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.
Gabriele de Seta: Thank you for having us.
Paolo Berti: Thank you.
Mike Rugnetta: This is
Gabriele de Seta: my side. Thank you.
Mike Rugnetta: 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.
Gabriele de Seta: 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.
Mike Rugnetta: 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.
Paolo Berti: 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?
Mike Rugnetta: 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?
Paolo Berti: 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.
Mike Rugnetta: 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?
Gabriele de Seta: 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.
Mike Rugnetta: Very literal. Yeah.
Gabriele de Seta: 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.
Mike Rugnetta: 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?
Paolo Berti: 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.
Gabriele de Seta: 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.
Mike Rugnetta: It's interesting. It's horrific, but in a way,
it's also kind of hopeful because it is able to be
explored.
Gabriele de Seta: 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.
Mike Rugnetta: 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.
Gabriele de Seta: Well, thanks to you and thanks to Chris for
for sharing this issue with you and it was a blast. So yeah.
Thanks.
Paolo Berti: Yeah. Thank you, Mike. And thank you, Hans, for
this.
Mike Rugnetta: Where can people find your work online? Gabriela,
you can go first.
Gabriele de Seta: People can find my work online on my
website, paranorm.asia.
Mike Rugnetta: Paula?
Paolo Berti: 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.
Mike Rugnetta: 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
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