Embracing Colonialist Dungeons
Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Crawl
Both Habeeb and Isaac forced me at gunpoint to write my response to their posts about dungeons and colonialism. What fun! Figuratively, of course. Firearm ownership for (non-rich) civilians is illegal in Indonesia. Here are theirs, in order of publication:
Might be good to read them first before continuing below.
Crawling in My Skin
Yes, dungeon crawling is inherently colonialist. I don’t care if the dead horse has been rendered into lump of mystery meat at this point. This fact should not be up to debate. Even if we remove the loot-gold-to-earn-advancement loop, the play space dubbed “dungeon” itself exists within a colonialist framework.
Of course we can reskin the entire dungeon adventure into seemingly anti-colonialist. The monsters are invaders, the treasures are stolen from us and must be reclaimed, the dungeon itself was once our sacred ruins. But that’s nothing more than whitewashing. It’s like changing the words “choose a race” into “choose an ancestry”: both are still bioessentialist.
Dungeon crawling has outgrown tabletop role-playing now. It has long been adopted by video and board games alike. We can even simulate dungeon crawling in the likes of Wizardry with Google Street View.1 Fact is, dungeons won’t go anywhere. It will even outlive us. It will also stay colonialist no matter how it’s wrapped up.
And that’s okay! No need to get defensive about it. Our favorite game mode is rooted in colonialism. So what, right, if we have fun from dungeon crawling? As my friend Zedeck wrote in DECOLONISING D&D:
The fact that going forth into the hinterland to seek treasure and slay monsters is a thing, and fucking fun, tells us valuable things about the shape and psychology of colonialism. Why conquistadors in the past did it; why liberal foreign policy, corporations, and post-colonial societies do it today.
Having fun despite the inherent colonialism in dungeon play doesn’t necessarily mean endorsing colonialism. This is the part that makes gamers defensive, I think. No, acknowledging colonialism in dungeons doesn’t mean that we must abandon the play mode entirely because it’s not politically correct anymore. It’s the opposite, really.
To Dungeons Deep and Caverns Old
Never say it’s not that deep to this topic, because dungeons are deep. Tolkien wrote so.
By knowing this aspect of dungeon crawling, we’d be able to face deeper themes when we play in dungeons. It’s like gaining Insight stat in Bloodborne. If we refuse to engage it at all while still playing an extractive – sorry, heroic – adventure game, it doesn’t mean that the colonialist themes are suddenly gone. It’s still there. We just refused to look at it.
Dungeon crawling is an old play mode today. In the years since, we’ve seen many games that don’t revolve around resource extraction. Games about nurturing relationships. About deducting crimes. Managing emotions. Those games don’t need dungeons to be fun.
Again, the existence of those games did not (and would never) render the classic extractive dungeoneering action moot. It stays alive for 50-odd years because it’s so damn fun. It’s even more alive outside tabletop role-playing. Roguelike deckbuilder video games usually have node-based dungeon crawling. Boss battler board games commonly have a dungeon crawling phase. As I said, dungeons will outlive us.
Thinking about heavy stuff such as colonialism when we just wanna have a blast killing monsters and getting shiny new gears in a fantastic locale makes us uncomfortable, I know. Yet our entire hobby revolves around thinking!
Nobody is taking our toys away. The dungeons aren’t going anywhere. It’s only our understanding of the play-contract within the space that’s changed. A change in perception. Our magic circle is still unbroken, but now we can understand more about how the circle came to be. How it mirrors real suffering of real people. How those people were othered as mere monsters throughout history. Still othered as of today. Deemed inferior. Disrespected.
Through understanding, respect.
Which is funny because the default 2D map that we still use today is a tool of colonialism.
I thought about this question a lot before realizing I'd never fully get away from the colonial problem -- and so, as you say, I let myself embrace it. At least a little.
My setting goes with the whole, "Humans were enslaved by another race for millennia" approach, which means that dungeon-crawling involves going into ruins and taking back "what's rightfully ours."
The problem arises when "what's rightfully ours" becomes contested by new national boundaries and the fact that other peoples might be sitting on nicer stuff than you are. People being what they are, they cannot avoid pillaging others' lands and ruins, leading to whole layers of faction intrigue generated by folks' inabilities to keep their hands to themselves.
So the 'crawling doesn't *have* to have a colonial bent to it. But it also feels honest to admit that, where such a dynamic isn't already inherent, we are still very likely to invent one.
The thesis is horseshit. The only colonialism in D&D are the people who ostensibly hate it invading to ruin what it once was.