Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Sonny Sidhu
Fall 2008
Sonny Sidhu
Swarthmore College
Film and Media Studies 086: Theory and History of Video Games
Professor Bob Rehak
Fall 2008
The heads-up display, or HUD, is gamingʼs most recognizable idiom, and in many ways the
video game experience is inextricably linked with the visual regime of the HUD. In gamer cul-
ture, many games and gametypes are inextricably linked with their HUD iconography, like the
iconic row of hearts in the Legend of Zelda series or the generic dual health bars associated
with fighting games. In wider visual culture, the language of the HUD has become a common
shorthand for the particular condition of video game avatar subjectivity, and is commonly em-
ployed whenever ʻreal lifeʼ is meant to be understood as being ʻlike a video gameʼ by an audi-
ence comprised of gamers and non-gamers alike. How did the HUD become so central to the
video game medium, in the cultural imagination and in fact? Is the HUD truly necessary to a
playerʼs enjoyment of and success within a game environment? If so, are current strategies of
HUD representation the most effective ones available in a medium that increasingly strives for
maximum immersive effect in single-player narrative gameplay?
Any exploration of the role of the HUD in video game design must begin with an acknowledg-
ment of the fact that games are a primarily visual and auditory medium. In any game, vital data
regarding the state of the game environment or avatar must be made visually or audibly intelli-
gible to the player, or it will effectively be inaccessible to her. In most cases, this limitation man-
dates the use of a HUD to place information within the visual frame—such as score, time
elapsed or remaining, location relative to objective, health, ammunition count, inventory, etc.—
that would otherwise not be consistently, visually or audibly apparent and accessible to the
player. Historically, this strategy of representation was necessitated by the limitations of game
graphics and display technologies, and the resultant need to clearly visually signify details oth-
erwise too subtle to be rendered by a gameʼs graphics engine. But the use of a HUD in video
game design is not solely a concession to the limitations of game graphics; rather, it also repre-
sents a game designerʼs understanding that entering even the most graphically lush game world
through the most sophisticated television set necessarily entails a certain compromise in sen-
sory, spatial, and situational awareness that must be compensated for either visually or audibly
in order for the environment to be understandable to the player. Indeed, some gametypes are
impossible to imagine without some form of robust HUD or menu mechanism, including real-
time strategy games, combat-based role-playing games, and sports games. But the advent of
high-definition display standards and the ever-increasing sophistication of game graphics opens
the door for a wholesale reconsideration of the role of the HUD in gametypes not fundamentally
dependent on the playerʼs access to visual representations of abstract data—particularly narra-
tive gametypes such as single-player action games, adventure games, and first-person shoot-
ers.
The representative strategies employed by each of these games have been widely hailed by
game critics and theorists for their uniquely immersive effects. To G4 commentator John Mana-
lang, the recent trend for diminished or diegetically immersed HUDs in game design is long
overdue, and represents the natural next step in an evolutionary trajectory of gaming that has
seen the increasing sophistication of game graphics dovetail with an increasing emphasis on
immersive strategies of subjective displacement in narrative gameplay. Manalang wonders,
“Game graphics and storylines are getting closer and closer to ʻreal life,ʼ so why do we accept
the contrivance of the HUD? Why do we accept that the character we're playing instantly knows
exactly how many gunshots he can suffer before he dies or exactly how far he has to walk to his
destination?” Manalangʼs incredulity reflects a growing consensus, among game critics, that the
traditional video game HUD represents an obstacle to maximum player immersion in a game
environment. Greg Wilson, a critic and former game designer, describes the HUD in the essay
“Off With Their HUDs!” as “an accepted shorthand, a direct pipeline from the developer to the
end-user.” In Wilsonʼs formulation, the HUD is gamingʼs broken fourth wall, through which the
player is able to step outside the subjectivity of her avatar and access a privileged plane of in-
formation, constructed within but transmitted outside the game world, which flows directly from
developer to player. While HUD-enabled objective mastery of game worlds is, admittedly, often
essential to success within them, the HUD nevertheless serves as a constant visual reminder of
the video game mediumʼs hypermediated artificiality.
While several recent games attack and erase these visual reminders of artificiality through the
use of a diminished or diegetically immersed HUD, very few attempt to address the more fun-
damental artificiality inherent in the introduction of omniscient game-world knowledge to an
avatar-based, subjectively grounded game. Games such as Dead Space, Metroid: Prime, and
Assassinʼs Creed have not genuinely done away with the HUD. Rather, they have merely dis-
guised it, as such, by relocating it to fit within the subjectivity of an avatar whose awareness of
the game world, according to the gameʼs convenient narrative, is technologically enhanced to
include HUD-like functions. These visual and narrative strategies may effectively sweep some of
the obvious wreckage of gamingʼs broken fourth wall out of sight, but they make no attempt to
repair it; player omniscience in relation to the game world is as crucial to success in a game with
a diegetic HUD as in any other. The persistence of an omniscient HUD mechanic—even in
games such as Metroid: Prime, Dead Space, and Assassinʼs Creed, which actively criticize the
outward artificiality of traditional HUD representations—suggests that the HUD is in some sense
an inescapable necessity in the construction of player awareness of a game world. It seems,
still, that the only way to mitigate the compromises in awareness and presence inherent in the
exploration of a large and three-dimensional virtual world through a small and two-dimensional
frame is through the introduction of visual and auditory cues representative of abstract or off-
screen information—traditionally speaking, a HUD. Indeed, according to the critic Marque Corn-
Cornblatt notes that his conception of the video game HUD as a map or mandala for progress
within the game immediately challenges the concept that “the map is not the territory.” This dic-
tum, coined by the scientist and philosopher Alfred Korzybski, holds that an abstraction derived
from a thing is not the thing itself. According to Korzybski, individuals and societies often limit
their own understanding of things by failing to distinguish their subjective perspectives (“the
map”) from objective reality (“the territory”). Cornblatt notes that Korzybskiʼs dictum resonates
differently “in todayʼs mediascape, in which we visit countless digital territories, reference maps
that signify maps, and have deeply fulfilling personal experiences in virtual space.” He muses:
“Are there any original territories left, or has literally everything become a signifier for something
else, an infinite loop of maps leading to other maps eventually leading back to the first—but not
necessarily the original—map?”
Cornblatt is hardly the first critic to note the potential for infinite regress inherent in any serious
challenge to Korzybskiʼs famous dictum that “the map is not the territory.” Jorge Luis Borges,
whose short story “On Exactitude in Science” concerns the creation, in an empire obsessed with
cartography, of a map as large as the empire itself, turns to the question of infinite regress in the
map-as-territory in “Partial Enchantments of the Quixote”:
The inventions of philosophy are no less fantastic than those of art. In the
first volume of The World and the Individual (1899) Josiah Royce has for-
mulated the following one: ʻLet us suppose, if you please, that a portion of
the surface of England is very perfectly leveled and smoothed, and is then
devoted to the production of our precise map of England… But now sup-
pose that this resemblance is to be made absolutely exact, in the same
sense previously defined. A map of England, contained within England, is
to represent, down to the minutest detail, every contour and marking, natu-
ral or artificial, that occurs upon the surface of England… For the map, in
order to be complete, according to the rule given, will have to contain, as a
part of itself, a representation of its own contour and contents. In order that
this representation should be constructed, the representation itself will
have to contain once more, as a part of itself, a representation of its own
contour and contents; and this representation, in order to be exact, will
have once more to contain an image of itself, and so on without limit.ʼ Why
does it make us uneasy to know that the map is within the map and the
thousand and one nights are within the book of A Thousand and One
Nights? Why does it disquiet us to know that Don Quixote is a reader of
the Quixote, and Hamlet is a spectator of Hamlet? I believe I have found
For Borges, the possibility of a map in fact being the territory disturbingly suggests the possibil-
ity that “the characters in a story can be readers or spectators,” and “we, their readers or spec-
tators, can be fictions.” This inversion should not, however, be disturbing to game designers
because it is, after all, the ultimate aim of immersive game design—the final, perfect merging of
player and avatar subjectivity. If we take, as Cornblatt does, the video game HUD to be a map
representing the territory that is the game world itself, then perhaps the metaphor of map-as-
territory is worth exploring as a potential strategy for subjective displacement through immersive
game design.
The logic of Mirrorʼs Edge holds that the player and Faith are seeing exactly the same thing at
every moment of gameplay. Thus, Faith herself is the player, navigating her environment with
the objective mastery of a seasoned and HUD-equipped gamer, and the player is Faith, explor-
ing the game world in her body and viewing it through her detail-oriented eyes. The game ele-
vates this sense of subjective unity through its convincing (and allegedly nausea-inducing)
simulation of Faithʼs proprioception—the human bodyʼs ability to sense the spatial relations of
all its parts to one another. As Clive Thompson notes in “Victory in Vomit: The Sickening Secret
of Mirrorʼs Edge,” “When you run, you see your hands pumping up and down in front of you.
When you jump, your feet briefly jut up into eyeshot—precisely as they do when you're vaulting
over a hurdle in real life. And when you tuck down into a somersault, you're looking at your
thighs as the world spins around you… I've never played a game that conveyed so beautifully
The video game HUD has proved central to the identity of the video game medium and the ex-
perience of gameplay because it serves as a map to a world that can often be disorienting and
bewildering to the human player. Idealist philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
reflected that the perfect map would be one which captured every last feature of the territory it
represented in absolute detail. Unfortunately, such a map would be as large as the territory it
represented, and would thus be useless as a visual metaphor for the space. However, what is
impossible to imagine in real life is often simple to realize in the artificially constructed world of
video games, and Mirrorʼs Edge shows that a map as large as the territory it depicts can be
more useful than ridiculous in a medium already constrained by the limits of three- dimensional
spatial awareness within a flat televisual frame. The implications of the map that is the territory
and thus includes itself within its own regime of representation may be disturbing in the literary
context of a theatregoing Hamlet and a Don Quixote who enjoys Cervantes, but in the context of
video game players yearning to be one with their avatars, the slightest possibility of such sub-
jective fluidity is cause for great hope.
Bibliography
Borges, Jorge Luis. "Partial Enchantments of the Quixote." Other Inquisitions, 1937-1952.
Transl. Ruth L.C. Simms. University of Texas Press, 1964.
Cornblatt, Marque. “Video Game HUD as Spiritual Mandala.” The Media Sapien. 13 Sep 2008.
4 Dec 2008. <http://mediasapien.wordpress.com/2008/09/13/video-game-hud-as-
spiritual-mandala/>.
Manalang, John. “The Death of the HUD?” The Feed. 13 Sep 2008. G4.com. 4 Dec 2008.
<http://www.g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/689092/the_death_of_the_hud.html/>.
Thompson, Clive. “Victory in Vomit: The Sickening Secret of Mirrorʼs Edge.” Games Without
Frontiers. 16 Nov 2008. Wired.com. 4 Dec 2008.
<http://www.wired.com/gaming/gamingreviews/commentary/games/2008/11/
gamesfrontiers_1117>.
Wilson, Greg. “Off With Their HUDs!: Rethinking the Heads-Up Display in Console Game
Design.” Gamasutra. 3 Feb 2006. 4 Dec 2008.
<http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20060203/wilson_01.shtml>.