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The Internet Is A Megadungeon [Archive Pull] · Never Post

• 0:00
  Mike Rugnetta: Friends, hello, and welcome to Never Post, a
• 0:03
  podcast for and about the Internet. I'm your host Mike
• 0:05
  Rugnetta, and we have a labyrinthine show for you this
• 0:09
  week. In this archive poll originally published 03/27/2024,
• 0:15
  I talk with Italian academics Gabriela De Setta and Paolo
• 0:19
  Berti about how we imagine the Internet. Is it a town square?
• 0:25
  Is it a series of tubes?
• 0:27
  Is it the backrooms? They make the case for the Megadungeon as
• 0:33
  a productive metaphor, a vast underground locale traversed by
• 0:39
  adventurers in tabletop role playing games. How does the
• 0:44
  imagined size, construction, purpose, and relationship to
• 0:49
  play of the Megadungeon help us think productively about our
• 0:55
  relationship to the Internet, a place in which so many of us
• 1:00
  cannot help but feel a little trapped. We're gonna take a
• 1:05
  short break. You're gonna listen to some ads unless you're on the
• 1:08
  member feed, and when we return, Gabriela de Setta, Paolo Berty,
• 1:13
  and the Internet as Megadungeon.
• 1:25
  Three months ago, my longtime friend and legendary Internet
• 1:29
  Cryptid, Chris Shee, mentioned me in a quote post on Blue Sky.
• 1:33
  She said, I think this might be made just for you. The post she
• 1:38
  quoted was from an Italian academic linking to a journal
• 1:41
  issue he had edited. His post read, in the introduction, we
• 1:45
  make a case for abstracting the main features of the
• 1:49
  Megadungeon, infrastructural layering, ecological geography,
• 1:54
  procedural generation, ludic logic, and mapping them onto
• 1:59
  digital mediation to see if they can capture its complexity. You
• 2:04
  are probably familiar with something like the mind palace,
• 2:08
  a framework, a metaphor, a kind of mnemonic made famous perhaps
• 2:12
  by its most well known user, Sherlock Holmes.
• 2:15
  The mind palace is a way to understand, to navigate one's
• 2:20
  own intellectual storehouse. It's a memory aid, a
• 2:24
  psychogeographic landscape, a place graft onto the
• 2:28
  placelessness of the psyche. Gabriela De Sita, who wrote the
• 2:33
  post that Chris forwarded me, and his colleagues Paolo Berti
• 2:36
  and Stefania de Vincenz, put forward in this journal that
• 2:40
  Gabriela linked to the Megadungeon, a place prevalent
• 2:43
  in tabletop role playing as a kind of mind palace for the
• 2:48
  media technological environment, which is itself also
• 2:52
  fundamentally placeless. I had the journal issue printed since
• 2:58
  its release is digital only at a local print shop, and I read it
• 3:02
  all highlighter in hand. Conceptually, it is dense and
• 3:06
  rich and really just unlike anything I've ever read, and it
• 3:12
  has changed the way I see the Internet, which is no mean feat.
• 3:18
  In this segment, me, Gabriela, Paolo, we barely scratch the
• 3:22
  surface of the work they've done. We traverse but a few
• 3:26
  rooms of the vast network of ideas that they have worked so
• 3:30
  hard to assist in generating. But as brief as the encounter
• 3:35
  is, there are more than a few treasures to behold. I hope you
• 3:39
  enjoy. Joining me are Gabriela De Sete and Paolo Berti.
• 4:06
  Gabriela De Sete is a sociologist and researcher at
• 4:09
  the University of Bergen. He holds a PhD from the Hong Kong
• 4:13
  Polytechnic University and was a post doctoral fellow at the
• 4:16
  Institute of Ethnology Academia Sinica in Taipei. His research
• 4:21
  focuses on digital media practices, how the social and
• 4:24
  the technological entangle, and vernacular creativity in the
• 4:28
  Chinese speaking world. Paolo Berti is a lecturer in the
• 4:32
  faculty of humanities at Cafoskari University of Venice.
• 4:35
  He holds a PhD from Sapienza University of Rome, did
• 4:39
  postgraduate work in historical and artistic heritage at the
• 4:42
  specialization school, and studied art history at the
• 4:45
  University of Siena.
• 4:47
  As a contemporary art historian, he focuses on new media, digital
• 4:51
  cultures, and mobile technologies with forays into
• 4:54
  critical theory and game studies. Gabriela, Paolo, thank
• 4:58
  you so so much for joining us.
• 5:00
  Gabriele de Seta: Thank you for having us.
• 5:01
  Paolo Berti: Thank you.
• 5:01
  Mike Rugnetta: This is
• 5:01
  Gabriele de Seta: my side. Thank you.
• 5:03
  Mike Rugnetta: So you both also, in addition to your long your
• 5:07
  long list of accomplishments, recently, with your
• 5:10
  collaborator, Stefania de Vincenz, co edited a special
• 5:15
  issue of the journal MAGAZEN, the International Journal for
• 5:19
  Digital and Public Humanities. This was, volume four, number
• 5:23
  two for people who go looking for it. I was out at the end of
• 5:27
  last year, December 2023. And this whole issue of magazine,
• 5:33
  their first ever, if I understand correctly, guest
• 5:36
  edited issue is organized around a single idea that is built upon
• 5:41
  and expanded and explored and plumbed throughout a number of
• 5:46
  papers, two of which are your own. The single organizing idea
• 5:51
  is that of the Megadungeon.
• 5:55
  And I wonder if the two of you could explain briefly what a
• 6:02
  Megadungeon is. Not the metaphor, which we will sort of
• 6:06
  get to in a moment, but just the sort of, like, base concept that
• 6:11
  exists in the world that appears in tabletop role playing games.
• 6:16
  What is a Megadungeon? Gabriele, let's start with you.
• 6:20
  Gabriele de Seta: So a Megadungeon is quite simply a
• 6:24
  dungeon that is very big. One of the ways to distinguish a
• 6:28
  Megadungeon from a dungeon is that a dungeon is usually part
• 6:31
  of a larger world role playing setting. So you might with your
• 6:37
  party of adventurers, you might start in a in a city inn and
• 6:40
  then kill some goblins and then hear about a dungeon and go
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  explore it to clear it of monsters or loot it. And then
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  you come out and you continue your adventures. A mega dungeon
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  is so big that usually it represents the entirety of the
• 6:57
  gaming world.
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  So you start in the dungeon in Megadungeon or you enter the
• 7:01
  Megadungeon and you never leave. And this has some consequences
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  for the design of the space because it's not just a I don't
• 7:09
  know, a cave system or or a an underground level of a castle.
• 7:13
  It is a huge dungeon that is a world in itself. It has a an
• 7:17
  ecology. It maybe even has some sort of urbanism in it or or
• 7:22
  different zones or societies or ecosystems.
• 7:26
  Mike Rugnetta: One of the things that's in the journal that I
• 7:29
  think is really interesting is this idea that the classic
• 7:31
  dungeon has an edge to it. You are probably gonna reach that
• 7:35
  edge when you're playing. You're gonna get to a point where the
• 7:38
  DM has decided, you know, there's a wall in this dungeon
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  and you can't go through the wall. One of the defining
• 7:44
  features of the Megadungeon is that you might never and perhaps
• 7:48
  could never get to a point where you've finished. So in each
• 7:55
  paper, we sort of take the idea of the Megadungeon as a starting
• 7:59
  point.
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  This possibly ever expanding active environment that contains
• 8:05
  the entirety of what you might need in a large scale campaign
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  and uses that idea as a framework for understanding a
• 8:14
  lot about the world. The contemporary media and
• 8:17
  technology landscape, is maybe the quickest way to summarize
• 8:22
  it. You know, saying that the Internet, media, the stack of
• 8:26
  technology that organizes and powers all of those things is
• 8:30
  itself a megadungeon in many ways, or there are things that
• 8:36
  you gain by looking at those things as perhaps being
• 8:41
  Megadungeon like. And I I don't wanna ask both of you to, like,
• 8:46
  summarize or to go through everything in a nearly 200 page
• 8:50
  journal issue, But I wonder if we could like let's start at the
• 8:54
  surface, like, you know, the entrance to the dungeon. Yes.
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  Like, how and why is it that contemporary media and
• 9:02
  technology is something like this setting that can be found
• 9:06
  in tabletop role playing games? Let's start with Paolo.
• 9:10
  Paolo Berti: Okay. The fact is that the digital realm today is
• 9:14
  depicted as an increasingly intricate with layers of
• 9:18
  interconnected system and so on. So it's not longer about just
• 9:23
  discussing of cyberspace or midspace or hybrid space. The
• 9:29
  word we imagine in the mid-twentieth century as small,
• 9:32
  so implying closeness to other, where globalization and
• 9:35
  telecommunication give us the impression that we could reach
• 9:39
  friends or relatives on the other side of the world,
• 9:43
  actually no longer exist. Dimensionality has changed.
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  Digital, telecommunication now speak of big word and spaces
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  that are no longer computable. So proximity no longer exists.
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  If I connect, for instance, from my kitchen to play Fortnite with
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  my brother in a in another room, it's not just a communication
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  between us as if it were simply a phone call, but rather an
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  entire infinite infrastructure of data, of layers, of words
• 10:16
  that have the potential to emerge. The world is not getting
• 10:20
  smaller. It's getting bigger, and we don't know where
• 10:23
  backrooms is an online trope, for instance, that speaks about
• 10:27
  that.
• 10:27
  Where they are, those Backrooms? Where they expanded those rooms?
• 10:32
  Mike Rugnetta: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
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  The Backrooms like the sort of very anodyne gray pathways that
• 10:39
  connect everything together in the lore of the Internet. Your
• 10:43
  Fortnite example is interesting. Is that sort of what you mean
• 10:46
  when you talk about self organizing, self propagating
• 10:50
  space? By taking these actions, by using this technology, you're
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  sort of automatically and maybe even accidentally expanding the
• 11:00
  architecture of how you can understand the entirety of, you
• 11:05
  know, contemporary media and the Internet?
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  Paolo Berti: The Internet is the most dungeon like media of of
• 11:12
  today. Just think of the of the iceberg image that represent the
• 11:18
  deep web, for instance. There is a real stratification and a real
• 11:22
  sense of exploration in the Internet. Something Dantian in
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  in the exploration of of the Internet. There is also a
• 11:34
  representation that I find very interesting, very effective.
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  As you may know, Wikipedia is full of hidden pages, and one of
• 11:43
  these leads to a page that equates the role of Wikipedia
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  contributors to characters of a dungeon crawling game. By
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  contributing, those people identify themselves as
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  characters, the article as dungeon, they have character
• 12:00
  sheets, experience points. The dungeon is very similar to this
• 12:07
  idea of leveling of the Internet, stacking.
• 12:11
  Mike Rugnetta: Yeah. What are what are some of the other
• 12:13
  characters that one encounters in the dungeon? Surely, the
• 12:18
  troll is, you know, a very easy and ready example. But, like,
• 12:24
  how far does this metaphor extend? Like, are we you know,
• 12:26
  am I a player?
• 12:27
  Gabriele de Seta: I think the history of how to characterize
• 12:32
  yourself when you relate to media is very interesting. So in
• 12:36
  the beginning, it was, you know, a user or a wizard, if you were
• 12:40
  very good at computing in the eighties, I guess. And it it
• 12:43
  changes. So, yes, you can be a player. You can be a user, a
• 12:46
  member, a profile, a streamer, a celebrity, an influencer.
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  And there is a constant change in the definition of of of the
• 12:56
  individual first person user of these technologies. We used to
• 13:01
  see the materiality, and we used to think about the Internet as a
• 13:05
  dungeon and and ourselves as wizards or a frontier to explore
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  or a geocities neighborhood, you know, in very spatial terms.
• 13:14
  Mike Rugnetta: Very literal. Yeah.
• 13:16
  Gabriele de Seta: And and we kind of lost that. And I don't
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  think it's because we stopped thinking about it, but it's
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  because there's an increasing attempt from especially
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  corporate actors to make people lose a sense of this
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  materiality, data centers and cables and increasingly
• 13:35
  environmentally demanding computation, labor exploitation,
• 13:39
  and so on. And that is why I think one of the most common
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  rhetorics for the digital has become that of flatness of
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  platforms, of a certain depthlessness. And in this
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  sense, the Megadungeon for me, and I think Paolo shares this
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  point of view, is a way to inject or reinject this this
• 14:02
  spatial and and volumetric model into discussions of of the
• 14:08
  Internet and and of any other, yeah, communication or
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  computational technologies.
• 14:13
  Mike Rugnetta: It's interesting because I I wanna try to pull
• 14:15
  together a a few things that we've just said in the last
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  couple minutes, which is like, for a lot of people, I think,
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  the Internet is kinda not fun anymore. Yes. It's a bleak
• 14:29
  place. You log on, you look at bad news, and you log off. We
• 14:34
  all know what the experience is.
• 14:35
  It's hard to imagine it on mass as something that's pleasant.
• 14:40
  Yes. But a lot of how you describe the Megadungeon and
• 14:47
  talk about our place in it and how we appreciate our
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  interaction with it is based in play. And in recognizing that
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  play is not only a sort of fundamental aspect of the
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  Megadungeon as a concept in tabletop role playing, but is
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  maybe part of our experience of the aggregate of technology that
• 15:13
  we can look at as a Megadungeon. And so I wonder, like, is the
• 15:16
  idea of play, like, radical in a sense in that way?
• 15:20
  Paolo Berti: I think there is a ludic paradigm that underlies
• 15:24
  the the dungeon and the Megadungeon. In my essay, I I
• 15:29
  talk about John Huisinga, that is a Dutch historian that wrote
• 15:35
  a book, nearly, one hundred years ago, suggesting that the
• 15:41
  foundation of religion and war and so on were shaped in the
• 15:46
  realm of play. We wanted to show how this Huzinga paradigm has
• 15:52
  come in the end to to wrap around us, to create a sort of
• 15:57
  prison around us. Through the concept of gamification, this
• 16:02
  day we approach life as a game, maybe too much. The interfaces
• 16:06
  of public administration apps speak the language of gaming and
• 16:12
  leveling up, for instance.
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  We strive to improve our self, our curriculum vitae through
• 16:20
  skills like characters. Digital goods are our equipments, for
• 16:26
  instance. So maybe this role playing game mobile model,
• 16:31
  sorry, has became more pervasive than we might expected, maybe.
• 16:37
  So it's a sort of mixed match of gaming too much and not gaming
• 16:42
  too much.
• 16:43
  Gabriele de Seta: The dungeon as a metaphor, the Megadungeon as a
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  model, asks us to think about the other side of play, which is
• 16:51
  design. So being a game master and a game designer and a
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  designer of the dungeon and who makes the Megadungeon, who
• 17:01
  decides what connects to what and and what you can explore.
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  And I think that that is a key point because what we were
• 17:08
  discussing before that the Internet has become boring or
• 17:11
  not fun is because much of it has become trapped by this
• 17:16
  gamification of use. So the platforms and and apps and the
• 17:22
  consumer oriented stuff. But the materiality is still there.
• 17:26
  The networks are still there. And actually, we have devices
• 17:29
  that are way more powerful than ten or twenty years ago. So we
• 17:32
  could build Otherwise, the Megadungeon is there to be
• 17:36
  explored and to be mastered and designed for ourselves. And I
• 17:42
  think what Paolo mentioned before, the the backrooms, is a
• 17:45
  very good example of that because, yes, it is a sort of
• 17:49
  pseudo horror trope, but it also represents a kind of fantasy or
• 17:55
  dream, this liminal space that is behind the Internet or be
• 18:00
  behind the surface world of of corporate media. It's it's this
• 18:04
  endless sprawling maze of of empty rooms that look like
• 18:09
  conference rooms in in in abandoned hotels or something
• 18:12
  like that.
• 18:13
  But but for me to me, that that is a very clear example of how
• 18:16
  people still dream of that unknown maze of infrastructural
• 18:21
  spaces that can be inhabited by by masters, but it can also be
• 18:25
  explored beyond the surface of what you're gamified into
• 18:30
  everyday use.
• 18:31
  Mike Rugnetta: It's interesting. It's horrific, but in a way,
• 18:33
  it's also kind of hopeful because it is able to be
• 18:36
  explored.
• 18:37
  Gabriele de Seta: Yes. And and and made into a story. Like, the
• 18:40
  the Backrooms as a whole, it it's just an image, right, or or
• 18:44
  a few images. But the stories that develop around them are are
• 18:47
  infinite. People make an entire lore about the Backrooms and how
• 18:51
  to no clip into them, inventing words and practices and and
• 18:55
  monsters that inhabit them and what they mean and where they
• 18:58
  come from.
• 18:59
  So it's it's this endless lore production that is very similar
• 19:03
  to role playing games to what players and and and game masters
• 19:06
  do together, fabulating a medium. So, yes, it is hopeful
• 19:10
  because it proves that you can make that exist.
• 19:22
  Mike Rugnetta: Paulo, Gabrieli, thank you so so much for
• 19:25
  chatting with us and taking some time out of your schedule to
• 19:28
  have this conversation. This was fascinating. I know I said this
• 19:31
  to both of you privately when I reached out, but I wanna say it
• 19:34
  publicly too, like, my friend Chris alerted me to the
• 19:37
  existence of this journal issue. Having now read it, what I said
• 19:41
  to her was, I don't know that there has ever been anything
• 19:44
  that feels like it is more for me. Thank you very very much for
• 19:48
  making it.
• 19:49
  Gabriele de Seta: Well, thanks to you and thanks to Chris for
• 19:52
  for sharing this issue with you and it was a blast. So yeah.
• 19:56
  Thanks.
• 19:56
  Paolo Berti: Yeah. Thank you, Mike. And thank you, Hans, for
• 19:58
  this.
• 19:59
  Mike Rugnetta: Where can people find your work online? Gabriela,
• 20:02
  you can go first.
• 20:03
  Gabriele de Seta: People can find my work online on my
• 20:07
  website, paranorm.asia.
• 20:09
  Mike Rugnetta: Paula?
• 20:10
  Paolo Berti: Yes. I I have a profile on Academia Edu, on
• 20:14
  Kafoskari webpage, on Archive, and social media like Facebook
• 20:22
  as Polo Berti or Instagram at betvibel.
• 20:37
  Mike Rugnetta: That is the show we have for you this week. We're
• 20:39
  gonna be back here in the main feed on or around Thursday, May
• 20:43
  21. Never Post is listener funded, but hey, good news. You
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