Book Club: Dungeons & Desktops...

I realize that this may be a bit of a nerdy book to discuss on my blog, but I hope that I can generalize some of the themes such that they're of interest to most readers. When I was a kid, I got really into video games. I think that most children of the 80s were, having grown up around the likes of Atari and Nintendo. While TV game consoles were all the rage, a smaller and in some ways more dedicated group of gamers flocked to the personal computer. Retailing for exhorbitant prices by today's standards, software designed for the PC tended to be a bit more adult and cerebral than what you'd find on consoles marketed squarely at kids (a Macintosh computer purchased in 1984 retailed for a whopping $5,165 in 2008 dollars, while the 1983 IBM PCs retailed for $10,600 when similarly adjusted!).

In Dungeons & Desktops (D&D; 2008; A.K. Peters), Matt Barton attempts to trace the history of computer Role-Playing Games, or RPGs for short - a genre that was arguably very influential in the history of interactive entertainment and one that has undergone a lot of changes over the years.

A bit of background: A reductive definition of an RPG may be the attempt to create a simplified system of stats-based mechanics in order to simulate some particular scenario. In order for it to be 'role-playing'  however, a further extension to the definition may be that the simulation must have some degree of persistence such that its actors progress and develop over its course. Though the most popular RPG in the public mindset is probably the classic Dungeons & Dragons, where the object of simulation is heroic fantasy, more rudimentary RPGs actually date back to the 1940s when they consisted of sports simulations and table-top war games. The excellent if a bit dry media studies book, Digital Play, makes a point of noting that by pioneering the idea of representing everyday events with numbers, RPGs paved the way for computer games in general (what is a computer game if not representing scenarios with numbers, hidden or otherwise?). Along with text adventures, RPGs were among the earliest games to make it big on home computers.

Back to the book: Instead of a general narrative about the genre featuring a few key examples, the author chooses instead to tell the history of 'CRPGs' using a rogues gallery approach. He seriously tries to write a small blurb on every game for which he can get information. It's really a labor of love, and Barton faces a challenge common to all works attempting a historical catalog: What's the best way to structure the narrative? By year, or sub-genre, etc.? D&D chooses a hybrid approach, wherein CRPGs are divded in to 5 broad, mostly cohesive 'ages' corresponding to general time-frames. Popular series and sub-genres are pooled together within each age. So we read about the Ultima games of the Silver Age or the 'Gold Box' games of the Golden Age, etc. I'll have more to say on this in a moment.

For people who aren't familiar with these classics, it's really quite difficult to describe how immersive and even somewhat crazy they were. These old CRPGs were often shockingly complex, had brutal learning curves, sometimes took hundreds of hours to complete, and as mentioned, required expensive equipment to play. But for those of us who had the time and/or inclination, they were amazingly satisfying and intellectually stimulating - typically requiring a fair bit of strategizing to pass their myriad challenges. A lot of folks dismiss videogames as brainless time-wasters, but I can trace much of my love of problem solving as well as reading and writing back to childhood evenings spent solving these games. Unfortunately, my ability to play CRPGs essentially died when I went off to college, but reading about all of these titles, both those that I loved and many that I missed, brought back more than a bit of nostalgia.

The relative weight of each game or series' coverage is much influenced by Barton's own personal opinions, which is understandable both because again, it is a labor of love, and because it adds a lot of personality to the narrative (it also helps that most of the author's opinions are in line with my own!). However, in terms of assessing the significance of various title's influences on the industry and genre as a whole, some games probably deserved a bit more exposure than they received - Especially failures such as the final 2 Ultima games. While the rogues gallery style of presenting a short write up of almost every game tugs at my heart-strings, the value of hammering out a few paragraphs describing how mediocre a particular obscure title was is less informative than explaining the significance of important milestones in the genre.

My one minor complaint about the book concerns its choice to group games into series within ages. Unfortunately, the most important determinant of any game's direction is most certainly what was successful on the market during the time it was developed. Sub-genres tend to appear in waves, such as Dungeon Master clones, or Diablo clones, etc. In the early parts of the book, when the 'ages' are only a few years (e.g., 1981-1984) the practice of grouping all games in a series together makes sense; they tend to be very similar. However, in the later 'ages', which are all characterized by very rapid technological advancements in hardware, such a system becomes unsatisfying. To give an example to those 'in the know', Ultima VIII (1994) and IX (1999) are discussed back-to-back within the 'platinum age', skipping over a plethora of important developments in the industry during the intervening years. These are vastly different titles existing in entirely different circumstances - the correct historical context is important in understanding why both of those games were, for the most part, utterly disappointing.

In all fairness, this is a much more minor complaint than it seems: It's highly unlikely that anyone crazy enough to buy this book isn't intimately familiar with most of the more recent titles being presented, and thus writing for the lay audience is probably unnecessary. Furthermore, Barton does do a quite excellent job of speculating on the causes of some of the trends in the industry, especially during the early years when most of the book's narrative take place.

At the risk of spoiling the conclusion, I will say that D&D ends on a rather sad note: There's really no denying that the old days of painstakingly saving princesses on CRT monitors are behind us. The designers of these massive adventures learned a lot over the years, streamlining interfaces and reducing frustration, for example. But at the same time, as gaming has moved beyond the niche of a few dedicated users, more titles have begun 'playing to the lowest common denominator' and as such, very few people care for the types of patient, tactical, strategic gameplay that these classics typically embraced.

In all honesty, there's no way that I could find the time to play many of these types of games today: I got most of it out of my system during my (pre) adolescence. I don't think that there could have been a better way than reading this book for a busy guy like me to relive some of those childhood memories.