dungeonmans

Video Games: People Care

by

(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

I’m my previous column I discussed the weird state of “people caring less” from the blog post “The Who Cares Era” and the value of having things be BY people and FOR people. Yeah, it involved AI, but also general issues in our culture.

So I was thinking about areas I saw a lot of care, a lot of involvement. One of them – perhaps the largest I could discuss – is video games.

Video games are things that people experience very hands-on. You guide things, you type, you make choices. You may have involving stories, if not stories that at least keep you moving ahead. There’s music to enthrall you, there’s graphics to show the story, there’s UI design to help you play. Video games are involving as a form of media – in many ways they are an intersection of media.

Getting this right takes work. Yes you can use pre-existing frameworks. Yes you can use premade music. There’s plenty of tools to help you. But that also means so many other people can do it. To make a game people care about you have to make something for someone, you have to at least give enough of a damn to make something people will want and pay for.

That’s because with games you are having a highly interactive experience and one where multiple forms of technology and art come together. Everything has to come together to make the experience work because that is what you are getting – an experience. If you’ve ever played a game that just compelled you, you know what I mean.

I think because of all of these interacting elements, because of the hands-on nature, gaming is one area where you can feel the care. Even if such care is a good job of engineering Space Shooter Knockoff Whatever, you can at least feel that. A game is something you live in with relative ease, and you want to belong there.

I’d also add that games take so much effort to make, to make really good ones, there’s a boundary to not caring. If you just want to grift or something, games are too much work.

So let me close up with a reflection on a few games I enjoyed the last few decades that I felt showed people cared (Most are indie)::

Approaching Infinity: A vision created by one author, a space Roguelike that got “rebuilt” with over a decade of history, released in 2025. A roguelike space adventure with classic graphics that has multiple plots, spaceship management, planets to explore, sci-fi drama to experience, and just about everything you’d imagine in a space adventure. The author cares and you cannot only feel it, but they even have a Discord.

Dungeonmans: A comedy Roguelike fantasy RPG that is also a serious game where you build a Dungeonmans Academy which continues even when characters die, create adventurers, build equipment, and so on. It’s both funny and an actually good game, and one I played in multiple times in Early Access and after release. The author has even updated it since it dropped in 2014.

Our Adventurer’s Guild: A game of, well, managing an Adventurer’s guild. It’s chock full of the things people that like fantasy adventures want – crafting, characters, adventuring, etc. Your growing teams have their own independent personalities, turning the game into a kind of procedural soap opera. It also has plot twists that really hit me in the gut, all with a kind of 80s-90s anime aesthetic. You can feel the care, a game that felt like someone saying “this is what I want and I bet others do to.”

Shadow Hearts (Series): A classic-type JRPG series, but with a kind of horror/macabre mix with humor. You assemble a team of weirdos to fight some evil supernatural force, and there’s all the classic JRPG elements, but with more horrific monsters and interesting twitch-click gameplay. The games all feel like they’re taking chances with their strangeness and weirdness, and it’s clear each one was fun to make. (Also, oddly, the only big name game I mention here).

The Slormancer: An ARPG released in 2025, a humorous game of battling the evil Slormancer (Slorm being a powerful magical substance), but the game is hardcore. You customize characters with complex interacting abilities, you build equipment, and everything interacts. It’s a game where someone had a vision, a vision so good a friend and I both had the game and obsessively swapped tips for weeks – we even won the game on the same day.

Star Traders: Frontiers: A spaceship management game in the Star Traders universe. Open-ended with a plot that repeats each game, you can choose your profession, make alliances, run a starship, and manage a crew where each member has a personality. The creators have done multiple games in this setting, and this one is a compelling space manager game.

Hope this gives you some food for thought. I’d love to hear your thoughts on games, caring – and ones that you enjoyed where you know people cared.

Steven Savage

The Writer’s Game: Dungeonmans

by

(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

Dungeonmans from Adventurepro games is a parody of fantasy games in the roguelike style.  As a titular Dungeonmans (the title is used no matter the preferred gender) at Dungeonmans Academy you sally forth to crush monsters and find treasure.  Near-inevitably your character will die, but their legacy lives on to assist the next student.  Eventually, you accomplish the all-too-common goal of finding the Big Evil and beating it up, then faffing around and exploring if you so wish.

Dungeonmans doesn’t aspire to a unique plot – the game’s charm is that it embraces all the tropes of fantasy and the roguelike genre.  Among the kill-and-loot mechanics and laughs there are multiple lessons for writers – because comedy is challenging.  Fortunately, Dungeonmans is fun, funny, and educational for writers

Embrace The Tropes

The game embraces every trope of fantasy and dungeon-delving games without a single inhibition.  Dungeonmans has dungeons, treasure, towns in need, and everything you’d expect from the umpteenth fantasy adventure game or story.  It doesn’t feel boring or repetitive, because the unoriginality is needed as it’s a parody.

By embracing the tropes, the game meets expectations of gameplay, but also allows it to mock them.  A player gets exactly what they expect in play and story, while also getting to see them taken apart and parodied.  You can’t parody from a distance, you have to embrace it.

Come to think of it, you can’t do anything with a genre without diving in, can you?  Other wise it’s half-baked, whereas Dungeonmans is perfectly prepared.

Explain The Tropes

Good worldbuilding in any story is needed so players understand what’s going on, or think they do.  When you’re playing with tropes, say in a parody game like Dungeonmans you have to explain what’s going on.  The tropes need to be explained as that’s part of the parody – because parody is often taking things to ridiculous lengths or exploring them.

Dungeonmans goes out of the way to explain what’s going on.  Dungeonmans are a recognized profession in a world overrun with monsters and evil.  An Academy was put in place to train such adventurers because they have to come from somewhere.  Some villains you face are even failed heroes, suggesting a kind of “economy of evil.”

The game is thus funnier because of the worldbuilding.  All the things you take for granted in a fantasy game have reasons, reasons both funny and thought-provoking.  Imagining the social and economic implications of professional but expendable monster-killers takes you places like any good story.

Funny Needs Details

Dungeonmans explanations arent’ just broad strokes.  Every item you find or create has a name and text explanation.  What is this wand made of? Why does this ridiculous sword exist?  Is the name of this weapon really twelve words long?  There’s all sorts of little details in the game that make it more interesting and funnier.

Good parody – and any good writing – has those little details that draw you in.   When you’re “in” the world of a story or game, you appreciate it more and feel those chills, thrills – or laughs in the case of parody.  Dungeonmans is filled with these little details, and you might find yourself pausing to read the description of the latest treasure you find.

Into The Depths of Humor

For me, Dungeonmans was the rare experience of a game both funny and engaging.  I kickstarted it, played it at least twice in early access, then once after it was released, and once after many updates.  Every time it was fun, and every time I’d get a good laugh, even with material I’d seen before.  Over these years, I realized these were lessons worth sharing.

Lessons for Writers:

  • If you parody something, embrace the tropes enthusiastically.  That meets expectations while letting you poke fun at the elements you’ve targeted.  You have to know a trope to take it on.
  • Disinhibition is necessary to embrace tropes, or you might do it halfway, and that is often miserable.
  • In parody – or anything involving tropes – you’ll need to explain them.  That makes the world believable, and is even more important in parody or extrapolation.
  • Details matter in any story as they draw the reader in.  They are important for impact – even when the impact is a good laugh.

Steven Savage

Pop Goes The Culture

by

(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

There’s something about current pop culture that doesn’t really “pop,” doesn’t seem to engage us unless it’s heavily marketed and promoted. I wonder what can help us find stimulating, challenging work these days.

In fact, what do we want from pop culture beyond entertainment and common ground.

Serdar wrote about what he wanted out of pop culture . He described how really interesting pop culture work isn’t top-down, but feels that it somehow escaped into the so-called mainstream

“I kept coming back to that word, “escaped”. I like it when it feels like some piece of popular culture has gotten away with something. I liked that Blade Runner 2049 was essentially a $200M art film, because we should make more $200M art films, dammit. I liked that David Lynch’s Dune, for all that was wrong with it, also had a lot that was daring and unrepentantly weird.”

This is something I want as well. When I look back on my pop culture interests, I find these things that feel escaped, at that subvert things genuinely really appeal to me. It’s pop culture on fire, that honest lightning that strikes us easily as it’s “pop” and accessible, but also something that twists, advances, or subverts expectation. Good pop culture travels along our common cultural wires, but delivers an unexpected and enlightening shock.

Most of my pop culture tastes tend to this role. My Hero Academia mixtaped American Superheroes and classic Shonen ideas, threw in a liberal dash of body horror, and created a haunted funhouse of action. Farscape was the Adams Family to the Father Knows Best of too much washed out science fiction, subverting tropes while delivering drama with a smirk. One of my most-beloved video games was Dungeonmans, a comedic Roguelike game that deconstructed the tropes of its genre, while delivering an actual good game.

Also those “wow” factors produce social bonding. That sudden, fulminating bond of an escaped wild idea can’t be duplicated.

But a lot of pop culture is pop only in popular, with giant conglomerates churning out cautious product. It’s meant to be popular,its meant to be widespread, but it doesn’t have that jolt, that scruff, that edge that some other projects do. It’s safe on every level, but that also mean’s it’s not challenging. When something big subverts expectations – say Shazam’s embrace of the family idea or Bird’s of Prey’s over the top delivery – we notice.

At some point, I think things are just going to keep grinding away and be less interesting. We’re watching DC capitalize on Snyder Cut mania for . . . well, I don’t know what reasons. In this Pandemic, are we really missing movie theaters and the usual output? Right now our cultural changes are making us massively rethink our media and media choices.

Serdar and I have discussed several times that any big media company who wants to do more needs a skunkworks. You need to try a lot of different things and see which clicks. Hand people low-to-mid budgets and see what you can run with that allows really great and interesting ideas to “escape” from the confines of creators heads – and the current media machines.

But barring that, we creators, we indies, have to be the skunkworks. We’ve got to try wild things. Weve also got to market ourselves and each others. I’m not sure we can count on anyone but us.

(Note: Despite it’s many, many flaws, by I will defend David Lynch’s Dune as being unspeakably, daringly weird and bizarre. People gave him Star Wars money and he made a David Lynch movie.)

Steven Savage