This is a fascinating thread, one that I missed on its initial appearance.
As I was reading the last 100+ posts, a thought occurred to me which I was surprised no one had mentioned yet -- automapping in computer games. Automapping has been around for ages and ages; it's very prominent nowadays in most games involving "dungeon" exploration (whether the dungeon is literally that, or is a sci-fi location, or is a quasi-modern-day location as in a spy game or tactical shooter).
Most automaps do not show you secret or hidden areas (until you find them), but they can make the player suspect the location of a secret area in exactly the same way that an old-school D&D player would react to an incompletely filled in sheet of graph paper. This tickles my fancy in that the new technology is being used to replicate the old. And of course it's no accident that things turned out this way, since the histories of computer games and role-playing games are tightly entangled.
The game that I was thinking of when I had the automapping thought is Elder Scolls: Oblivion, and I want to point out one of its dungeons which I think is pretty well designed. Here is
Vilverin, a large "beginner" dungeon that is literally the first thing the player sees upon emerging from the tutorial level.
Note: spoilers ahead.
[sblock]If you read the explanation of the area -- scroll down to "Zone 1:
Vilverin", you will note that the dungeon starts off rather mundanely. Like most Oblivion dungeons, it is less a sequence of corridors leading to rooms than it is one huge interconnected area with room-like smaller parts. For that reason, if you go charging into Vilverin straight out of the tutorial, you are likely to get your butt handed to you by the mutiple bandits who are fully capable of swarming your position. (And interestingly, this somewhat presages the 4e D&D trope of interconnected encounter areas which can lead to masses of monsters engaging the PCs.)
Another thing that's not apparent from the overhead view map on the wiki page is the use of verticality in the Zone 1 map. From the entrance (labeled "Out" on the left-hand side of map), you spiral around a short stairway and then down a much longer one to the big open area. The section to the top of the map is lower still, so you can potentially sneak up on the bandits lurking below and literally get the drop on them; or you can descend another set of stairs to attack them at their own level.
At any rate, if you do not pay attention to your surroundings and pick up on the clues present in Zone 1 (i.e., the
Dirty Scroll from the bandit ringleader), you will make your way down to Zone 2, fight a single bandit, and depart Vilverin without ever plumbing its true depths.
Zone 2:
Vilverin Canosel is where the clever map design starts to pay off. There's a secret door that leads to the rest of the complex (location N on the map). What's especially clever is that just looking at the automap won't necessarily tip you off to the secret: the pre-secret area is nice and symmetrical. Instead the player must observe, or stumble upon, the trigger that opens the door. The player could use use auditory clues that something (a shuffling zombie) is beyond the "wall", or could potentially use life-detection magic to make the same discovery.
Past the secret area, there's a choice of two ways forward: past a locked gate (which the PC can unlock if he's good at the lockpicking minigame) or through another secret passage. In either case, there is an entirely separate section of monsters'n'loot that you can only get to by going through a flooded area -- a reward for persistent or risk-taking PCs (and it is a risk this early in the game because you will lack the ability to breath underwater and, depending upon your magical ability, might lack the ability to
see underwater!).
Zones 3 and 4 are straightforward in a map sense, but have a variety of things the player must do to proceed. Unfortunately, there is no reason not to press every single button and follow every single passage you find; I'd like these zones better if there were some sort of clever environmental observation you could make that would reveal the easiest/most lucrative path.[/sblock]
Some of the later dungeons in Oblivion are much more complex, with multiple uses of verticality, looping, secret areas, and so forth. All of them, though, are essentially linear. I think the linearity works in a game like Oblivion, because you are either in a dungeon for a specific quest or side-quest, or you're there just randomly looting, so the dungeon is not meant to be a tremendously lengthy endeavor.
There are some much older computer games -- Eye of the Beholder, for example, which is explicitly a D&D game -- with some highly clever layouts involving teleporters, one-way doors, and all the other Gygaxian tricks. So even though those things may have fallen out of favor in print adventures, they linger on in computer games.
