The Dungeon Mode is an ongoing research project that has run through my work from 2019 until the present. It was also the title of a chapter of my MFA thesis writing.
The time-share terminal, home computer, and commercial game console all share intertwined histories with programmatic dungeons. These digital dungeons reflect and extend the physical spaces where their host machines reside—the institution, the family room, the bedroom, the in-between. Each of these sites contains its own labyrinth, where familiar shadows of fantasy are cast by different real-world adumbrations—some, like Medusa, too terrible to face directly. Videogame dungeons are more than fantasy obstacle courses. They embody carceral, hellish, and pseudo-medieval motifs so frequently repeated in media that their origins often go unexamined. They echo the mine—both as metaphor and historical reality—invoking centuries of exploitation, from the earliest capitalist enterprises to the extraction of materials for today’s disposable devices, often mined by enslaved or coerced labor. These dungeons resemble the buried infrastructure of modernity: a network of caverns, a vault of hoarded treasure, a crypt of forgotten bodies, or a nest of subhumans rendered killable without consequence. “Marvelous” and “faery” fantasy—the genres in which dungeons often appear—carry the spectral baggage of hereditary rule, patriarchy, and biological essentialism. The worldbuilding of fantasy is closely tied to the ideological constructions of nations and religions. Yet the dungeon crawl, even in its rote mechanics, can gesture toward other values. In the dungeon, we retrieve what is lost, unlock what is sealed, light what is hidden, subdue the powerful, and free the imprisoned—all from a disoriented perspective and under mounting difficulty. Dungeon games—situated between fantasy and architecture—offer a mode: of creation, of play, of learning, of collection, and of critique.