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99 Potions, 99 Elixers, and a Platypus of Truth: Platypus Nostalgia

I think I played my first D&D game when I was twelve.  The first Final Fantasy must have come out when I was about that age as well.  Safe to say, I've done a lot of dungeon crawls in my time.  College brought new experiences including the wonderful world of White Wolf's Exalted.  Once you've tried free-wheeling through the almost limitless world of the Realm, it's hard to go back into the narrow confines of the dungeon even if there is a dragon at the end.

The point of all this is that I stumbled across an announcement that Blizzard is going to be releasing Diablo III sometime in the near future (with Blizzard this could mean next decade.  They are the southern Italians of the video game world.).  Now I've seen a lot of Diablo, never played it, and it's always intrigued me.  As far as I understand it, it's just a series of really artful dungeon crawls.  Yeah, there's some bit of an above-ground world, but most of that seems to be a prelude or mood-setter to get you to the real point: the dungeon.  Now my experience has been that free-wheeling game worlds in the pen-and-paper domain, such as Exalted, are way  more fun than more than the standard subterranean adventures of classic D&D.  I figure that this would also extend to the digital world.  This leads me back then to the question of why so many people, myself included, find the dungeon-filled world of Diablo so fascinating.  Sure, we could talk different strokes for different folks, but what is it, specifically, about the dungeon crawl that captures our imagination?  Why, after game world have gotten so much more expansive, do we keep returning to this time-worn trope?

I usually try to answer my own questions or at least point out in which direction I think the answer might lie.  This time, however, I think I'm going to let the question stand.  There's still a couple more missions of Starcraft II for me to work through, but maybe after that's done I can break out some old dungeon crawls and see if I can come to grips with this hallowed pillar of fantasy gaming.
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