Strange US
After a long dry spell, Strange Maps treated me this morning with a massive thirteen new strange maps to look at. This is a neat site, willing to cover all kinds of unusual maps: historical oddities, geological oddities, maps of fictional locations, humorous maps, gross mapmaking errors, maps designed for propaganda purposes, whatever. The map that particularly caught my attention this morning was a map designed for an adventure game set in post-apocalyptic America. However, the map has almost nothing in common with the USA; among other weirdness, Chicago is north of Mount Rushmore, which lies in the heart of the continent, Alaska is an island dominated by a city called “Ice Castle,” Carlsbad Caverns appear in two locations, Missouri is reduced from a state to a city, and the coastlines resemble nothing I’ve ever seen.
The attached commentary observes that the map is something like what you might get if you got a bunch of Japanese game designers together, got them drunk, and had them assemble a map on a cocktail napkin out of what they could collectively remember of US geography. For all I know, that’s how it was, in fact, created, especially since the detailing of sites look like someone’s trip to the Grand Canyon while vast swaths of the rest of the country simply fail to appear. Certainly, it’s a gross miscarriage of geography.
But, to be fair, I had to speculate on what drunken Americans with a cocktail napkin would produce from their collective memory. They’d probably manage to depict Japan as an island—whether they’d get all four main islands is doubtful—but what else?
I could draw a pretty good likeness of the coastline, even while drunk. Maybe I’d draw the main island a little too fat and a little too straight, but the outline would look okay. I could get the angular shape of Hokkaido, including the little hook at the southern tip, Yokohama harbor, the bean-shaped Shikoku, the peninsular shelf Honshu dangles over Kyushu. But after getting the coastline down, what then? I could place Tokyo and Kyoto, probably Osaka. Sapporo, I know, is somewhere on Hokkaido, but where? I’m not sure which island Nagoya is on. Mount Fuji? Uh, it’s in there somewhere. Don’t even ask about other natural landmarks.
And I’m way more familiar with Japanese geography than most Americans. I like maps. A lot. I traced a large map of Japan a couple of times for a home-made adaptation of a railroad game set in the northeast US, and agonized over where to allow bridges and tunnels. I’ve studied maps of Japan as background for a Torg campaign, and as a possible Civ scenario.
Eileene suggests that demanding a cocktail-napkin version of Europe from drunken Americans would be a fairer test on the grounds that we, as a people, see it more often, but I’m not convinced. The Japanese hear a lot of America as a unit in the news, but no more than we hear of tsunami disasters and the Japanese stock market. They may visit more often—or they may not; I don’t know—but I doubt many tourists drive the country; they stick to a single city, or the environs of Disneyland, just like we do. I’ve seen some pretty appalling drawings of the US by Americans. God help us if our drunken cartographers include South Carolinian beauty queens.
I suspect that, forced to draw a map of Japan, with post-apocalyptic points of interest, and not allowed to just leave the paper blank, most Americans, including American game designers, would come up with a comparable geographical travesty. Of course, any decent game designer would take at least ten minutes to copy something out of an atlas, more if they abandoned the rather silly notion that the apocalypse dramatically redrew all the coastlines, but budgets are tight. Sometimes people don’t have ten minutes to look at an atlas. They’re busy coding, or applying makeup, or something.
The map isn’t entirely wrong. As the commentary points out, New Jersey appears to be a hole in the ground.