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Comment by gimboland | Hacker News Reader

As soon as I opened that page I had a flashback to playing Elite on my ZX Spectrum as a 10-year-old. I had to look twice at the map to check it didn't show Lave and Reidquat.

And that's really weird, because now I look into it, I think there's no way I saw a map like this in that game. Nor Frontier on the Amiga, as far as I can see. But when I look at the map, Elite is all I can think about, somehow I feel certain that's where I've seen it before, even though the evidence suggests I'm wrong. There's some strong association going on there. Weeeeeeird.

Edit: I think it might actually just be that I first saw this page so long ago that it feels the same... As soon as I zoomed out I knew I'd seen it before, but not for a long long time.

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The Map Is Not the Territory. Your memory of the mental model of our local neighbors that you'd worked out is overriding the actual memories.

Something similar happens when we remember childhood houses. Spaces where there was a lot of activity seem bigger, because we've mapped those areas extensively.

Interesting. I’m aware of the common feeling that one’s childhood room seems “much smaller than I remembered” when it’s visited in adulthood (especially after a long time away), but I had never heard that feeling tied to level of time/activity done in that space.

It makes a lot of sense in retrospect.

is it because you were small when you were child and thats why these spaces are bigger in your memmory than you experience them now. for example for my kids ceiling is 5 times theyr own heigt. that would be huge for adult me to have ceiling 10meter high.

No, it wasn't the mental model, it was literally this picture, i.e. the image, down to the colours and everything.

The association you have is not for the local / galactic chart from Elite, but rather the navigational scanner when in flight - used the same 3-D positional rendering for nearby objects. See bottom centre here: https://www.retrogamer.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Elite-...

I think it's that the layout of the map, with flags going above and below a circular plane, looks exactly like (and is perhaps inspired by) the scanner that shows where ships around you in local space are in Elite/Oolite (FOSS Elite 1984 clone, highly recommended).

You're not the only one - C64 Elite player here.

There are similarities between the scanner and this map, but the in-game map wasn't even close. There's probably an interesting visual memory research to be done into how we make that association.

The colours and font are quite evocative of the early versions of Elite, even if the names of the stars aren't :-)

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