Traversing Fantasy: (Game) Master as (Game) Interface
I am going to be republishing my essay about dungeon crawls as an avenue for male desire, which you can find in its original rough form on my Itch . In this series, I shall attempt to analyze the dungeon crawl both as a discourse in the psychoanalytic sense (a mediated relation between the subject and the Other), and as a language in the sense of data science. From the latter field I shall borrow two terms which are useful to explicate what distinguishes the dungeon crawl from other modes of play: deterministicity (i.e. the quality of being deterministic) and indefinity. A deterministic machine is one for which each possible input has only one outcome. For example, addition is a deterministic machine: when you add 2 and 2, you will always receive 4. Meanwhile, a non-deterministic machine could have multiple possible outcomes for any one input. By looking at a non-deterministic machine step by step, you cannot tell where any input will actually go because of the variety of different out...