html excerpt from wiley's mfa thesis: "A dungeon raid is a violent archaeology carried out within a hostile system of architecture rather than in a specific place. The “place” of a videogame dungeon lies in a form of visionary architecture, created by some imperial force positioned in a hierarchy of power that is part of a fantasy world... Adjacent to fantasy and architecture, dungeon games have an opportunity to critique history, power, place, and orientation."
"Snelson plays a wandering bard – misusing the system to produce the most unlikely of scrawls: small poems scattered across the game’s landscape. The book is a documentation of that performance in a prosody marked by the poetics of fandom. They are recorded here as movie captures, static images, and poetic texts, arranged in four parts spelling a newly coherent object."
"I’m not suggesting that Rushdie carries a picture of Mario around with him at all times, but I am suggesting he might force it into conversation in the green room of a writers’ festival, and that by the power of the novelists descriptive language, Oates would have a pretty good idea of what Mario looked like, and what his deal was. It’s possible that she might respond to a picture of Mario with “oh that’s Salman’s little friend” but I’m fairly sure she would remember the name."