ABSTRACT
Few gamers take on the audacious undertaking of tracing their favorite game genre back to its roots, documenting the decisions and trends that informed the development of each new entry along the way. Harris will be the first to admit that he isn’t the best roguelike player, but it’s very likely he is the most knowledgeable. The European board-game boom that’s going on right now follows that rule. Settlers of Catan, which is the most famous of the Euro games, has a randomly created board. It’s possible that procedural generation can turn out very flat and uninteresting. It’s no mean feat to create a random dungeon, but that’s not going to be interesting. It is telling that roguelikes provide so many of the solutions to making dungeon exploration interesting, possibly, because it got many of them from classic D&D.
