adding To This Project

This is a participative project. The memories and descriptions in the game are not just my own; they are sourced from many people, with many different experiences of campus. In the map, the memories themselves have been anonymized, removed from their original context. While “you” are experiencing the map, “you” are not yourself; you are a fictional, generic student, an amalgamation of the memories of many people.

If you’re interested in contributing, fill out the Google Form below.

If you find any bugs, or have suggestions about format or technical details, feel free to email me at mit-if-map@mit.edu.

Google Form Link: https://forms.gle/QNwyfbskXeV7GYRr7

How To Play

You can access the game at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1awwTrBf-LByYgv4wPUQDm0lNqS5ExG0U/view?usp=sharing. Download the zip file onto your computer, extract it (you can just click on it and it should extract automatically) and then click play.html and it should open in your browser.

There are two main types of actions available to you: examining objects and walking around the map. To examine an object, type “examine (object name)” or “x (object name)” for short. Examining objects might trigger a description or a memory. Some objects don’t have any information yet- to add a description or associated memory for them, fill out the form!

To walk around the map, type one of the eight cardinal directions. For example, typing “east” from Lobby 7 will take you to the Infinite, and typing “southeast” will take you to the coffeeshop. You can return to the direction you entered from by typing the opposite cardinal direction- for example, typing “northwest” will take you from the coffeeshop back to Lobby 7.

Methodological Reflection

I was fairly set on making a interactive fiction map from the beginning of this project, although I wasn’t sure exactly what I was planning to include. I’ve worked with maps before, especially GIS data and digital maps. Making or looking at a map can give you a different way of understanding a space— sometimes by showing its physical layout, but also by changing your perspective on its characteristics or salient features.

I’ve spent a lot of time exploring and studying and working on Main Campus, sometimes upwards of 15 hours a day. I’ve heard a lot of people complain about the ugly brutalist aesthetic, but I think I’ve spent so much time and have so many memories here that I have an affection for it; the space is not just the space but also the collection of memories and the people who live here. So I wanted to illuminate all of these extra-spatial things. I wanted to recontextualize the campus as a place that carries the emotions and memories of its inhabitants.

I spent some time thinking about both the affordances of the digital methods I picked as well as the components of a map. One urban planning paper⁴ helped me figure out what details contribute to people’s experiences of a place like the MIT campus, and accordingly what my adaptation could gain or lose. Specifically, they discussed the components of a mental map: nodes, paths, districts, edges, and landmarks. This helped me anchor my descriptions and my map by either including details to help with visualization or deliberately excluding details (for example, specific dimensions, or distances) where I felt they would detract from the experience.

Logistically, I could have included pictures or audio. I decided not to do this because it runs counter to my goals for the project; I wanted it to be purely text, so that anyone reading the prose could bring their own assumptions and experiences to it instead of me imposing a particular interpretation on them.

I took some inspiration from some of the writing in the Milton-Cobello book about IF and hypertext.⁵ In particular they discussed how IF is a form of participatory storytelling, requiring the reader to shape the direction of the story. In my own project I wanted to reflect the internal experience of wandering around campus, and the interactive narrative format helped a lot with this. I tried to keep the explicitly interaction-oriented nature of the story in mind while writing the map, trying to make sure that the content rewarded free exploration and close reading of descriptions. Unlike in a novel or an essay, the explorer can jump around and go in any direction and look at anything they want. The map is unanchored in time. While objects are associated with memories, the explorer is looking backwards on them, and they’re unordered, not forming a plot or a story. I wanted to show the fabric of memories without following any one person’s particular strand.

I was also informed by some of the writing in class about audiences and publics;⁶ it helped me consider both the audiences and publics relevant to my own project (the readers of the admissions blogs, prefrosh, cruft) and the public I was depicting in my project (mostly students). It’s interesting to me that these groups don’t necessarily align.

I did briefly consider some different methods for implementing the narrative. I knew I wanted to work with something that involved audience input, as well as something that took advantage of explicitly digital methods. I considered Twine, but Twine is built more for choice-based stories than map-based stories. It also restricts the player by limiting their choices to just the highlighted words in the text. Unlike Inform, the “fundamental unit of Twine” is the word, so it is well-suited for stories that are based on words or interested in words.⁷ I was more interested in physical spaces and less interested in chronological plots, which lends itself well to Inform.

Inform allows the creator to build a map, with rooms and connections between rooms and objects in the rooms. Users interact with the story via a parser, which is somewhat less user-friendly but allows a much larger range of actions and options. It also internally simulates a physical space, building a digital map which the user interacts with via commands. (This is in contrast to Twine, which internally builds a choice tree.) This makes it significantly easier to easily implement things like the position of rooms with respect to each other, or objects with descriptions within the rooms.

In the prose, I was inspired by a lot of traditional IF games, with their detailed descriptions of rooms and heavy sense of place. In an article on her website, Emily Short discusses how this was one of the first tropes to emerge from parser fiction, to a degree not really seen in other genres or forms.⁸ I found this really interesting- I don’t think I’d articulated that distinction to myself before, so learning some of the characteristics of the adaptation method I picked helped me articulate the way I wanted to tell my story. I spent a decent amount of time revising my prose and descriptions, trying to evoke the sense of place. Writing and revising the prose was most of the work I ended up doing for the project. After getting some feedback from people testing the map, I realized that I needed to better signal the range of potential options, so I’ve both tried to include short descriptions for most objects that someone would look at and also made the error text more helpful and less frustrating. I’m also thinking about implementing a way to highlight words in the text as examined/unexamined.

The project presentation itself was mostly an expression of my motivations and thoughts about the game itself. Incorporating feedback, I tried to make it more tuned to my potential audience, and fixed some issues with flow and clarity (and grammar). I did ask the WCC for feedback about the flow and clarity, which was very helpful in directing my revisions. I also added an instructional section to hopefully make the map itself easier to use and understand.

If I were to extend this project, I would implement many more rooms and extend the amount of objects users can look at, to capture more of the depth and detail of campus. I’d also like to take more external input on the descriptions- while the memories were sourced from several places, the physical descriptions were very centered on my own viewpoint. To achieve the goal of making it a true collaborative map it might be nice to have more perspectives.

---

1. Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino↩︎
2. Writing In Collaboration With The System, Emily Short↩︎
3. Urban form and digitalization of urban design, Chenghe Guan.↩︎
4. Urban form and digitalization of urban design, Chenghe Guan.↩︎
5. Translation, Adaptation, and Digital Media, John Milton and Silvia Cobelo, pgs 86-90↩︎
6. The Anthropology of Texts, Persons, and Publics, Ch. 5 Audiences and Publics, Karin Barber↩︎
7. Writing In Collaboration With The System, Emily Short↩︎
8. Writing In Collaboration With The System, Emily Short↩︎