The Dungeon In Our Dreams: Bachelard in Tabletop Gaming

This article is a bit more academic and a bit more weird than what I normally write! I hope this essay can be a productive starting point for new modes of engagement with tabletop RPGs in a poetic context. I'm a bit rusty with the academia side of things, but I hope you enjoy regardless!

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"The house with cosmic roots will appear to us as a stone plant growing out of the rock up to the blue sky of a tower,"¹ Gaston Bachelard describes for us in his foundational 1958 book The Poetics of Space. Within, he provides the framework for examining space as more than simply a geographic or architectural truth, but rather as a dreamlike (oneiric) environment, one that responds to human will and reflects our deepest dreams. To Bachelard, there is a continuous thread between the poetry of houses, their construction, and their impact upon the human mind. He's interested in the experiences we have with shells and doorways, structures both miniature and massive, and how we relate to them as both active and passive participants. To Bachelard, a doorway is not simply a door but instead, "an entire cosmos of the Half-Open."²

Through the labyrinthine houses and towers of Bosco and Baudelaire, Bachelard advances an analysis of the spaces themselves within a text, inspiring the reader to phenomenologically explore these environments non-linearly, repetitively, and with an eye towards the experience itself (the phenomena). Bachelard describes the phenomenological process as "[of the production] within ourselves a reading pride that will give us the illusion of participating in the work of the author of the book."³ This is a process similar to that set out by the reader of a tabletop game, in effect to take on an active role within the text as a player of the environments, an explorer of the proverbial dungeons contained within French poetry.

Tabletop games are a psychogeographical study, one where the creative mind articulates itself on multiple levels. "Playing a character is taking that space [of identity] and making of its possibility a playground."⁴ The possibility of the playspace is apparent from both the imagined reality of the characters navigating a fictional environment, and the literal reality of the players around a table engaging in the game. Indeed, is there any art which more openly grounds itself in a location, through the shared oneiric table? Even when a game is played without a literal table, we imagine the playing of the game in miniature upon a simulated table, creating a geography of space between half-eaten snacks, battlemats, and scattered pages.

In this article, I seek to establish a connective tissue between Bachelard's analytical toolbox in The Poetics Of Space and the tabletop role-playing hobby as a whole, in an attempt to foster further poetic analysis of games. The intent is to open the doorway (or at least, gesture vaguely towards) a particular relationship between the houses, cellars, locks, and shells of Bachelard, and the interplay of space within tabletop games. We will apply this analysis to both the fictional world within the game-space and the present world of the players around the game-space, moving freely between the dream and the dream-within-dreams.

Bachelard seeks to jacquays the labyrinth of modernity. Is it any wonder then, that we might feel compelled to apply a Bachelardian analysis back towards tabletop games, when Bachelard left the door open for us?

The Mythic Underworld

The dungeon is a distinctly tabletop environment. It can trace its history back to the original design conceits of the genre, its geography solely bound to the conceits of an imagined environment and its translation into the physical world. While dungeons may be designed around concerns of enjoyable navigation, narrative justification, or realistic ecosystems, their common tropes and natures have no relationship to the limitations of physical creation or architecture. And while there are many dungeons in many settings (indeed, some might even describe all tabletop games through the lens of a dungeon), there exists an ur-dungeon, the imagined dreamspace within our minds from which all other dungeons inform and relate.

The dungeon is a chthonic space, a mythic underworld for its explorers and inhabitants. Jason Cone describes the dungeon as such:

"Not merely an underground site or a lair, not sane, the underworld gnaws on the physical world like some chaotic cancer. It is inimical to men; the dungeon, itself, opposes and obstructs the adventurers brave enough to explore it."⁵

In Cone's rendition, a dungeon is an environment which defies attempts by explorers to "claim" it, rebuffing all attempts to be understood or fully mapped. He describes rules and principles for modeling the dungeon's mythical relationship with the monsters within, how doors will struggle to open and torches will refuse to stay lit. And when prompted to describe the fundamental principles of these dungeons, the first rule Cone states is, "It's big, and has many levels; in fact, it may be endless."⁶

The dungeon is potentially endless. The potential is the key — the moment a dungeon ceases to be endless, the moment the explorers have come to understand the dungeon in its totality, the dungeon ceases to be a dungeon, losing its function as a place of potential. There is little thrill in traversing a dungeon which has been fully comprehended, unless there is some unknown further space which may continue to intrude into the known environments.

As Bachelard maps the cosmic house described by our dreams, he spends a significant amount of time exploring the three essential components of a house which (in his view) allow the house to be oneirically complete — the attic, the cellar, and the middle floor. In his description, the attic becomes a piercing tower, the cellar digging deep beneath the earth. If we were to imagine a fantasy world as an oneirically complete house, then the dungeon is self-evidently the cellar, "where darkness prevails both day and night, and even when we are carrying a lighted candle, we see shadows dancing on the dark walls."⁷

Bachelard describes the story of L'Antiquaire as a "series of underground maneuvers" within "countless cellars, a network of passages, and a group of individual cells with frequently padlocked doors."⁸ The ultra-cellar of Bachelard's fascination is a labyrinth of roots beneath a cosmic house, roots which run into the darkness at the bottom of the cosmos. "When we dream there, we are in harmony with the irrationality of the depths."

Even the word dungeon is specific, for the structures frequently have little resemblance to the medieval dungeon. They are endless catacombs beneath the ruins of lost sites that freely intermingle with caves and mines, and yet they still imprison something. The dungeon is a place to capture the unconscious, a site of endless captivating binding, so similar to the Imaginary Prisons depicted by Giovanni Piranesi. Societally, we hide our shame underneath us, keeping sewage lines, dead bodies, and the movements of the downtrodden beneath our collective feet. There is something inside the oneiric dungeon which we are trying to forget, and yet us adventurers are here trying to uncover and free some lost shame.

Cone's 6th rule for the dungeon as a mythic underworld is that "Its purpose is mysterious or shrouded in legend."⁹ Much like Piranesi's vaulting structures or Bachelard's cellar, the dungeon is a place for the unconscious to reside, some pre-human force of darkness that dwells beneath us. There is no way to understand the darkness, besides what we may take from within it. And it is well-documented that all dungeons, in addition to their chambers and their beasts, contain loot.

A Phenomenology of Loot

Loot is a broad category of magical treasure, ancient artifacts, art objects, and gold. It is united only by the shared impulse of adventurers to take it, and the prophetic impulse to understand it as already claimed. That is to say, "loot" is a term to classify an object which will be stolen but hasn't yet been. Plenty can be said of the colonialist impulses of looting, including how the narrative fantasy of what it means to loot extends to museums and archeologists today venturing into places where indigenous people are very much still around and stealing important objects from them. In the fantasy of dungeons, loot once belonged to the inhabitants (former or current) of the dungeon, and now is the rightful conquest of the adventurers.

This is true, and we can also continue to understand loot as a part of the process of the dungeon. Loot is critical to the dungeon as an oneiric whole, for it marks and measures the progress of adventurers through its halls. The deeper an adventurer travels, the more valuable the loot, and the more dangerous the beasts which treasure it. Many early editions of Dungeons & Dragons even use loot to directly measure the experience of characters, marking their development through the confiscation of coins from the deep, bringing them up into the surface. The dungeon's master doesn't want the players to easily access their treasure, and so from within the dungeon emerges a paradoxical cat and mouse game, where the dungeon's master continuously incentivizes the players' forward travel through the continuous offering of loot.

The dungeon is a locked chest with treasure inside. And as Bachelard puts it, "a locked chest is an invitation for thieves. It is a psychological threshold."¹⁰ This need for secrecy, in the Bachelardian sense, allows the dungeon to become a puzzle-box which we now seek to open. The expectation and the desire for hidden treasure is a doorway into the dungeon, similar to how a heavily-locked door inspires more fascination than a mundane and unlocked door. The dungeon's master hides treasure inside the dungeon and alerts us to where it is. Bachelard describes the box which confounds thieves by hiding boxes inside boxes, with less valuable treasures in the outer boxes to satisfy the thief's curiosity. The dungeon's master is the owner of a box who hopes its contents will be stolen, and thus paradoxically hides valuable treasures inside deeper dungeons, and yet hopes we will break into all of them.

This paradox is resolved through the Bachelardian discussion of intimacy.

"But from the moment the casket is opened, [inside and outside] no longer exist. The outside is effaced with one stroke, an atmosphere of novelty and surprise reigns. The outside has no more meaning…a new dimension—the dimension of intimacy— has just opened up."¹¹

What was once unfamiliar has become familiar and comforting. The cellar's darkness is banished through discovery and familiarity, and upon fully mapping the dungeon, we turn it into an intimate space. The dungeon's master is not just to be the guard against thieves, but the creator of an intimacy between the players and the dungeon. By the end of their journey, players will traverse the paths of the dungeon with assurance and confidence, clutching their map in their hands, and they will say to themselves, I know how to get there, I know how to navigate this space. When the dungeon is fully mapped and the loot has been stolen, it becomes entirely familiar, existing in miniature upon the page. "The cleverer I am at miniaturizing my world, the better I am at possessing it."¹²

Miniature Miniatures

We shift now from a discussion of the oneiric properties of the fantastical world we play in, towards a discussion of the oneiric properties of the play space more broadly. While this might feel jarring, it's the nature of games to move smoothly from one level of perception to the other. Players will comfortably discuss the game from outside it, above it, within it, and below it — indeed, we can imagine the game as an object sitting in the middle of the table, with the players around it and sticking their heads inside.

While we're in an age of booming online play and an absence of in-person communication, the description of these games as "tabletop" might feel extraneous. But the table is a vital method for understanding what happens during play, and frequently when playing these games, its players will imagine or construct a virtual tabletop to engage in play upon. Tables in the modern American psyche are spaces where many structures of being can reside simultaneously. We may work from home and cover the table in paperwork. We may eat upon it (of course), indeed at any time of the day in any context, alone or together. We may sit down and discuss over the table, often while engaged in another activity, perhaps touching feet underneath. We may even in rare cases press our bodies against tables, or adorn them with puzzles, or occupy them with crafts. In this way, we allow a tabletop game to become a mixed environment, where office work, consumption, socializing, intimacy, and craft can all live together in the middle of the room.

The game sits on top of the table, in a shared game space. Indeed, anything that isn't on the table isn't considered to be part of the game — consider the disappointment when dice fall off the table and negate their own rolls, or the surprise when a particularly massive beast is taken off of a shelf and placed in the middle of the table. The game sits on top of the table regardless of the complexity of the game. Certainly, traditional games with battlemats and minifigures sprawl themselves across the table, but even games which dwell in the theater of the mind like Dream Askew by Avery Alder make explicit references to the "picking up" and "putting down" of game elements onto the table.¹³ When we play in a space without a table, we transform our environment into a table.

Bachelard informs us of the intimacy of smallness his discussion on the miniature, and we see that apparent in tabletop as well.

"All small things must evolve slowly, and certainly a long period of leisure, in a quiet room, was needed to miniaturize the world. Also one must love space to describe it as minutely as though there were world molecules, to enclose an entire spectacle in the molecule…"¹⁴

Our intimacy with an object is tied to its presence on the table. It's only when we get excited or invested in a concept do we allow it to dwell within the space we've formed, rather than merely painting it along the side. Compare the difference in presentation between the travel montage of a game's master eager to arrive at the next destination, versus a hexcrawl laid out across the table as a whole. Even abstractions make their way to the table — we construct threat maps, index card webs, and printouts to mark and observe the parts of the game we wish to form intimate connections with.

When we transition the game from abstract to specific, or rather, when we capture the symbolic in a miniature form in our hands on the table, we signal a changing of stakes and of relationship. In doing so, we reveal the immensity of what Bachelard describes as the "cosmic miniature."¹⁵ The hex crawl, the megadungeon, and the churning immensity of a Forged in the Dark game all reveal a sense of intimate immensity, where by depicting the complexity of its vastness onto the table, we see in its miniature its largess. We imagine ourselves as miniatures, seeing ourselves in the plastic figures that stand on the table. And when the dungeon's master slams a dragon the size of a breadbox onto the table, we gasp in its enormity even as we know, if we encountered such an object in any other context, we would consider it to be a small reproduction of the dragon. Through miniature we may create a form of intimate immensity.

Towards The Poetic

Tabletop games are caught in a complicated and transitory state as they seek to push at the limits of what is possible while simultaneously struggling to understand what they are. We find this present in the lyric game design movement: the resulting artistic works of a series of creators online making zines of games which are frequently unconcerned with playability or technique. As my friend and colleague Marcia B discusses in her essay "Critique of the Conversation Surrounding Lyric Games": "Lyric games often have neither the literary strengths of poetry (or prose) nor the function of rulebooks."¹⁶ While I disagree with many of the arguments made in Marcia's essay (and have no desire to rehash the conversation here), I find this observation compelling: for when tabletop games are practical, they frequently fail to serve as interesting literary texts, and when they strive towards a literary quality, they often fail to achieve either intent.

This is not a failure of lyric games! Rather, this amateur quality reflects the limitations of a medium balancing precariously on the intersection of practical craft and artistic discipline. Lyric games in particular emerge from an attempt to isolate trends in RPGs within a miniature experimental space, with the hopes that by removing the part of RPGs concerned with playability, the remaining pieces could be shaped and sculpted into a new artistic style. Whether they succeed at this endeavor is left as an exercise for the reader, but as a game designer, I find the exercise of lyricism to be very valuable for when I return to my more expansive projects.

Lyric games represent a fascinating artistic movement in a broader space of shared creation, one which we lack any framework for analysis or comparison. If we want to build up a way to talk about games in a richer sense (indeed, to avoid the pitfall of poetic analysis and comparison solely for "the fetishization of a medium for being prestigious in itself", as Marcia describes it),¹⁷ we need to utilize the tools and framework poetic disciplines have already provided us to approach these works. Games are a fascinating artistic medium, as much like the emergence of dreams within the Bachelardian construct, they are composed of many parts which inform each other. The game-text and the game-as-played, the players and the game's master, the table and the toys, all feed into each other to create a series of images which invite phenomenological study. While this might feel daunting, there is beauty in the knowledge that we are not the only oneironauts to venture into the unconscious space where dreams and images emerge.

This essay points a way forward, a new vocabulary of meaning which can emerge as we discuss the cosmic and dreamlike properties of gameplay, a shared framework of dungeons, miniature immensity, intimacy, and dreams.

Footnotes

1. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Penguin Books 1964, Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1958, 43.

2. Ibid, 238.

3. Ibid, 42.

4. Geostatonary, "Naming The Nameless," The Flesh of Play: Zines on the Intersection of Games, Identity, and the Body, February 10 2019, https://geostatonary.itch.io/geo-zine-bundle

5. Jason Cone, "The Dungeon As A Mythic Underworld," Philotomy's Dungeons & Dragons Musings, 2007.

6. Ibid.

7. We see this further in Bachelard's description of the distinction between the attic and the cellar. "In the attic, rats and mice can make considerable noise. But let the master of the house arrive unexpectedly and they return to the silence of their holes. The creatures moving about in the cellar are slower, less scampering, more mysterious." Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 40.

8. Ibid, 43.

9. Cone, "The Dungeon As A Mythic Underworld."

10. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 102.

11. Ibid, 103.

12. Ibid, 169. This quote is preceded by a section on artists escaping prisons by painting new tunnels, which feels connected to this whole endeavor.

13. Avery Alder and Benjamin Rosenbaum. Dream Askew & Dream Apart. Buried Without Ceremony 2018.

14. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 177.

15. Ibid, 189.

16. Marcia B, "Critique of the Conversation Surrounding Lyric Games", Traverse Fantasy (blog), November 10 2021.

17. Ibid.