What I Talk About When I Talk About Dungeon Diving
There is a wing of the archive with nothing in it.
No boxes, no tiles, no rank of painted miniatures behind glass. A chair. A camera. Shelves left deliberately out of focus. The Keeper avoided the room for years on the reasonable grounds that an archive of games ought to contain games, and this one contains only a man explaining himself.
That was an error of cataloguing.
What I Talk About When I Talk About Dungeon Diving ran from 2019 to 2022 — nine essays in which the archivist set the cardboard down and worked backwards from the shelf to the reason for the shelf. Why nostalgia is maintenance rather than regression. Why an empty room is an event. Why he would rather roll badly than think poorly. When the series retired it returned as Diving In: same habit, better lighting.
The wing never stayed put; its arguments kept escaping into the review halls. So the catalogue below hangs as one continuous run: the essays, and the evidence they left behind.
Exhibit Catalogue — the essays wing, earliest first:
- What I Talk About When I Talk About Dungeon Diving - Episode One — a red box in fourth grade, played in secret through the Satanic Panic.
- WITAWITADD: Episode Two - House Rules — a vampire hunt’s timer made elastic: win early, start an hour sooner.
- WITAWITADD - Yo Dawg, I Heard You Like Games — an entire sub-genre played before the game: Microscope, Fiasco, The Quiet Year.
- WITAWITADD - Exploration! — legendary sites hidden behind tile shapes only the player can build.
- WITAWITADD - Escapism! — March 2020, asthmatic and afraid — and a fire hydrant named R2-D2.
- WITAWITADD - Empty Tombs — in defence of finding nothing: someone looted this crypt centuries ago.
- WITAWITADD - Slow Questing — one turn per work break, for days — plus a house in Yellowport.
- Confessions of a Rule Book Junkie — a 50-page Metroid manual carried to school; the whole obsession explained.
- Shadows of Brimstone - Part 30 - A Few House Rules — the theory applied, at last, to the archive’s most-mentioned crawl.
- Let’s Talk About COMBAT! (WITAWITADD) — the genre’s central verb, and he mostly doesn’t enjoy it.
- Expedition to Skull Island — a hex-crawl reviewed in this wing’s vocabulary, and named for it.
- Why I don’t do many (if any) let’s play videos — the same self-examination turned on the channel itself.
- Diving In - Episode 1: Why do I love dice? — luck grants permission to lose; plus one mystery die nobody can identify.
- Diving In - Episode 2: Stat tests and player-focused puzzles — if the GM tests your wits, why not make you lift the portcullis?
- My thoughts on AI art — the essay register at its least armoured, on a wryly “uncontroversial” topic.
- The Witcher Adventure Game - These House Rules Make it Great! — house ruling still at work six years on, salvaging an unloved licence.
691 transcripts • 770 posts archived
– The Keeper
Notes that the wing with no exhibits turned out to be the label on every other wing, and has moved its lectern accordingly.