Dungeon Crawler Ethan Mollick
In which I draw a strained analogy with the barest of connective tissue...
Since I last posted, I’ve fallen down a Dungeon Crawler Carl sinkhole. You see, this summer has been one of transitions. I was wrapping up some more intense work on retiring the video game and I’ve been helping out at roost.tools . Meanwhile, our eldest child graduated with her Masters last year and starts her PhD this fall in Los Angeles as our youngest heads to their bachelors on the East Coast.
I’ve been driving and travelling a lot over the last few months to do college tours, first year visits, Los Angeles apartment setting-uppings and I took a fun trip across the Atlantic with a dear old friend. I've had a *lot* of reading/audiobook time.
In May I gave into the social media promotion, audible pushing, reddit ads and word of mouth news about Dungeon Crawler Carl.
I should preface: I adore science fiction and some fantasy novels but I am not given to liking the genre that has become known as “LitRPG”. I don’t mean to disparage, but the “It’s my favorite videogame but I’m really in it and it’s real!” style book just… never gelled for me.
Back in the 80s when there was a surge of “DND but somehow it was all real” novels, extremely pulpy novels, that kind of turned me off the genre.1
Back in April or so, I had a long drive down south, and I clearly had not paid enough attention to the blurb/cover of an audiobook I had started.
This was how I found myself at a rest stop deleting from my audible account an egregiously terrible audiobook after chapter 3. It was probably the worst example of the litrpg genre I’ve come across. I won’t name the book, but it was badly written, the characters were appalling and goodness the human relations on display made me wonder if the author has met a human, or for that matter any mammal, outside of a NSFW subreddit.
As I had another 800 miles to go on a driving trip when I decided to give in and try DCC. It’s author is a local fellow2 so I figured at worst I was supporting a local writer! It couldn’t be any worse than the audiobook I had just deleted astride interstate 5. I figured that I’ll give it two chapters or a ¼ tank of gas before re-listening to Project Hail Mary3 or something.
Dear readers, I didn’t delete the book. Indeed, I ended up over the next few months buying the 6 further books in the series and savoring the story. I absolutely devoured the incredible narration4 and I really enjoyed the community of fans of DCC. I’m sure my family and friends and random waiters are fully annoyed with me talking about Princess Donut.
In DCC, Author Matt Dinniman has , through his use of Patreon, released individual chapters whilst engaging with his reader community. He’s created not just a deeply riveting story with , strangely, the most wonderful characters5, but also an incredible commentary on modern civilization.
The subjugation of earth by the galactic syndicate to cause enormous planet wide suffering for what is in effect a Love-Island meets Battle-Royale reality show6 resonates more than you’d expect.
The AI ‘Dungeon Master’ in the story is itself a remarkable Frankensteinesque7 warning for builders of intelligent8 systems that should make for required reading/listening for anyone working on these new systems.
Watching Matt Dinniman create DCC hand in glove with his Patreon community, his subreddit, is a lot like watching the approach we nerds in open source have taken with software but applied to literature.
And before I move on to Ethan Mollick, you really owe it to yourself to look into this Jeff Hays guy. Seriously an incredible narrator. What a chameleon. That said, DCC is *very* much not a kids book. Very adult themes, and intensely violent. Not for everyone, for sure.
I mean, this is the book that has brought us the, ahem, cursed Arrow9 of Enthusiastic Double Gonorrhea. Not. For. Everyone.
Aside from the AI warning inherent in Dungeon Crawler Carl, how does this tie into Ethan Mollick? Ethan Mollick is a professor at Wharton School of Management. His substack “One Useful Thing”
is required reading if you are at all involved in this brave new world of software development. His research on the topic has been revelatory, modern and remarkable. Like Matt Dinniman, He engages with the larger community of AI hackers and companies that has emerged over the last few years. His book, Co-intelligence is on the ‘shelves’ of , well, everyone in the space and he’s a frequent prolific, thoughtful commenter on AI topics.
But how is he like Matt? His use of social media to promote his work, and his discord server has become the elite salon for folks working in the space. These spaces, Patreon, discord, substack are force multipliers for modern authors and, well, thinkers.
I don’t really have much more to say about it, but it just struck me as funny to see two people who are in two different worlds taking such fine advantage of these modern tools to reach their audience. It’s very direct, and there are surprisingly few middle-men collecting a toll. Like Hugh Howey before them, having as direct as possible a relationship with your readers/users is always such a good way to create and cut out all those who would be in your critical path.
It’s funny, Sam Schillace recently released a post here on the ol’ substack titled “Do you own your memories”
that also ties into these ideas of direct creation with your audience.
I’m going to write a longer thing on Sam’s post. How…. right…. it is. How open source was always about controlling your software destiny and how we shouldn’t give up ownership of creative works on the altar of AI tools, no matter how helpful and useful they might be…. Look for that coming soon.
It’s funny, to me anyhow, Joel Rosenberg's book were favorites when I was younger but I wouldn’t call them great. It’s one of the reasons I’ve become careful about reading books from my youth with adult eyes.
The author Matt hails from Gig harbor, which isn’t far from me in the west sound.
Miriam Dom, an Italian born Vampire Goat Shepard who adventures with a very sweet sentient Goat named Prepotente that was one of her former flock. Her motherly relationship with Prepotente (Pony, to his friends) is one of the strangest yet most endearing in the series. And yes, I know how ridiculous this sounds. Don’t get me started on the tragic figure of the igneous rock monster Chris Andrews.
Seriously, understanding Love Island is understanding our modern trump-addled civilization.
Yes, Frankenstein’s-monster-esque would be more correct, but I’m straining the character limit on substack as it is.
Adjacent. They’re not really intelligent, but they’re pretty amazing tools, ya know?
It might be a crossbow bolt, but still..