Dungeons were all the
rage back in the olden
days. Subterranean
torture chambers
were to medieval
England what en suite
bathrooms were to
early 1990s suburbia. Curtain-twitching
lords would peer across their estate
as the neighbouring baron had one
installed. “Him over the road is having
some work done on his castle,” he
would say to his lady wife with barely
concealed envy. “One of those fancy
new dungeons by the looks of it. And
he’s had his moat done. Reckon he must
have come into some groats. You’re not
even listening are you? Too busy on that
bloody lute.”
The popularity of the dungeon
continued long after the dark ages
ended and into the modern era, though
their purpose gradually changed from
imprisoning traitors and torturing
peasants, to storing garden tools and
bits of old Christmas decorations. We
also started calling them “basements”,
and promising to clear them out one
quiet weekend when we got a chance,
but never actually getting around to it
until it finally becomes time to move
house, and you seriously consider just
setting fire to everything and running
away as a viable alternative.
But the classic dungeon – with the
flagstones and torches and grilles- still looms large in games. In the
hierarchy of the most clichéd videogame
destinations, dungeons are right up
there with slippery ice levels and that
one side-scrolling section of crime-
ridden 1980s New York where all the bins
are on fire and the same piece of graffiti
repeats itself every 30 feet.
The problem
As with so many problems in modern
games, our obsession with dungeons
can trace its origins back to Dungeons
& Dragons, the satanic tabletop RPGunder a castle into which they chucked
their surplus corpses and potato peelings.
But why was a dungeon selected
as the venue for D&D? Simply because
they were linear spaces with just
one or two routes to follow, allowing
events to unfold in the correct order,
and controlling the paths and limiting
the decisions the player could take
at any given time. Dungeons served
the essential gameplay mechanics of
Dungeons & Dragons, and from then
on they naturally became the overused
venue for many early videogames.
It wasn’t long until the dungeon
crawler genre was established. Dark
Souls, The Witcher, Elder Scrolls, Ashen,
all of them are infested by boring, badly
lit stone corridors. And aside from the
odd giant spider, or spinning blade trap,
you’d struggle to tell any of them apart.
Besides, as anyone who’s been to The
London Dungeon knows, real dungeons
are inhabited by poorly paid actors who
couldn’t make it on television, jumping
out at you from behind a mangle.The solution
Let’s banish dungeons to whatever the
dungeon’s equivalent of a dungeon
is. Some kind of a double dungeon,
where only the worst and most
depraved dungeons are sent. If we
deny developers the ability to set their
games in an endless series of cobweb-
filled tunnels, they would be forced to
transport players to ever more wonderful
and interesting places instead, like
the underside of a cloud, or inside the
imagination of a border collie.
Just like how banning alcohol in the
1920s drove brewers underground and
led to bootleg booze, a prohibition on
dungeons would cause games to be set
in locations so dangerously creative that
they’d turn players blind. Which, if you
ask me, is preferable to stepping foot
inside another dungeon. QSteve also writes for City A.M.enjoyed by long-haired boys who,
without exception, go on to become
serial killers. That game – which is now
illegal and only played in prison and at
underground raves – promoted the idea
of a dungeon as a place of adventure
and intrigue, rather than a dark holeINSIDER OPINION
Steve takes issue with the humble but overused dungeon
The Fixer
Steve Hogarty is...
“Game dun eons
are ri ht up there
with slippery
ice levels”
020 THE OFFICIAL XBOX MAGAZINE