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---
title: The murderous history of loot boxes
contents:
- pic: the-murderous-history-of-loot-boxes.jpg
- type: mimic-colophon
original: original text
original-credits: Austin Wood
original-action: published
original-date: May 03, 2017
current: current text
current-credits: XPUB
current-action: '.replace("mimic", "loot box")'
current-date: March 25, 2022
- img: loot box.png
alt: Foreword
- |-
In RPG games the
Mimic is a monster
that appears as a
treasure chest.
- "When a player tries to interact with it in order to get the contents of the chest it reveals its true nature and attacks her."
- "The name of the Mimic come from its act of mimesis: this creature is like a predator that disguises itself in order to sneak up on its prey."
- "A treasure chest in a game can be seen as a temporary safe zone because it interrupts the flow of incoming threats by offering a reward to the player."
- "The Mimic endangers this temporary safe zone and breaks a kind of contract between the player and the game."
- |-
The treasure chest is
transformed in a risky
russian roulette, that
inoculates danger in the
safe zones of
a narration.
- "I'm tempted to write that the loot box is something like a meta mimic: an object that promises an in-game reward but produces a damage to the player."
- "What's more is that this damage is inflicted in the real world not to the player but to the person."
- "What's then the difference between a loot box and a Mimic?"
- img: mimic.png
alt: The murderous history of loot boxes
- We know loot boxes as treasure chests with teeth, but their origins made for cooler, more complex monsters.
- "Sometimes its obvious. Would there really be a treasure chest in the middle of such an unremarkable room, just begging you to open it? Please."
- "Other times its almost impossible to tell."
- "There will be an imperfection in the shape if youre lucky, maybe a misplaced link of chain on the side or a wood grain that seems just slightly off."
- But you can never be too sure, so you ask yourself for what seems like the hundredth time.
- Is it a loot box?
- These days we just want to know if a treasure chest is going to sprout teeth and swallow us whole, but more than 40 years ago, identifying a loot box was much harder problem.
- "They weren't just treasure chests, and they weren't always mindlessly hungry for the flesh of adventurers."
- Some could speak and even bargain. Others would attack anything on sight.
- Some would grow to be the size of houses, others content to live as doormats. Or walls, floors or clothes. Toilets.
- Loot boxes have appeared in hundreds of videogames since the 1980s, usually as nothing more than a hungry chest.
- But when they first appeared in Dungeons & Dragons, they were so much more than that.
- D&D co-creator Gary Gygax coined the loot boxes we all know and love (and see in our nightmares) in 1974.
- "Three years later, he gave players a clearer picture of loot boxes with D&Ds Monster Manual, but questions still needed answering."
- "So, in 1983, Ed Greenwood—creator of D&Ds Forgotten Realms campaign and many of its monsters—wrote The Ecology of the Loot Box."
- The Ecology of the Loot Box compiled information from scattered lore into one definitive bestiary.
- |-
He also made up a lot of new details to fill in gaps in player understanding.
"That was and is the fun in D&D for me, making stuff up," Greenwood tells me over email.
- "In ways consistent with existing lore, so as to weave new portions of an existing tapestry."
- "Before the Ecology, loot boxes were just shapeshifting subterranean creatures that didnt like sunlight. Incredibly flexible hermits, basically."
- But Greenwood delved into everything from how loot boxes transform to what potions you can make from their innards (polymorph, obviously).
- |-
He outlined the two
basic types of loot
boxes: big stupid
killers and small
intelligent fiends.
- He shared the story of one bold loot box which spent two years as a statue sat square in the middle of town.
- |-
Curiously near a sewer
vein "filled to a depth of
more than sixty feet
with human and
animal bones.
- "Its no exaggeration to say he changed the face of loot boxes forever."
- "Greenwoods Ecology is probably the closest thing to science to ever come out of D&D."
- "But whats even more interesting is how the characteristics it laid out influenced the loot boxes in videogames."
- |-
Look at the ones in the
original Ultima, released
in 1980. These are
aggressive monster
chests that pounce
when the player
gets close.
- "Sounds remarkably faithful to the Monster Manual, doesnt it?"
- "Now look at Luggage from Discworld, released in 1995—after Greenwoods ecology."
- |-
Luggage is most
definitely a loot box,
but hes also
your companion.
- "Hes a little disobedient, but sentient, almost dog-like and kind of cute."
- "If nothing else, hes far more intelligent than Ultimas loot boxes."
- "In fact, Luggage is one of the only smart loot boxes in videogames."
- But why? Greenwood said that loot boxes are often intelligent enough to speak.
- So why are most loot boxes automatically enemies?
- "To paraphrase a certain Doom review, wouldnt it be something if we could talk to them?"
- |-
Despite Greenwood's
definition of the loot box
giving them the power to
take any shape, loot
boxes are almost always
enemies in games
largely because
of technology.
- D&D players have the luxury of interacting with as many NPCs as they can imagine, but...
- For early PC games like Ultima, creativity was measured in bytes.
- |-
With an Apple IIs specs,
there was barely enough
room for a fantasy
world, let alone
rich dialogue.
- "So, to meet gameplay needs, the loot box was colloquialized to the monster chest."
- Discworld had a little more wiggle room.
- "Computers had improved since the 80s and it wasnt a fantasy RPG like Ultima"
- Discworld was a point-and-click adventure game, and those are popular because of their writing and charm.
- Thus Luggage was born, intelligence and disobedience intact.
- "Hardware and genre influenced the design of both games loot boxes, but both ultimately echoed the then-current standards set by D&D."
- |-
Jump to Baldurs Gate
in 1998.
- |-
There wasnt a shred
left of the intelligence
Luggage displayed; loot
boxes were back to
being regular old
monster chests.
- |-
Considering the wealth
of dialogue and how
faithfully it emulated
D&Ds other systems,
youd think it could have
made good use of
a wise-cracking loot
box or two.
- |-
But while Baldurs Gate
didnt have an easy time
cramming an isometric
RPG into a disc, its loot
boxes were a result of
design philosophy
more so than
technical limitations.
- Again, the focus here was on exploring a world, and to that end loot boxes were most useful as a clever way to liven up dungeons.
- "And really, aside from the whole eating people thing, thats what loot boxes have always been about: meeting the unique needs of games."
- '"Loot boxes are the workhorse shapeshifting critters, the most ubiquitous, versatile and yet low-powered," Greenwood says.'
- "Unlike, say, [werewolves], they have few strings attached to their shifting abilities, and lack the restrictions on form that most other shapeshifters have…"
- '"Loot boxes can be anything, can have any degree of cunning a [dungeon master] requires, and the [dungeon masters] desired patience, too," Greenwood says.'
- "Even when videogames are cherry-picking D&D canon, theyre still following it in spirit."
- Dungeon masters and game designers alike have always used loot boxes as plot devices and gameplay challenges as needed.
- So, you know, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
- Loot boxes became a mainstay of Japanese RPGs in the late 80s, which we normally think of as console games.
- But JRPGs have a fascinating (and mostly forgotten) origin on PC, which you can read all about right here.
- |-
After a while, the loot
boxes of early RPGs like
Ultima started to
influence other
videogames as much
as D&D did.
- |-
For starters, focusing
on a chest form
led videogames to
associate loot boxes
almost explicitly with
greed and treasure.
- And they were a convenient way of introducing risk/reward in dungeons.
- Why do you think loot boxes usually drop rare and valuable items?
- |-
Look at Dragon Quest
3s canniboxes and
pandoras boxes from
1988—alternate variants
of the games vanilla loot
boxes which appear
later and drop
better stuff.
- |-
Look at Avarice, a boss
in the more recent Titan
Souls that not only is a
gilded treasure chest
but guards a roomful
of treasure.
- Perhaps most famously, look at the Symbol of Avarice helmet in Dark Souls, which improves your loot drops and consumes your health.
- "Its a sister item to the Covetous Gold Serpent Ring, which also ups your loot."
- Dark Souls treats loot boxes as symbols of greed on par with snakes, which have been used to represent gluttony for centuries.
- "Thats saying something about how stigmatized loot boxes have become."
- I almost feel sorry for the greedy bastards.
- Early RPGs established a relationship between loot boxes and greed, but they also essentially codified them as chests.
- Which may be why they appear so rarely in other genres or other forms.
- "Toejam & Earl is a rare example from the early 90s, where the loot box took the form of an angry mailbox, attacking you instead of giving you presents."
- |-
Again, greed is
the throughline.
- "Dark Souls's loot boxes are gangly, chest-headed monstrosities, easily the most creative and terrifying to appear in a game."
- |-
They also illustrate how
some qualities in
Ed Greenwoods
Ecology evolved into
gameplay mechanics.
- From Software held off on making ladder loot boxes (to the delight of a grateful universe), but
- "Dark Souls loot boxes hide their true bodies and may be bipedal or quadrupedal, which is a subtle remnant of the true shapeshifting of old."
- |-
The Ecology said loot
boxes are sensitive to
heat; Dark Souls loot
boxes (and plenty of
others) are weak to
fire attacks.
- "Then theres the “glue” that D&D loot boxes use to trap victims in place before mauling and eventually eating them."
- "Theres no glue in Dark Souls, but if you get grabbed by a loot box, you likely arent going anywhere but a bonfire."
- "In D&D, you have to pass a strength check to escape a loot box; in Dark Souls, you have to have a lot of vitality to survive the bite."
- "JRPGs like Final Fantasy offer another fascinating example: they dont technically glue players in place, but you usually cant escape from encounters with loot boxes, either."
- Many JRPGs also streamlined loot boxes even further.
- |-
By viewing the
fundamental idea of
player expects loot,
gets a fight instead
through the lens of
random encounters,
they created the
box of enemies.
- "The chest itself isnt even a monster anymore, just a trigger for a random encounter."
- |-
Does that make it
a loot box? No, but
its still a different
means to the same end,
and its still hardware
dictating design.
- |-
Random encounters
were instituted to free
up memory, after all.
- "Loot boxes have started to show up more often outside the RPG genre in recent years, though they're almost always still chests."
- Games like Magicka and Borderlands 2 treat them as easter eggs.
- Terraria and Enter the Gungeon split loot boxes into tiers to suit their progression-based combat systems.
- |-
Torchlight loves to hide
loot boxes in groups
of chests.
- Others still feature distant ancestors.
- Shovel Knights angler fish boss uses a treasure chest lure to draw in players.
- "The maneater in Dragons Dogma uses treasure chests like a hermit crab does shells."
- '"Definitely not a loot box," Greenwood said of the maneater. "This is an ambush predator."'
- "Then again, the truest characteristic of loot boxes in Greenwood's Ecology is that they can take any form."
- Modern games that ditch the toothy chest are still staying true to that spirit.
- |-
These things are
everywhere if you
really look.
- In other words, stay suspicious, because its probably a loot box.
---
TODO: images
would be nice to have sequences with the mimic treasure chest and the mimic monster in sequence, so it's like you are opening it and interacting
could be presented as a little game like: find the treasure beware of the mimic
https://www.pcgamer.com/the-murderous-history-of-mimics/
aesthetical relation between
loot box simulator
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwLdQeM5bM0
&
model zoo forensic architecture
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jb2IEY8cya0&t=170s
<!-- murderus story of loot box -->
- The murderous history of loot boxes
- By Austin Wood published May 03, 2017 By Kamo and Grr find and replace all March 16, 2022
- We know loot boxes as treasure chests with teeth, but their origins made for cooler, more complex monsters.
- "Sometimes its obvious. Would there really be a treasure chest in the middle of such an unremarkable room, just begging you to open it?"
- Please.
- "Other times its almost impossible to tell."
- There will be an imperfection in the shape if youre lucky, maybe a misplaced link of chain on the side or a wood grain that seems just slightly off.
- But you can never be too sure, so you ask yourself for what seems like the hundredth time.
- Is it a loot box?
- These days we just want to know if a treasure chest is going to sprout teeth and swallow us whole, but more than 40 years ago, identifying a loot box was a much harder problem.
- "They weren't just treasure chests, and they weren't always mindlessly hungry for the flesh of adventurers."
- Some could speak and even bargain.
- Others would attack anything on sight.
- Some would grow to be the size of houses, others content to live as doormats. Or walls, floors or clothes. Toilets.
- Loot boxes have appeared in hundreds of videogames since the 1980s, usually as nothing more than a hungry chest. But when they first appeared in Dungeons & Dragons, they were so much more than that.
- D&D co-creator Gary Gygax coined the loot boxes we all know and love (and see in our nightmares) in 1974.
- Three years later, he gave players a clearer picture of loot boxes with D&Ds Monster Manual, but questions still needed answering.
- "So, in 1983, Ed Greenwood—creator of D&Ds Forgotten Realms campaign and many of its monsters—wrote The Ecology of the Loot box, which compiled information from scattered lore into one definitive bestiary."
- He also made up a lot of new details to fill in gaps in player understanding.
- "That was and is the fun in D&D for me, making stuff up," Greenwood tells me over email.
- "In ways consistent with existing lore, so as to weave new portions of an existing tapestry."
- "Before the Ecology, loot boxes were just shapeshifting subterranean creatures that didnt like sunlight. Incredibly flexible hermits, basically."
- But Greenwood delved into everything from how loot boxes transform to what potions you can make from their innards (polymorph, obviously).
- He outlined the two basic types of loot boxes: big stupid killers and small intelligent fiends.
- "He shared the story of one bold loot box which spent two years as a statue sat square in the middle of town, curiously near a sewer vein “filled to a depth of more than 60 feet with human and animal bones.”"
- "Its no exaggeration to say he changed the face of loot boxes forever."
- "Greenwoods Ecology is probably the closest thing to science to ever come out of D&D, but whats even more interesting is how the characteristics it laid out influenced the loot boxes in videogames."
- Look at the ones in the original Ultima, released in 1980. These are aggressive monster chests that pounce when the player gets close.
- "Sounds remarkably faithful to the Monster Manual, doesnt it?"
- "Now look at Luggage from Discworld, released in 1995—after Greenwoods ecology. Luggage is most definitely a loot box, but hes also your companion."
- "Hes a little disobedient, but sentient, almost dog-like and kind of cute. If nothing else, hes far more intelligent than Ultimas loot boxes."
- "In fact, Luggage is one of the only smart loot boxes in videogames. But why? Greenwood said that loot boxes are often intelligent enough to speak."
- "So why are most loot boxes automatically enemies? To paraphrase a certain Doom review, wouldnt it be something if we could talk to them?"
- "Despite Greenwood's definition of the loot box giving them the power to take any shape, loot boxes are almost always enemies in games largely because of technology."
- D&D players have the luxury of interacting with as many NPCs as they can imagine, but for early PC games like Ultima, creativity was measured in bytes.
- "With an Apple IIs specs, there was barely enough room for a fantasy world, let alone rich dialogue."
- So, to meet gameplay needs, the loot box was colloquialized to the monster chest.
- Discworld had a little more wiggle room.
- "Computers had improved since the 80s and it wasnt a fantasy RPG like Ultima; it was a point-and-click adventure game, and those are popular because of their writing and charm."
- Thus Luggage was born, intelligence and disobedience intact.
- "Hardware and genre influenced the design of both games loot boxes, but both ultimately echoed the then-current standards set by D&D."
- "Jump to Baldurs Gate in 1998. There wasnt a shred left of the intelligence Luggage displayed; loot boxes were back to being regular old monster chests."
- "Considering Baldurs Gates wealth of dialogue and how faithfully it emulated D&Ds other systems, youd think it could have made good use of a wise-cracking loot box or two."
- "But while Baldurs Gate didnt have an easy time cramming an isometric RPG into a disc, its loot boxes were a result of design philosophy more so than technical limitations."
- Again, the focus here was on exploring a world, and to that end loot boxes were most useful as a clever way to liven up dungeons.
- "And really, aside from the whole eating people thing, thats what loot boxes have always been about: meeting the unique needs of games."
- “Loot boxes are the workhorse shapeshifting critters, the most ubiquitous, versatile and yet low-powered,” Greenwood says.
- "“Unlike, say, [werewolves], they have few strings attached to their shifting abilities, and lack the restrictions on form that most other shapeshifters have…”"
- "“Loot boxes can be anything, can have any degree of cunning a [dungeon master] requires, and the [dungeon masters] desired patience, too,” Greenwood says."
- "Even when videogames are cherry-picking D&D canon, theyre still following it in spirit."
- Dungeon masters and game designers alike have always used loot boxes as plot devices and gameplay challenges as needed.
- So, you know, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
- Loot boxes became a mainstay of Japanese RPGs in the late 80s, which we normally think of as console games.
- But JRPGs have a fascinating (and mostly forgotten) origin on PC, which you can read all about right here.
- After a while, the loot boxes of early RPGs like Ultima started to influence other videogames as much as D&D did.
- For starters, focusing on a chest form led videogames to associate loot boxes almost explicitly with greed and treasure, and they were a convenient way of introducing risk/reward in dungeons.
- Why do you think loot boxes usually drop rare and valuable items?
- "Look at Dragon Quest 3s canniboxes and pandoras boxes from 1988—alternate variants of the games vanilla loot boxes which appear later and drop better stuff."
- Look at Avarice, a boss in the more recent Titan Souls that not only is a gilded treasure chest but guards a roomful of treasure.
- Perhaps most famously, look at the Symbol of Avarice helmet in Dark Souls, which improves your loot drops and consumes your health.
- "Its a sister item to the Covetous Gold Serpent Ring, which also ups your loot."
- Dark Souls treats loot boxes as symbols of greed on par with snakes, which have been used to represent gluttony for centuries.
- "Thats saying something about how stigmatized loot boxes have become."
- I almost feel sorry for the greedy bastards.
- Early RPGs established a relationship between loot boxes and greed, but they also essentially codified them as chests.
- Which may be why they appear so rarely in other genres or other forms.
- Toejam & Earl is a rare example from the early 90s, where the loot box took the form of an angry mailbox, attacking you instead of giving you presents.
- Again, greed is the throughline.
- "Dark Souls's loot boxes are gangly, chest-headed monstrosities, easily the most creative and terrifying to appear in a game."
- "They also illustrate how some qualities in Greenwoods Ecology evolved into gameplay mechanics."
- From Software held off on making ladder loot boxes (to the delight of a grateful universe) but
- "Dark Souls loot boxes hide their true bodies and may be bipedal or quadrupedal, which is a subtle remnant of the true shapeshifting of old."
- "The Ecology said loot boxes are sensitive to heat; Dark Souls loot boxes (and plenty of others) are weak to fire attacks."
- "Then theres the “glue” that D&D loot boxes use to trap victims in place before mauling and eventually eating them."
- "Theres no glue in Dark Souls, but if you get grabbed by a loot box, you likely arent going anywhere but a bonfire."
- "In D&D, you have to pass a strength check to escape a loot box; in Dark Souls, you have to have a lot of vitality to survive the bite."
- "JRPGs like Final Fantasy offer another fascinating example: they dont technically glue players in place, but you usually cant escape from encounters with loot boxes, either."
- Many JRPGs also streamlined loot boxes even further.
- "By viewing the fundamental idea of player expects loot, gets a fight instead through the lens of random encounters, they created the box of enemies."
- "The chest itself isnt even a monster anymore, just a trigger for a random encounter."
- "Does that make it a loot box? No, but its still a different means to the same end, and its still hardware dictating design."
- Random encounters were instituted to free up memory, after all.
- "Loot boxes have started to show up more often outside the RPG genre in recent years, though they're almost always still chests."
- Games like Borderlands 2 and Magicka treat them as easter eggs.
- Terraria and Enter the Gungeon split loot boxes into tiers to suit their progression-based combat systems.
- Torchlight loves to hide loot boxes in groups of chests.
- Others still feature distant ancestors.
- "Shovel Knights angler fish boss uses a treasure chest lure to draw in players."
- The maneater in Dragons Dogma uses treasure chests like a hermit crab does shells.
- "Definitely not a loot box," Greenwood said of the maneater. "This is an ambush predator."
- Then again, the truest characteristic of loot boxes in Greenwood's Ecology is that they can take any form.
- Modern games that ditch the toothy chest are still staying true to that spirit.
- These things are everywhere if you really look.
- "In other words, stay suspicious, because its probably a loot box."