ok so I may have nearly forgot to post this but! Seemingly much to their surprise, I wrote a mini-paper on @qm-vox‘s old Quest, Dungeon Life Quest. Please note this will feature spoilers, and bear in mind some details had to be changed (and often over-simplified particularly in the case of the cultural context) in order to fit in the 1650 word limit but here it is:
Exploring the topic of “What Makes An Interactive Or Immersive Story Meaningful” Through The Lens Of An Old Literary Role-Playing Game
For this exploration, while there are several I could have chose between, I chose “Dungeon Life Quest”, a Literary RPG or “Quest” ran on 4chan with threads archived from 29/12/2015 through to 23/3/2017. The mere fact of its 4chan presence brings several interesting conundrums - despite its modern reputation, which is quite rightly deserved, until recent days it served a similar function to Reddit as a website and forum dedicated for use by people that were generally considered weird by much of their peers. It was segregated into several different “containment boards”, such as A and B (the first two to be created) and later additions themed around specific ideas, notably including TG (Traditional Games, the board that this and many other Quests took place within), LGBT, and the POL (Politically Incorrect - whose inclusions may indicate some parts of this tale). Regardless, until around late 2014, most boards of the site were nothing out of the ordinary compared to most forums. In fact, what little moderation the place had seemed to be quite effective, with the implementation of rules frequently causing exodus from the website. What is important about this is that 2015 was when the events of GamerGate are often stated to have come to an end. As readers may know, GamerGate was largely orchestrated by members of 4chan and SomethingAwful forums, and resulted in a wave of harassment towards reporters and game designers, along with a significant increase in popularity of far-right groups and ideologies, with “channers” (a term used to refer to members of 4chan and similar websites) coming to include the often-correct insinuation that the individual is a member of a far-right group.
As stated, Dungeon Life Quest is a LitRPG that ran on the TG board of 4chan from late 2015 through early 2017, and is most well known for its left-wing politics, extreme care taken towards approaching non-Western cultures for much of its worldbuilding, and expansive run time. Barring few exceptions, the threads ran completely without interruption, with frequent user activity overnight and the author continuing to write updates to the quest even while suffering an unexpected healthcare emergency.
The core premise built on the Megadungeon tradition of dungeon-delving roleplaying games popularised by D&D’s Undermountain module, featuring an underground game environment filled with monsters and designed as its own fully-functional ecosystem with political factions and entire communities modelled within. In a LitRPG, one author writes a story and presents options for the main character to choose between, and the entire active userbase then votes on a course of action, frequently with write-in options allowed. The player character, once voted on, took the form of Brianna Lacroix - presented as simply “Brianna la Croix, Journeyman Necromancer (Female human; No Good Deed Goes Unpunished)”. She was sentenced to “The Dungeon” until having located and retrieved the Crown Jewels of the kingdom nominally in control of the region, for the crime of necromancy. To be more specific, Unlawful Reanimation: she had been given a death sentence for saving the life of a subordinate to the local Captain of the Guard, hence the “No Good Deed Goes Unpunished” part of her description. It was after her choosing that she was revealed to be black.
To prevent a complete recount of all one-hundred and eighteen threads this Quest ran the course of, I will speed up my summary. Brianna swiftly acquires two companions - a soldier brought to the Dungeon with her so that she could save him from a fatal disease, and a half-harpy the pair rescued from being used as caged bait to kill unwary adventurers by the villain in control of the first layer of the Dungeon. After much discussion on the nature of the group’s relationships and how to go about it healthily, the group eventually fell into a polyamarous relationship, a format known as a “triad” as each member was dating each other member. As the story built up and more of the mysteries were revealed, it culminated in rescuing the Angel overseeing the cessation of life from her enslavement by the various men in control of the Dungeon layers, who had been aggressively exploiting the layers under their control and alternatively indirectly harming the residents of the layer by depleting its natural resources or simply enslaving them, in a manner quite deliberately reminiscent of the owning class of capitalists. Much of how this went about was a great surprise to the author of the quest, who had fully expected the players to use the necromancer main character as an evil wizard, but instead attempted to do so with minimal loss of life, and frequently served as therapists and guides to other characters in the story, with Brianna’s backstory eventually being revealed through flashbacks to have been written to accommodate for this after the fact. Most curiously is the way non-Western religions were approached. The author was stated to be in frequent communication with at least three separate sensitivity readers, one of which was a historian and practising Rabbi. Given this information, it is unsurprising that much of the worldbuilding was taken from historical Semitic cultures, and the author was very open of this fact.
It is time to talk politics once more.
While this quest was going on, several neo-nazi groups had been sizing up various forums as recruitment tools - following GamerGate, this had proven to be wildly successful, as social media such as Facebook and Twitter had shown that the algorithms used to promote the inflammatory arguments that have come to be termed Discourse with a capital D were excellent at fostering authoritarian nationalism, xenophobia, and isolation, all of which make an individual extremely weak to common cult recruitment tactics such as lovebombing.
It was at mid 2016 when this campaign proved ultimately successful on 4chan, with the POL board (now often stated to be short for simply Politics) being the most active board on the site, and frequently used for planning harassment campaigns or even physical attacks. As this bled through into other areas, the followers of Dungeon Life Quest began to be singled out for derision amongst the TG board. This, in itself, was surprising - despite being at the later end of the LitRPG community of the website, there were still usually around five different and extremely well-followed quests running at any one moment. Also surprisingly, the active user-base of the quest only seemed to increase. As a final addition to this mystery, which may cause some blocks to fall into place, many of the IP addresses present in the quest began to cease activity in any other regions of the website.
There has been no formal study on this, and there likely never can be - the whole driving point of the website is that the user-base was entirely anonymous, and after the quest ended, many who followed it entirely ceased to use the website. Despite lack of hard evidence, I do believe this to indicate that the majority of those who followed the quest managed to escape the radicalisation suffered by those who remained on the site, and chalk down the rise in viewership to them being chased from the other boards. As stated before - you didn’t use 4chan if you felt welcome in other areas. That made DLQ likely one of the last places they did feel welcomed by their peers, before the runner began to mention that instead of using Twitter to announce threads starting, they would be using Tumblr - itself much derided by the other users of the platform, largely due to its high usage amongst the queer community and similarly notable presence of left-wing organisers (there are at least three organisers for the International Workers of the World with an active presence of the site, who I know of due to being friends with one of them).
For something to be meaningful, I would say it has to affect how you view or interact with the world. This was a role-playing game ran on 4chan shortly before the site finally succumbed to neo-nazi groups, with radical left-wing politics and a great deal of respect for groups usually labelled minorities within the United States that made up the websites primary user-base, and is possibly even directly responsible for preventing individuals being recruited by neo-nazi groups. I know of at least one individual who claimed it to have been responsible for helping them realise their bisexuality.
If nothing else, it served as party of a great daisy chain of events when I was younger, and I would not be where I am today without it. As you may have guessed, I was one of the people that read it back when I was a teenager. Sure, I don’t think it it introduced any particularly new ideas to me at the time, as I was always fairly leftist even if I never knew the words. But without that story, I would never have felt comfortable enough to actually talk to people online, and I would never have followed the author on their exodus from the website. I would not have paused a videogame on the midnight of December the 25th in 2018 to check my notifications, and discovered that trans people exist. I, and many other people like me, never planned to reach the age I have. I can safely say that without the influence of a caffeine-addicted madman running games on the internet, I would not be here today.
I’m not sure really what makes an interactive story meaningful, still. I don’t think its something you can plan for, and I’ve seen plenty of Oscar-bait movies, and stories that pat themselves on the back for writing about disabled and neurodivergent people being in pain. But I think this one counts, at least.
