Dark. Dangerous. Disturbing. That’s the typical Foozle lair. In fact, that could almost describe the lair of any mini-Foozle, too. Have you noticed how similar these places tend to be?
Jim Rossignol, in a post on the oddly-named bldgblog blog, discusses the architecture of evil lairs. In particular, he notes that evil beings, especially in fantasy RPGs, always live in evil-looking places.
Of course, most Foozles tend to be “Ancient Evil” something-or-other: demon, god, necromancer, or powerful undead. So we have an expectation that, wherever they’re hiding, the place just has to be a reflection of their evilness.
In the real world, that’s usually not true. Plenty of evil people have walked the earth, and lived in quite nice places, including palaces and mansions. However, real-world people are just that: people. They aren’t demons, gods, necromancers or powerful undead.
Does that bother us? Is that why we can accept those nasty, evil-looking dens in game after game? And aren’t we becoming tired of that particular look? As Jim mentions, there isn’t a lot of variation in it.
So many places are underground: below the castle, below the city, below the tower, below the ruins, below the river, etc. and ad infinitum. Are we after Foozle or a mole here?
Even when a lair is “up top” instead of “down under”, there is an overall sameness to the “evil HQ” that persists from game to game. We hardly notice the architecture any more.
Personally, I think Foozle ought to smarten up his den. Why should it have to be some foul-looking construction that just reeks of evil? To emphasize he’s a “bad boy”? C’mon, we knew that a long time ago.
In fact, I think it might be more disturbing and unsettling to have “Ancient Evil” hanging out in a pristine lair rather than surrounded by hellfire. The idea that “evil = dark & dirty” is a childish one, and it’s time to move away from that perspective, difficult though it may be.
This is just the difference between fantasy and reality. In reality, much evil is done by, or ordered by, people who think that they’re doing good. The rest is by people who have relatively normal desires, but who are egocentric enough to care only for themselves (and their immediate families, often enough).
Oh, sure, there are always exceptions. In a world of six billion people, you can find at least one of everything, I imagine. But television is obsessed with serial killers because TV is also fantasy. Games can choose demons, gods, or whatever as the Foozle, because they don’t even pretend to be anything but fantasy.
And really, if it’s fantasy anyway, why not have an evil lair that’s spooky and scary? Such places use human nature, and the effects of countless horror movies, to induce an emotion in the player. Admittedly, I’ve never liked cliches, so I’d probably welcome a game that broke this pattern. But I imagine that the pattern itself will remain, and for good reason.
There have been several games that broke this pattern (including some mentioned in the article). Although those were usually not the games wherein the evil was “ancient.” Apparently one cliche deserves another…
A few points came to mind, loosely related to this topic and the ironic clichés that we’ve come to accept:
1. The flip side of the common observation that foozle usually does little or nothing in the game world during the game is the observation that whatever made him/her evil has apparently not done foozle much good. Foozle usually lives/unlives in pretty poor circumstances, though plot contrivances sometimes attempt to explain why.
2. Foozle rarely earns his/her evil reputation in the game. In general, foozle is simply presented as evil as a given, hence the “evil” environmental clues to drive the point home. Often, foozle’s greatest evil is that he/she “summoned evil/undead creatures to the land” or stole something important (but doesn’t actually do anything with it, apparently waiting for the player to come retrieve it however long it takes).
3. Regarding all the games that require the player to find the scattered pieces of something (98% or so?): if foozle’s minions are all over the game world, why can’t they do for foozle what the player is trying to do? You’d think that such a huge network of minions might find at least some of the pieces more efficiently than a single player, particularly since the player usually starts out as a weakling moron. Likewise, if foozle’s minions have so much treasure to discover, why isn’t foozle taking a cut?
In the real world, that’s usually not true. Plenty of evil people have walked the earth, and lived in quite nice places, including palaces and mansions.
I wonder…I’ve seen a couple of Saddam Hussein’s palaces, and while they didn’t have skulls and axes everywhere (though there were some sculpted monsters), they were tastelessly gaudy in an extreme way, one that really is related to the nature of his regime (showing off how wealthy & scary he was) - and not what you see in your average civilized capital or governor’s mansion.
On the other extreme, I’ve read that Hitler’s bunker (if not his mountain retreats or railcar) was simply grim, utilitarian and near undecorated - the pictures I’ve seen of the “Eagle’s Nest” didn’t look sinister except for the swastiskas (however, I’ve seen some of Goering’s memorabilia at the Infantry museum in Georgia - and they really were Saddamish in the matter of taste).
The worse Roman emperors inherited the attractive architecture left by the others - but then, is that different from the mutant bosses in Fallout inhabiting nice, shiny vaults (or military complexes) like the one the player comes from?
X, good to see you posting again. Hey, there’s always variations. “Usually” is the key word here. I’m sure if we both bothered to look hard, we could come up with examples running from one extreme to the other. You’ve already done a couple as it is.
Even so, did Hussein’s places look like the typical Foozle lair? Didn’t seem that way to me.
Not as far as I can tell (keep in mind that I haven’t played the kind of high-end graphics adventures the article is talking about; and in the lower-end CRPG’s, the enemy lair looks like the other generic dungeons). My point was simply that the evil nature of a regime or its rulers really can affect the architecture - they treat art about as subtly as Smaug.
In good old-fashioned adventure fiction, it varied too - the evil mongol from The Thief of Baghdad fought it out in a stolen palace, but some forgot rule 137 of the evil overlord list.