Playing with Money (3): Arms Dealers

Over at ihobo today, the final part of the Playing with Money serial, looking at how gun games acquired shops in various ways. Here’s an extract:

Resident Evil 4 is one of several notable examples of shopping making its way into gun games, which had long resisted the player practices of currency and shops. This is ironic, since the first person shooter was itself an offshoot of the CRPG lineage. Catacomb 3-D, John Carmack’s project immediately prior to Wolfenstein 3D, was a straightforward dungeon crawler of the form popularised by Dungeon Master in 1987. Those dungeon crawlers, however, had differentiated themselves from other CRPGs by being interested solely in the dungeon, and discarding the village and overworld (wilderness in the tabletop precursors) that had structured the play of non-dungeon crawlers.

You can read the entirety of Playing with Money (3): Arms Dealers over at ihobo.com.