Blog Archives
Space-Cast! #49. A Vantage on Vantage
By now you’ve likely heard of Vantage, the ambition first-person exploration game about surviving and thriving on an alien planet. For today’s Space-Cast!, we’re joined by Jamey Stegmaier to discuss the eight-year inception, development, and eventual appearance of this wonderful and strange artifact. Along the way, we discuss Vantage’s inspirations, how design constraints can engender greater freedom, and games within games.
Listen over here or download here. Timestamps can be found after the jump.
Life in First-Person
There’s an exercise I sometimes use in class to help my students break out of their modern mindset. Everyone gets a sheet of paper and swears to avoid looking at anyone else’s work until we’re finished. Then I ask them to draw a picture of where they are in the world. To place themselves within their surroundings.
For most modern people, the reflex is to draw a map. The layout of the lecture hall, the nearby buildings, maybe our city or state or country. This isn’t universal; those with aphantasia might create rudimentary images, while my more artistically minded students sketch the nearby mountains. (Or me, sitting at the front of the class, looking more pouchy and tired than I’d prefer.) But in most cases, maybe seventy to eighty percent of the time, they draw a map. Bird’s eye view, top-down, like something you’d see on a navigation tool.
And then we talk. Because for most humans in most places and most times, a map was an impossibility. Perhaps surveyors and astronomers had created one, a painstaking process that still resulted in an unreliable thing with uncharted gaps and “here be dragons” scrawled in the margins. More often, the best one could hope for was a series of landmarks. A settlement here, a strange rock over there, a mountain or lake on the horizon. Your world was a series of visual cues, a vast maw that threatened to swallow you up the instant you strayed from its stepping stones.
This modern tendency to locate ourselves on a map creeps into our thinking about… well, everything. The identity of our kinsmen, neighbors, and rivals. The spaces that can be considered safe or dangerous. The distance between points. Our place within a country, continent, time zone, planet, ecology. Who we are.
Way more important than any of that identity junk, of course, is that maps also make their way into board games. Whether we’re talking about hex grids or squiggly provinces, nearly every board game about kingdom-building or exploration stands its players on firm footing, located safely within the confines of a perfectly scaled representation of reality.
Except for Vantage.
SPACE-BIFF! 