In August of 2024, Ace Books of Penguin Random House released Dungeon Crawler Carl, the first in a series of previously self-published books by author Matt Dinniman. The novel follows a character named Carl and his ex-girlfriend’s cat Princess Donut, who are stuck on a TV game show run by aliens, forced to navigate a series of traps to survive. Dinniman’s work employs a writing style known as LitRPG, in which elements of video games, often specifically MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games), comprise part of the story’s world. For example, characters may “level up,” gain experience points, and talk to other players. LitRPG is distinct from interactive fiction like Choose Your Own Adventure in that the reader is not involved in the game but remains an observer.
Given that niche-sounding description and the bizarre premise of Dinniman’s novel, you might think that the book being picked up by a major publishing house is a fluke. But while PRH is only just getting into the LitRPG business, Dungeon Crawler Carl has already made serious inroads into the literary world.
In August, Book Riot’s Liberty Hardy called it “One of the most bananapants, funny, inventive books I have read in a while.” In December, LitHub released a list by Drew Broussard of top sci-fi, horror, and fantasy books of the year that placed Dinniman’s book shoulder-to-shoulder with many well-reviewed works that bring literary sensibilities to these genres, including several we’ve covered at BookBrowse (Beautyland, The Bright Sword, The Night Guest, The Bog Wife). And interestingly, Ace Books operates under the Penguin imprint Berkley — yes, the same Berkley associated with romance and historical fiction and authors book clubs love, like Marie Benedict and Dolen Perkins-Valdez. Recently, the imprint has been expanding in scope, growing its list in areas like speculative fiction, and now delving into LitRPG.
LitRPG, as a wider trend, has risen out of novel formats popular in Russia, Korea, and Japan, and has long boasted a robust culture of self-publishing and serializing supported by engaged fans. The style isn’t always so precisely defined, and lines blur between LitRPG and GameLit, which still inhabits a game world but is lighter on game mechanics. Examples of GameLit that may sometimes fall within a looser definition of LitRPG are Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One (2012) and Marie Lu’s Warcross (2018). It’s worth mentioning that while LitRPG and similar narratives often are associated with sci-fi or fantasy elements, and while LitRPG is sometimes referred to as its own genre, any genre can theoretically be combined with a LitRPG format. The key features are details like player stats that show game progression.
So why is LitRPG emerging in mainstream American publishing now? Editor Stephanie Clark at Orbit, an imprint of Hachette that just released its first LitRPG title in January 2025 (Level: Unknown by David Dalglish), tells Publishers Weekly: “People are used to hearing character dialogue; they’re used to seeing their characters leveling up on screen…It’s just like they’re playing a video game, and they’re looking for that experience in a narrative.” LitRPG is similar to “Let’s Play,” a type of online video that allows the viewer to watch someone play through a video game, and the popularity of that format may explain some of the appeal of an equivalent written experience. A lot of reality television also includes elements of competition or gamification, and this phenomenon has been linked to broader aspects of modern capitalist society in fictional depictions of people trapped in lethal games, like the Hunger Games books and movies and the Netflix series Squid Game — while Dungeon Crawler Carl may be very different from these works in tone, it shares some plot features.
Whatever the reasons behind it, a LitRPG like Dinniman’s gaining mainstream acceptance opens the door for the style to grow in popularity, creativity, inclusivity, and subject matter. While there are concerns within the LitRPG community over some of the same issues present in video game culture — such as sexism and general rigidity — many possibilities exist for LitRPG's evolution, and it's arguably more accessible and flexible than video games and other kinds of interactive fiction: The reader doesn’t need special instructions or skills to read the book, all they have to do is read it (or listen to it as an audiobook, which many fans prefer), and any writer with an interest in creating a LitRPG can probably find the necessary resources to do so. Furthermore, LitRPG is hard to put in a box and already somewhat embedded in the world around us. It may seem new and weird to those just discovering it now, but it’s built on ideas that have been around for a long time: not only in role-playing games, but in reading as an escapist pastime, in being able to observe a character experience an adventure, however far-fetched, from the comfort of an armchair. In a conversation about the definition of LitRPG, one Reddit user remarked that its roots could be traced as far back as Don Quixote: “Obviously it's not straight up Gamelit or LitRPG. But the guy gets lost in his fantasy worlds and that's a basic element of most Gamelit. I think it could be the honorary grandfather of the genre.”