“At Play in the Carceral State is a week-long series investigating play in, around, and about prisons and prison culture. Learn more here.”
“The history of interactive fiction, as a genre, is a history of narratives of confinement and imprisonment.”
“That history starts even before there was such a thing as interactive fiction or a text adventure”
“It starts with the dungeon, an endemic notion that has shown up in every corner of the medium.”
“The usage of dungeon in games is idiosyncratic, different from what the word means in ordinary English. Dungeons & Dragons has its roots in tabletop wargaming “dungeon crawls,” scenarios about assaulting a castle through its underground complex, its dungeon.”
“A dungeon is underground, maze-like, and full of dangers and monsters. An abandoned temple can be a dungeon; a cave can be a dungeon. But the word that stuck wasn’t mine, or cave, or labyrinth; it was dungeon. Prison.”
“We don’t really examine this shift; we don’t really think about it. But in gaming, the “dungeon” went from being a place that holds people to being a place that holds monsters. This space of imprisonment, and those imprisoned within, are beasts to be challenged, conquered, outsmarted.”
“Who builds dungeons? Nobody, or nobody that matters. Dungeons are both a distortion of a prison and an empty, “savage” territory waiting for to be taken, plundered, colonized. And these are the kinds of spaces that video games were first populated with.”
“Colossal Cave Adventure, often credited as the original text adventure, is based on a real place, the Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky. But it already draws from Dungeons and Dragons.”
“And the games that picked up after CCA are explicit dungeon games. Rogue, the game roguelikes are named after, cited CCA as one of its inspirations. Zork takes place in a much more literal dungeon; a vast, abandoned, underground space, once again populated by monsters but devoid of people.”
“Here the “dungeon” is phrased as the remnant of an underground empire, drawing on already-established D&D tradition of the dungeon as an abandoned place.”
“An abandoned space filled with treasure and monsters: The idea doesn’t originate in D&D. It starts with Columbus landing on what he would decide to call Hispaniola and seeing it, irrespective of people already living there, as territory to be conquered free of moral consequence.”
“It’s an idea with so much currency in Western culture that we barely notice it’s there. There’s a rhetorical violence to declaring that a place is morally empty, a place where all actions are justifiable because “no people” live there, because it’s been abandoned due to some cataclysm we don’t care about.”
“The dungeon is this logic of colonialism applied to a space that resembles a prison; it is both a place of confinement and a supposedly empty place.”
“Mechanics and narrative co-evolve, and so IF’s traditional mechanics lean into building confining spaces.”
“The way space works in a traditional parser game (like Adventure or Zork) is that the world is composed out of discrete “rooms,” and you move between them in a single step.”
“Those clearly separate rooms with defined thresholds between them suggest indoor space more than outdoor space, underground rather than aboveground, a designed environment rather than nature.”
“In the 80s, when puzzle-laden interactive fiction thrived, dungeons were frequent. Even when those spaces became lively and populated with people, even when they stopped being an empty place to be conquered and plundered, the mechanics and construction inherited from the dungeon lingered on, persisting into the hobbyist community that kept IF alive through the 90s.”
“But everything in any medium that is forcibly literal and physical eventually becomes metaphorical or indirect.”
“far from subverting it, narratives of escape are, paradoxically, part of the ideological scaffolding of the carceral state.”
“Carceral society promotes fantasies of escape to make itself seem more tolerable; to make it seem like imprisonment is something to be overcome by its own victims.”
“Bronze, Emily Short’s version of the Beauty and the Beast story, is another story of confinement. The Beauty is, of course, trapped in the Beast’s castle, with no way to leave. But, as much as you can in parser IF, the environment here tries not to be claustrophobic but vast and sparse. It’s not really about the physical content of the rooms; it’s about a mental geography of Beauty’s confinement.”
“Spider and Web used extreme physical confinement to highlight a mental process; Bronze used an expansive physical world to demonstrate the other, more subtle forces that bind people. Where those seemingly opposing ideas crash into each other is with Porpentine’s howling dogs.”
“With characteristic Porpentine bleakness, in howling dogs, you’re only ever escaping physical imprisonment into emotional or spiritual imprisonment; the fantasy of escape, and thus the fantasy of just imprisonment, is repeatedly annihilated.”
“If anything in IF can stand in for the carceral state, as opposed to the physical concrete body of a prison, it’s an image of perpetual escape into another form of confinement; a dungeon of the body, mind, and spirit”
“But critical fantasies of escape are essential to resistance against this carceral rhetoric.”
“If the dungeon equates the imprisoned to the monstrous, then pieces like howling dogs, Begscape and With Those We Love Alive ask us to inhabit the skin of the monstrous, the grotesque, the pitiable.”
“The empathy is with the kobolds hiding and scurrying, the gelatinous cubes crawling the corridors. This is not to “humanize” the monsters, but to show how “humanity” can be a petty, conditional notion, something to be taken away at a moment’s notice to create an empty space full of monsters, left behind for those who feel entitled to inherit it.”