by Joe Miller,
Director of Development
For the last several months, every time I’ve opened my Kindle, Amazon has recommended that I read a book called Dungeon Crawler Carl.
I was pretty skeptical. The premise is silly: a race of aliens transforms Earth into a real-life version of a dungeon crawl and forces humans to participate – all as part of an intergalactic, televised game show.
For those not familiar with the term, a “dungeon crawl” is a type of role-playing game (RPG) in which players navigate some sort of maze while battling monsters, solving puzzles and collecting treasure. The original dungeon crawls happened on paper maps, with players gathered around a table—think “Dungeons & Dragons” and other such tabletop RPGs.
Dungeon crawler games made the move to computers very early. One of the very first – “Zork” – was released in 1977 and ran on mainframe computers. Players typed simple text commands – ”go north,” “take lamp,” “hit goblin” – and received text-based descriptions of rooms – “You see a locked treasure chest sitting on a table.”
As computers improved, games became more visual and more intricate. A game like the immensely popular “Baldur’s Gate 3” can require upwards of 150 hours to complete.
Dungeon crawler games all share a basic set of characteristics. Players have a set of stats (e.g., strength, intelligence, charisma) and a set of skills (e.g., magic use, healing, sword fighting) and some sort of measure of health. The stats determine how effectively a player can use their skills. Both stats and skills can be improved (“leveled up”) by gaining experience, which mainly happens by killing monsters and finding treasure.
Dungeon Crawler Carl makes the conventions of computer RPGs literal. The aliens give Carl the ability to see his inventory of stuff, a list of all his skills, a meter showing his health and so forth. Carl basically walks around with the user interface for a computer game in his head. Only in this case, they measure Carl’s actual characteristics.
The book is one of the more popular entries in a micro-genre called LitRPG, short for literary role-playing game. All of them involve characters who are sucked into a real-life version of a computer RPG. Making the mechanics of the video game an explicit part of the story is one of the defining features of the genre.
Conor Kostick, who heads a publishing company that specializes in LitRPG, describes the genre as “the reading equivalent of watching someone playing a game on Twitch or Youtube.”
Now I’m going to be honest – watching someone play a video game on Twitch or Youtube sounds absolutely dreadful. Indeed, I’ve never once tuned into a Twitch stream and I’ve no plans to change that.
But also – 35 million people use Twitch every single day. And video games are a $282 billion industry. That’s more than twice the size of the movie business!
Plus, I’ve really enjoyed watching Mythic Quest – a workplace comedy that’s set in a studio that produces a hit computer RPG.
So, I decided to give it a whirl.
The 440 pages go quickly – though partly that’s because I did a lot of skimming during Carl’s tutorial on the game’s mechanics. The same goes for the (many) pages devoted to describing the contents of various treasure boxes Carl opens.
But for the most part, the plot moves along briskly. The writing is breezy and occasionally funny. There’s a lot of violence – the premise, after all, is that Carl runs around a dungeon killing monsters – but the violence is mostly cartoonish rather than gory.
Overall, it did very much feel like the reading equivalent of what I’d imagine it’d be like to watch someone play a video game on Youtube. Which is to say, it’s unlikely that I’ll pick up any of the six (of the planned 9 or 10) sequels.
That said, if these books had existed during the era when my son was very into video games and not so much into reading, I would absolutely have gotten him a copy. Reading longform fiction builds important critical thinking skills and young readers are more likely to engage with topics they already find interesting.
If you’re a gamer who doesn’t care much for reading – or someone just looking for a fun summer read – give Dungeon Crawler Carl a shot.
