🆕 Never Post! The Internet Is A Megadungeon [Archive Pull]

Originally published on March 27th, 2024, enjoy Mike's conversation with Gabriele de Seta and Paolo Berti about how the “megadungeon” is a productive model for understanding the internet.

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Megadungeons

• Megadungeon: A Model for Media Complexity, Magazen
• Megadungeon: New Digital Volumetries in Art and Media, YT Playlist
• paranom.asia, Gabriele de Seta
• unive.it, Paolo Berti
  
  

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Never Post’s producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show’s host is Mike Rugnetta.

Friends, hello, and welcome to Never Post, a podcast for and about the Internet. I'm your host Mike Rugnetta, and we have a labyrinthine show for you this week. In this archive poll originally published 03/27/2024, I talk with Italian academics Gabriela De Setta and Paolo Berti about how we imagine the Internet. Is it a town square? Is it a series of tubes?

Is it the backrooms? They make the case for the Megadungeon as a productive metaphor, a vast underground locale traversed by adventurers in tabletop role playing games. How does the imagined size, construction, purpose, and relationship to play of the Megadungeon help us think productively about our relationship to the Internet, a place in which so many of us cannot help but feel a little trapped. We're gonna take a short break. You're gonna listen to some ads unless you're on the member feed, and when we return, Gabriela de Setta, Paolo Berty, and the Internet as Megadungeon.

Three months ago, my longtime friend and legendary Internet Cryptid, Chris Shee, mentioned me in a quote post on Blue Sky. She said, I think this might be made just for you. The post she quoted was from an Italian academic linking to a journal issue he had edited. His post read, in the introduction, we make a case for abstracting the main features of the Megadungeon, infrastructural layering, ecological geography, procedural generation, ludic logic, and mapping them onto digital mediation to see if they can capture its complexity. You are probably familiar with something like the mind palace, a framework, a metaphor, a kind of mnemonic made famous perhaps by its most well known user, Sherlock Holmes.

The mind palace is a way to understand, to navigate one's own intellectual storehouse. It's a memory aid, a psychogeographic landscape, a place graft onto the placelessness of the psyche. Gabriela De Sita, who wrote the post that Chris forwarded me, and his colleagues Paolo Berti and Stefania de Vincenz, put forward in this journal that Gabriela linked to the Megadungeon, a place prevalent in tabletop role playing as a kind of mind palace for the media technological environment, which is itself also fundamentally placeless. I had the journal issue printed since its release is digital only at a local print shop, and I read it all highlighter in hand. Conceptually, it is dense and rich and really just unlike anything I've ever read, and it has changed the way I see the Internet, which is no mean feat.

In this segment, me, Gabriela, Paolo, we barely scratch the surface of the work they've done. We traverse but a few rooms of the vast network of ideas that they have worked so hard to assist in generating. But as brief as the encounter is, there are more than a few treasures to behold. I hope you enjoy. Joining me are Gabriela De Sete and Paolo Berti.

Gabriela De Sete is a sociologist and researcher at the University of Bergen. He holds a PhD from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and was a post doctoral fellow at the Institute of Ethnology Academia Sinica in Taipei. His research focuses on digital media practices, how the social and the technological entangle, and vernacular creativity in the Chinese speaking world. Paolo Berti is a lecturer in the faculty of humanities at Cafoskari University of Venice. He holds a PhD from Sapienza University of Rome, did postgraduate work in historical and artistic heritage at the specialization school, and studied art history at the University of Siena.

As a contemporary art historian, he focuses on new media, digital cultures, and mobile technologies with forays into critical theory and game studies. Gabriela, Paolo, thank you so so much for joining us.

Thank you for having us.

Thank you.

This is

my side. Thank you.

So you both also, in addition to your long your long list of accomplishments, recently, with your collaborator, Stefania de Vincenz, co edited a special issue of the journal MAGAZEN, the International Journal for Digital and Public Humanities. This was, volume four, number two for people who go looking for it. I was out at the end of last year, December 2023. And this whole issue of magazine, their first ever, if I understand correctly, guest edited issue is organized around a single idea that is built upon and expanded and explored and plumbed throughout a number of papers, two of which are your own. The single organizing idea is that of the Megadungeon.

And I wonder if the two of you could explain briefly what a Megadungeon is. Not the metaphor, which we will sort of get to in a moment, but just the sort of, like, base concept that exists in the world that appears in tabletop role playing games. What is a Megadungeon? Gabriele, let's start with you.

So a Megadungeon is quite simply a dungeon that is very big. One of the ways to distinguish a Megadungeon from a dungeon is that a dungeon is usually part of a larger world role playing setting. So you might with your party of adventurers, you might start in a in a city inn and then kill some goblins and then hear about a dungeon and go explore it to clear it of monsters or loot it. And then you come out and you continue your adventures. A mega dungeon is so big that usually it represents the entirety of the gaming world.

So you start in the dungeon in Megadungeon or you enter the Megadungeon and you never leave. And this has some consequences for the design of the space because it's not just a I don't know, a cave system or or a an underground level of a castle. It is a huge dungeon that is a world in itself. It has a an ecology. It maybe even has some sort of urbanism in it or or different zones or societies or ecosystems.

One of the things that's in the journal that I think is really interesting is this idea that the classic dungeon has an edge to it. You are probably gonna reach that edge when you're playing. You're gonna get to a point where the DM has decided, you know, there's a wall in this dungeon and you can't go through the wall. One of the defining features of the Megadungeon is that you might never and perhaps could never get to a point where you've finished. So in each paper, we sort of take the idea of the Megadungeon as a starting point.

This possibly ever expanding active environment that contains the entirety of what you might need in a large scale campaign and uses that idea as a framework for understanding a lot about the world. The contemporary media and technology landscape, is maybe the quickest way to summarize it. You know, saying that the Internet, media, the stack of technology that organizes and powers all of those things is itself a megadungeon in many ways, or there are things that you gain by looking at those things as perhaps being Megadungeon like. And I I don't wanna ask both of you to, like, summarize or to go through everything in a nearly 200 page journal issue, But I wonder if we could like let's start at the surface, like, you know, the entrance to the dungeon. Yes.

Like, how and why is it that contemporary media and technology is something like this setting that can be found in tabletop role playing games? Let's start with Paolo.

Okay. The fact is that the digital realm today is depicted as an increasingly intricate with layers of interconnected system and so on. So it's not longer about just discussing of cyberspace or midspace or hybrid space. The word we imagine in the mid-twentieth century as small, so implying closeness to other, where globalization and telecommunication give us the impression that we could reach friends or relatives on the other side of the world, actually no longer exist. Dimensionality has changed.

Digital, telecommunication now speak of big word and spaces that are no longer computable. So proximity no longer exists. If I connect, for instance, from my kitchen to play Fortnite with my brother in a in another room, it's not just a communication between us as if it were simply a phone call, but rather an entire infinite infrastructure of data, of layers, of words that have the potential to emerge. The world is not getting smaller. It's getting bigger, and we don't know where backrooms is an online trope, for instance, that speaks about that.

Where they are, those Backrooms? Where they expanded those rooms?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

The Backrooms like the sort of very anodyne gray pathways that connect everything together in the lore of the Internet. Your Fortnite example is interesting. Is that sort of what you mean when you talk about self organizing, self propagating space? By taking these actions, by using this technology, you're sort of automatically and maybe even accidentally expanding the architecture of how you can understand the entirety of, you know, contemporary media and the Internet?

The Internet is the most dungeon like media of of today. Just think of the of the iceberg image that represent the deep web, for instance. There is a real stratification and a real sense of exploration in the Internet. Something Dantian in in the exploration of of the Internet. There is also a representation that I find very interesting, very effective.

As you may know, Wikipedia is full of hidden pages, and one of these leads to a page that equates the role of Wikipedia contributors to characters of a dungeon crawling game. By contributing, those people identify themselves as characters, the article as dungeon, they have character sheets, experience points. The dungeon is very similar to this idea of leveling of the Internet, stacking.

Yeah. What are what are some of the other characters that one encounters in the dungeon? Surely, the troll is, you know, a very easy and ready example. But, like, how far does this metaphor extend? Like, are we you know, am I a player?

I think the history of how to characterize yourself when you relate to media is very interesting. So in the beginning, it was, you know, a user or a wizard, if you were very good at computing in the eighties, I guess. And it it changes. So, yes, you can be a player. You can be a user, a member, a profile, a streamer, a celebrity, an influencer.

And there is a constant change in the definition of of of the individual first person user of these technologies. We used to see the materiality, and we used to think about the Internet as a dungeon and and ourselves as wizards or a frontier to explore or a geocities neighborhood, you know, in very spatial terms.

Very literal. Yeah.

And and we kind of lost that. And I don't think it's because we stopped thinking about it, but it's because there's an increasing attempt from especially corporate actors to make people lose a sense of this materiality, data centers and cables and increasingly environmentally demanding computation, labor exploitation, and so on. And that is why I think one of the most common rhetorics for the digital has become that of flatness of platforms, of a certain depthlessness. And in this sense, the Megadungeon for me, and I think Paolo shares this point of view, is a way to inject or reinject this this spatial and and volumetric model into discussions of of the Internet and and of any other, yeah, communication or computational technologies.

It's interesting because I I wanna try to pull together a a few things that we've just said in the last couple minutes, which is like, for a lot of people, I think, the Internet is kinda not fun anymore. Yes. It's a bleak place. You log on, you look at bad news, and you log off. We all know what the experience is.

It's hard to imagine it on mass as something that's pleasant. Yes. But a lot of how you describe the Megadungeon and talk about our place in it and how we appreciate our interaction with it is based in play. And in recognizing that play is not only a sort of fundamental aspect of the Megadungeon as a concept in tabletop role playing, but is maybe part of our experience of the aggregate of technology that we can look at as a Megadungeon. And so I wonder, like, is the idea of play, like, radical in a sense in that way?

I think there is a ludic paradigm that underlies the the dungeon and the Megadungeon. In my essay, I I talk about John Huisinga, that is a Dutch historian that wrote a book, nearly, one hundred years ago, suggesting that the foundation of religion and war and so on were shaped in the realm of play. We wanted to show how this Huzinga paradigm has come in the end to to wrap around us, to create a sort of prison around us. Through the concept of gamification, this day we approach life as a game, maybe too much. The interfaces of public administration apps speak the language of gaming and leveling up, for instance.

We strive to improve our self, our curriculum vitae through skills like characters. Digital goods are our equipments, for instance. So maybe this role playing game mobile model, sorry, has became more pervasive than we might expected, maybe. So it's a sort of mixed match of gaming too much and not gaming too much.

The dungeon as a metaphor, the Megadungeon as a model, asks us to think about the other side of play, which is design. So being a game master and a game designer and a designer of the dungeon and who makes the Megadungeon, who decides what connects to what and and what you can explore. And I think that that is a key point because what we were discussing before that the Internet has become boring or not fun is because much of it has become trapped by this gamification of use. So the platforms and and apps and the consumer oriented stuff. But the materiality is still there.

The networks are still there. And actually, we have devices that are way more powerful than ten or twenty years ago. So we could build Otherwise, the Megadungeon is there to be explored and to be mastered and designed for ourselves. And I think what Paolo mentioned before, the the backrooms, is a very good example of that because, yes, it is a sort of pseudo horror trope, but it also represents a kind of fantasy or dream, this liminal space that is behind the Internet or be behind the surface world of of corporate media. It's it's this endless sprawling maze of of empty rooms that look like conference rooms in in in abandoned hotels or something like that.

But but for me to me, that that is a very clear example of how people still dream of that unknown maze of infrastructural spaces that can be inhabited by by masters, but it can also be explored beyond the surface of what you're gamified into everyday use.

It's interesting. It's horrific, but in a way, it's also kind of hopeful because it is able to be explored.

Yes. And and and made into a story. Like, the the Backrooms as a whole, it it's just an image, right, or or a few images. But the stories that develop around them are are infinite. People make an entire lore about the Backrooms and how to no clip into them, inventing words and practices and and monsters that inhabit them and what they mean and where they come from.

So it's it's this endless lore production that is very similar to role playing games to what players and and and game masters do together, fabulating a medium. So, yes, it is hopeful because it proves that you can make that exist.

Paulo, Gabrieli, thank you so so much for chatting with us and taking some time out of your schedule to have this conversation. This was fascinating. I know I said this to both of you privately when I reached out, but I wanna say it publicly too, like, my friend Chris alerted me to the existence of this journal issue. Having now read it, what I said to her was, I don't know that there has ever been anything that feels like it is more for me. Thank you very very much for making it.

Well, thanks to you and thanks to Chris for for sharing this issue with you and it was a blast. So yeah. Thanks.

Yeah. Thank you, Mike. And thank you, Hans, for this.

Where can people find your work online? Gabriela, you can go first.

People can find my work online on my website, paranorm.asia.

Paula?

Yes. I I have a profile on Academia Edu, on Kafoskari webpage, on Archive, and social media like Facebook as Polo Berti or Instagram at betvibel.

That is the show we have for you this week. We're gonna be back here in the main feed on or around Thursday, May 21. Never Post is listener funded, but hey, good news. You are a listener. Help us continue to bring you weird and interesting Internet tidbits like a flock of your own personal digital magpies by going to neverpo.st to become a member today.

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