(Hello everyone. It's obviously been a while since I last posted to this blog. I am toying with the idea of expanding the scope to explore a wider range of media, since I eventually got exhausted by the original premise of focusing solely on vintage paperbacks. I am also trying out a looser, less formal style, which will hopefully be more fun for me to write and for you to read. Wait, did I really say I wanted to write less formally and then use the word 'typology' in the title of the blog post? Oh well. I hope you enjoy it.)

With Dungeon Crawler Carl becoming a cultural phenomenon (and me finally reading the first book and enjoying it) I've started thinking about LitRPG novels again. I don't actually enjoy the LitRPG genre for the most part, yet I'm continually fascinated by it. It's an indie genre grown on the internet, with its own insular culture, completely ignored by the mainstream publishing industry. It's also a male-coded genre in a world where the commonplace wisdom is that men don't read books anymore. And its community is insanely vigorous and prolific, both the writers and the readers. (I like to think of myself as someone who really loves books. But the average LitRPG fan probably spends more hours per week reading than I do.)

I'm particularly interested in the question of: what kind of games are giving their shapes to popular fiction? If you were a New York Times columnist or whatever you could be content with saying "Dungeon Crawler Carl is inspired by videogames". But I actually play videogames, so I want to know: which videogames are we talking about? There are quite a lot of them!

First of all I want to establish that both "LitRPG" and "progression fantasy" both sit under the wider umbrella of novels that take their structure from videogames. Progression fantasy just makes the shape implicit rather than explicit. Novels like Cradle, The Mine Lord or The Years of Apocalypse all have a videogame structure "under the hood", even though they don't literally include stat blocks and level-ups like DCC does.

The most popular of these novels (Dungeon Crawler Carl, Cradle, The Primal Hunter, etc) can broadly be said to draw inspiration from open world action-adventure-RPGs, or simply "AAA games". Games where the main character explores an open environment, levels up, collects better items, fights bosses, and so forth. You know... a normal videogame.

This is the archetypal "gamer's game" in 2026. But, obviously, there are many other genres of videogame. And indeed, some subgenres of LitRPG/progression fantasy do seem to correspond to different game genres. To whit:

Game-shaped subgenres

Cosy games/life sims: I haven't really read any myself, but I understand there is a whole subgenre of cosy litRPG, often involving characters who are tasked with some epic quest, refuse to do it, and just vibe the whole time instead. Beware of Chicken seems to be the most popular example of this.

Base building/strategy: there's also a subgenre of "base building" novels, often overlapping with cosiness. I rather enjoyed The Mine Lord by A. Trae McMaken, about a young band of dwarfs setting up a gold mine. It goes into loving detail about the construction of the mine, their homes, crops, defenses and so on.

Roguelikes: "time loop" stories (e.g. having the main character caught in a time loop a la Groundhog Day) are another popular subgenre. Mother of Learning is the ur-example, but I prefer The Years of Apocalypse (full disclosure: written by a friend of mine). The structure of having the protagonist die over and over, learning and improving each time, does seem to have a lot in common with roguelikes. However, all these time loop stories start from the assumption that the loop is the same each time. Only the protagonist's actions change. This is fundamentally different to a roguelike game, where the whole point is that you get a random selection of environments, enemies and abilities each time. I don't know of any time loop novel that has introduced this element of randomness into the mix, but it probably exists somewhere.

Game-shaped novels outside of LitRPG

I can also think of at least two other recent novels that seem "game-shaped" to me, although they aren't usually promoted or discussed as such. The first is Project Hail Mary. This is somewhat obscured in the film version, but the novel begins in a very similar way to a lot of LitRPG/isekai stories: an amnesiac protagonist with a quippy, detached voice wakes up in a strange environment, explores, and immediately begins to solve practical problems. But instead of a roleplaying game, PHM more closely resembles classic point and click adventures like Myst - or their weird casual offspring, the "escape the room" genre.

Again, the film took things in a different direction, but it's worth remembering that the novel PHM could have been produced (as a game or a movie) on a shoestring budget. The scale of the story is cosmic, but Ryland Grace mostly experiences it by wandering around a single cramped environment, looking at computer screens, and pressing buttons. His intermittent flashbacks resemble cutscenes as rewards for game progress. In another timeline, this could easily have been adapted into a moody indie game along the lines of Return of the Obra Dinn.

The second novel I would pick as a covert piece of game lit is The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle (Scott Turton, 2017). The hero of this book is, again, an amnesiac protagonist, trapped in a time loop, trying to solve a murder mystery at an ersatz 1920s house party. The rules of the loop are quite convoluted and, above all, arbitrarily constructed to give shape to the story. There is even a theatrical "game master" character in a spooky mask, who seems lifted directly from Pathologic or Majora's Mask.

(In fact, the "game master" role seems a very common one: if the story needs arbitrary rules, it helps to include the rule-designer as a character themselves. The Borant Corporation from Dungeon Crawler Carl, the time-warping god from Years of Apocalypse, and Eva Stratt from Project Hail Mary are all cut from the same cloth.)

Genres as yet unborn

I now move from enumeration to speculation. If we already have game-literature derived from RPGs, action-RPGs, life sims, point and click adventures, and murder mystery games, then what would a literature shaped by other game genres look like?

I (probably?) don't have plans to write any of these myself. I just find it interesting to imagine the possibilities.

1: Metroidvanias

Ah, the metroidvania, my beloved. Prince of game genres. What would you look like if you were a novel instead of a game?

Aesthetically, most metroidvanias and soulslikes (I consider soulslikes to be metroidvanias, your honour) already share a lot of DNA with what could broadly be termed "weird fantasy": Gormenghast, Elric, The Book of the New Sun, The West Passage. All of the above share an aesthetic of decay and deep time. They are interested in things falling apart, slowly; in environments haunted by their own history; in individuals whose lives are shaped by ancient disasters they will never fully understand. This is also the aesthetic of Hollow Knight, Elden Ring, Super Metroid, and Animal Well.

(There are metroidvania games that don't have this "aesthetic of decay", but I consider them to be generally inferior. Even my favourite cutesy, upbeat 'vania game - Yoku's Island Express - has a strange sense of melancholy underlying it.)

The weird fantasy novel typically has an ambivalent relationship to the hero's journey. It wants to disturb our assumptions about progress and triumph: maybe the hero can't save the world, maybe the world isn't worth saving. Maybe we don't even know what "save the world" really means.

But a metroidvania game, despite its aesthetic decadence, is still a story of progress. It's a story about a character who gets progressively better abilities, which open up more possibilities of movement and interaction. It's also a story structured around the act of returning. Coming back to a place or a problem that once stymied you and saying: "now I have the key to succeed." A novel could not be metroidvania-shaped without incorporating this crucial element of return.

There is a tension in almost all these games between the decaying world and the progressing hero; this is usually resolved by admitting the possibility of renewal. The world is fallen, but the hero has the potential to eucatastrophically restore it to its former glory. The flame can be rekindled; the blight can be burned away. A single moment of triumph can reverse centuries of decay. I think all metroidvanias might be fundamentally Christian stories.

2: MOBAs/hero shooters

In multiplayer team games, you are no longer the centre of the universe. You're part of a team, and you have to do your part for victory while trusting that everyone else is doing theirs. If you're out in the jungle farming creeps, you have to hope that someone else is defending the tower; if you're the bait in an ambush, you have to have faith that your partner is ready to pounce at the crucial moment. Also, if you're in public queues, half the people you're relying on are fifteen year old boys who either don't speak English, spew racial slurs, or both.

This is a far more vulnerable position to be in compared to single-player RPGs, where your progression and ultimate victory is effectively guaranteed. (One of the unspoken rules of LitRPG fiction is that the protagonist should never get knocked back too hard.)

So, what would a MOBA-shaped novel look like? Would it maybe resemble... The Lord of the Rings?

After the end of Fellowship, the characters are separated into three "lanes". (Four if you count Gandalf, who is respawning.) And they have to trust one another at a distance: Frodo can't cross Mordor unless Aragorn distracts the Eye of Sauron; Aragorn can't defend Helm's Deep unless Merry and Pippin rally the ents; and so forth.

This structure seems like something that would be fundamental to all epic fantasy novels, but it's actually not. More recent multi-POV fantasy novels often set their characters at cross purposes instead of working together: see Game of Thrones, Malazan, Joe Abercrombie's novels, etc.

As it happens, I am currently writing an epic fantasy novel that follows the classic structure - with four POV characters, separated by distance but working toward a common goal. I didn't consciously set out to emulate the structure of MOBAs (nor Lord of the Rings, for that matter). But I do think all these works touch on a common human experience: the need to have faith in other people, even though they are just as fallible as you.

3: Deckbuilding games

Let's get a bit weirder. Deckbuilding and card collecting games: can they become novels?

Several LitRPG novels have approached this literally. They have card-based magic systems, protagonists searching for chase rares, etc. Wizards waving hands full of trading cards around on the battlefield and trying not to look silly.

That's fine, but I wonder if we could do "decks" of "cards" in a more metaphorical sense. What if the "cards" were story elements, such as objects, characters and environments? And each "draw" recombines them in surprising ways?

The Years of Apocalypse kind of does this with characters. The cast rotates in and out of the story: in any given arc there are two or three people who are currently "active" in the protagonist's life.

Could this be made more systematic through a narrative contrivance? A wizard with a portal that summons different allies from across the multiverse. Or a company of space mercenaries, deep frozen in capsules, and fired at random out of a giant revolver to carry out missions on different planets... I guess Suicide Squad is kind of close to this.

4: Boss-focused games

I was going to say "boss rush games", e.g. games where you do nothing but fight bosses. But I actually want to cast the net a bit wider, to all sorts of games that treat bosses as centrally important. This runs from 100% boss battles (Furi), games where the non-boss elements are atrophied (Shadow of the Colossus, Cuphead), and more normal games where bosses still have a special magnificence attached to them (Dark Souls, Hollow Knight, etc.)

In general, I think fiction writers are sleeping on "boss" as a narrative device.

What distinguishes a boss from a regular villain? Firstly, a general aura of power and majesty surrounding them. Second, an implied history that stretches back far before the encounter with the protagonist. Third and most important, the boss's history and character traits are expressed through the ways in which they are trying to kill you.

Most villains in novels show up multiple times, often threatening or bargaining with the hero before they finally attack. Bosses, on the other hand, are heralded by dire omens, but (usually) appear only once, and when they do, they immediately want you to die. For prose fiction, I see this as an interesting limitation and challenge. If a villain shows up in your story for just one chapter, attacks the hero, and then dies, how are you going to give that villain depth and character? Videogames have a rich history of answers to this question.

One novel that has a lot of "boss-shaped" villains is Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman. Most of these are monsters rather than people: a dragon-salamander under a bridge, an animated statue of the Virgin Mary, a giant worm made of thousands of corpses. They don't talk or have complex motives. What they do have is a very strong visual design, strong enough to come through even in prose description; and an implied history that is entangled with their appearance and their methods of attack.

5: Bullet hell/shmup games

Gravity's Rainbow is a bullet hell game in novel form. I will not be taking questions on this point.

6: Emergent games

When I say "emergent", I'm reaching for an umbrella term that would cover true roguelikes (Nethack, Dwarf Fortress) as well as "immersive sims" (Bioshock, Deus Ex) physics-themed RPGs such as Divinity and Tears of the Kingdom, and any other game that features "emergent gameplay". Basically, any game that has a bunch of cool little things that the player can combine in ways the developers didn't foresee.

I want to zoom in on that word, "things". From a narrative perspective, what all these games have in common is a special attention to material objects. Every funny or surprising story that emerges from this type of game begins with a physical interaction. A mad dwarf picks up a cat's liver; a fireball ignites a wooden structure; an explosive barrel becomes glued to a helicopter.

In videogames, interactions between characters are relatively predictable. When a hero walks into a room full of monsters, there are only two ways the scene can end. But objects, lacking intentionality, are subject only to the mindless influence of physics, and therefore their possibilities for action and movement multiply rapidly.

In fiction, objects usually have low narrative status. Characters and social structures are what really matter. Where an object does feature prominently, it is usually as an extension of a character's will (e.g. the sword that the hero swings) or as a symbol that carries meaning for a character.

What would it mean for fiction to pay close attention to objects as themselves - to attend to the minutely variable ways in which they can bounce, stick, break, squash, repel, connect, entangle, pierce...?