Finished Critique and Presentation

November 29th, 2008

Friday saw possibly the first final deadline for a piece of work this year, the Design for Entertainment Systems game critique. Entitled ‘A Critique of Dungeon Keeper: The Subterranean World’ it explores the techniques behind the immersive world created by Bullfrog’s original Dungeon Keeper.

Introduction

Dungeon Keeper was released in 1997 by Peter Molyneux’s Bullfrog Productions and was quickly succeeded by a Deeper Dungeons expansion and more importantly a Gold Edition that featured all of the combined previous efforts and a map editor that with a little bit of work could be installed and used to build your own levels. For me it was one of the most engaging of the early PC games owing to a number of reasons, teaching me quite a few things about how to structure a successfully enthralling Real Time Strategy game, as well as having a few quirky concepts that I have yet to see repeated since. But most of all it showed me what I look for in a game that I truly enjoy and hence influenced my own ideas for designs.

This essay intends to discuss how the game created a unique and immersive game world which translated into many, many hours of play from what was really a rather limited tile set with unassuming objectives.

The World of Dungeon Keeper

In order to study how a game world immerses a player within it there are certain aspects of the world itself that need to be investigated. Firstly there is the way in which the world is presented. Often the premise of the world is expressed through a narrative structure, beginning with the fact that computer games have translated most of their terminology and structure from cinema, a theory explored extensively by Lev Manovich. In the case of Dungeon Keeper, the three dimensional movements (and inherent freedom) of the camera dominated half of the game’s list of key features, placing emphasis on the ‘virtual camera [becoming] as important as controlling the hero’s actions’ (Manovich 2002: 91). Through a game’s camera the world is then observed in likeness to traditional cinema, with the use of characters, plots and cutscenes.

This leads neatly to the next aspect, the structure, design and aesthetic of the world itself. Different styles of world are typically dictated by genre; Real Time Strategies usually feature vast and varied landscapes but tend not to be able to focus into tiny detail where First Person Shooters spend huge volumes of processing power rendering the immediate environment and cull objects in the distance. Therefore the world is a reflection of the scope of the player’s influence on it.

And finally there is the question of how the player interacts with the world. This is often the defining factor in game immersion; no matter how well designed the world is, it cannot work without a means of not only observing, but exploring it. Dungeon Keeper arguably takes an unusual position on all of these points.

The full critique is available online here.