Just for fun, let’s imagine a young Coast Guard veteran named Carl runs into a frigid Seattle night in his underwear to rescue his ex-girlfriend’s cat, Princess Donut, from a tree. Shortly thereafter, aliens seize planet Earth, disintegrate all of its buildings and everyone inside them, and give any remaining survivors the chance to fight for their lives in an underground AI-controlled videogame-like reality show. Because they’re almost naked and very cold, Carl and the cat descend into the dungeon, wherein Princess Donut learns to talk and shoot missiles out of her eyes, and Carl learns the art of deftly wielding dynamite to keep himself and his new feline best friend alive.
If this absolutely bonkers plotline appeals to you, beware. You could become inextricably enmeshed in the irreverent absurdity of Matt Dinniman’s best-selling science-fiction series, “Dungeon Crawler Carl.” The books have exploded in popularity with the release of the eighth installment earlier this year, as five of the novels at the time of this writing occupy a third of The New York Times Hardcover Fiction Best Seller list, and Peacock recently greenlit a television adaptation to be produced by “Family Guy’s” Seth MacFarlane.
The purpose of this essay is not to persuade you to read “Dungeon Crawler Carl,” though I myself was. After my husband convinced me to do so, I started consistently staying up past my bedtime to read, laughing out loud at the books in inappropriate circumstances and shouting videogame sayings like “New Achievement!” in the face of mundane feats of greatness. While the books’ outlandish premise can be hilariously riveting, the dungeon’s obscene language, darkly crass humor, satirical stereotypes, parodied deities and gratuitous violence are decidedly not for everyone. Nay, the purpose of this essay is to present Carl as an example of the lessons taught in another document about what it means to be human in our sometimes dark, often confusing, artificial-intelligence-powered age. And that document, most surprisingly, is Pope Leo XIV’s recently published “Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.”
Before we return to Carl’s insane dungeon and what a book series that occasionally lampoons religion has to do with papal teaching, we’ll pause to introduce Pope Leo’s eagerly awaited “Magnifica Humanitas.” Heralded as the first American pope’s first major document and as the Catholic Church’s response to the proliferation of AI, the encyclical’s 245 paragraphs cover a lot of ground. There is a history of papal discourse on Catholic social doctrine, and, yes, a quote from J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings.” This essay will not engage with the document’s many theological, philosophical, historical or political implications. I confess that I really only trudged through “Magnifica Humanitas” in the hopes that the pope would share strategies for parenting through the age of AI.
And herein we find our first parallel between Pope Leo’s teachings and “Dungeon Crawler Carl” — between the society Pope Leo cautions us against and the nightmarish world Carl finds himself fighting through.
Alas, a granular level of parenting advice the Holy Father does not offer. What he does provide is a dire picture of the society we could build as we cede more human agency to artificial intelligence. He outlines the dangers of an AI-powered world governed exclusively by corporate profit, worldly power and personal greed, and he cautions us against new ideologies that suggest that “every person must earn or justify his or her own worth, to the point of attributing greater value to those who are more efficient or effective. From this perspective, persons end up being reduced to a means of achieving results, a resource to be used and exploited, and are no longer recognized as a proper end in themselves who should never be instrumentalized” (MH 51).
And herein we find our first parallel between Pope Leo’s teachings and “Dungeon Crawler Carl” — between the society Pope Leo cautions us against and the nightmarish world Carl finds himself fighting through. For Carl rapidly discovers he is in the first of 18 intricate dungeon levels that an extraterrestrial corporation built to entertain trillions of aliens across the galaxy. Here, humanity’s survivors become superpowered videogame-like characters, and their fights with monsters and completion of quests generate the quantifiable stats, followers, views and revenue that directly determine a human player’s worth. As one corporation representative starkly advises Carl when he’s given a rare break from fighting for his life: “This is a for-profit venture in the entertainment industry … Don’t ever forget that” (DCC 244).
In this way, the horrors of the dungeon illustrate what can happen when the dignity of the human person is abandoned in a relentless pursuit of profit. It realizes the fears Pope Leo expresses about what could happen when those in power “envision ‘second-class’ human beings, subordinate to the interests of elites who consider themselves superior. This troubling prospect becomes all the more serious when combined with technological tools that exponentially increase the capacity for control and selection” (MH 172). The dungeon’s AI, of course, often does just this, manipulating players and game environments in ways that it perceives will make the contest more entertaining for viewers, no matter how abominable and horrific those changes are, no matter how many innocent lives they cost.
These parallels raise the question: Where is the hope in the face of such a society? Where is the hope for us, and for Carl? Pope Leo, for his part, reminds us that “even in the darkest nights, the Lord raises up men and women who refuse to give up, who persevere in doing good, who protect the vulnerable and open pathways to reconciliation. The memory of the saints, righteous people and the oft-forgotten peacemakers, show us that grace does not magically eliminate conflict, but instead it inspires active resistance to evil and an astonishing creativity in doing good” (MH 211). Indeed, such saints arise in unexpected places and unexpected people, and, one could argue, perhaps outrageously, that we find such a hero in Carl himself.
These parallels raise the question: Where is the hope in the face of such a society? Where is the hope for us, and for Carl?
Some who have read “Dungeon Crawler Carl” will at this point laugh at the absurdity that anything about Carl could be associated with sainthood. He yearns for revenge against the aliens responsible for the cruelty of the dungeon — and not exactly in ways that “open pathways to reconciliation” (MH 211). His circumstances require that he kill one creature after another in his quest for survival, and his closest relationship with non-satirized religion is his repeated tendency to shout the catchphrase, “G*ddamnit, Donut” (DCC 237). And yet in his other catchphrase, “You will not break me” (DCC 366), we find in him a man who, like Pope Leo puts forth, refuses to give up. While he’s lobbing expletives and explosives, Carl perseveres in doing good, exhibiting an astonishing creativity in doing so, and he decides, in one small step after another, to protect the vulnerable whenever he can.
An early example of his heroism comes in a pivotal moment on the dungeon’s first floor. After days of horrific fighting, Carl and Donut find a way to get themselves to safety, but they encounter a group of elderly nursing home residents who have incredibly survived the first few monsters of the dungeon. Carl considers how easy it would be to walk away alive, then embarks on the nearly impossible mission to save them all, declaring, “if I’m gonna die, I might as well do it in the pursuit of a worthy cause” (DCC 178). Afterwards, when a member of the group tries to thank him for their lives, he shrugs him off, saying, “If we get to the point where we don’t help each other anymore, that’s when we stop being human” (DCC 321).
This simple helping each other is, in fact, the foundation of the “civilization of love” that Pope Leo encourages us to build (MH 185). “Ours is the pressing duty to remain profoundly human” (MH 15), he says, and “the ability to care for one another is a fundamental dimension of our humanity” (MH 114). We see Carl retaining this humanity in small ways — in his protection of Princess Donut, in his saving his fellow contestants from danger, in his helping other dungeon creatures in heartbreaking circumstances. It’s a reminder that we can find our own humanity in small, unexpected ways as well. “The civilization of love,” Pope Leo says, “will not arise from a single or spectacular gesture, but from the sum total of small and steadfast acts of fidelity that serve as a bulwark against dehumanization” (MH 213).
Pope Leo tells us that “Christians see the darkness and acknowledge it for what it is, yet they do not merely gaze upon it passively” (MH 211). He goes on: “Authentic realism does not give up on changing the world” (MH 218). Matt Dinniman, for his part, tells us in the acknowledgements to the first book that “in order to enjoy ‘Dungeon Crawler Carl,’ no matter how dark it gets (and believe me, it’s gonna get dark), you have to be the kind of person who is able to cling onto hope, no matter how small that spark is” (DCC 450). Carl’s small steps to save a group of doomed dungeon dwellers may not immediately overturn the horrors of an AI-powered darkness, any more than our own mundane feats of greatness can. But there is solace in knowing that these small steps, one after the other, will be the very light that overcomes every darkness, no matter how insane, no matter where we find it.