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You've had an exceptionally stressful day. Neglecting household chores, you instead boot up your current game and proceed to play far past your bedtime until your bleary-eyed stare can no longer withstand the captivating glow of the screen.
Unfortunately, you died moments away from an autosave checkpoint or a predesignated save location. An inflexible save system is a prescription for headache -- as numerous articles from Bitmob indicate -- but at the core of this is our frustration with the concept of losing progress. In fact, we’re so overly concerned with being productive that some of us even feel guilty dicking around and neglecting story missions in open-world titles like Grand Theft Auto.
We’re frustrated because we know what it means to lose progress in most modern games. I dreaded reloading a sequence in Killzone 2’s linearly designed single-player campaign at one particular checkpoint save over and over again. Why? Because I realized that the game forced me to perform the same actions in the same order -- repeatedly -- to progress further.
I walked the same hallways. I ducked behind the same sandbags. I shot the same enemies in the same sequence. Each reload unfolded almost identically -- except for the few moments after my previous death and before my next one. I was bored out of my mind. Only perseverance and trial-and-error deduction got me through to the next section.
But what if we measured progress differently? What if progress meant not driving the narrative or reaching the final stage in a series of carefully crafted playgrounds but instead meant understanding game mechanics? What if progress meant learning to play more proficiently at a deeper level?
Enter the roguelike.
Rogue was the culmination of Michael Toy’s and Glenn Wichman’s efforts to create a graphical appropriation of a text-adventure game, known simply as Adventure, popular on college campuses. Back in 1980, most university computer labs were based on a shared mainframe accessed by a network of dumb terminals that could only display text characters; thus, Rogue broke new ground with its use of ACSII code to represent the game world.
The duo’s seminal title also popularized the dungeon crawler -- each level of Rogue is a procedurally generated series of rectangular rooms connected by snaking corridors. The game randomly allocates monsters and treasures for the player to fight and discover throughout the journey. This aspect of content creation brings seemingly infinite replay value and means that no two playthroughs are ever the same.
But the defining features most identified with Rogue are the fragility of your character and the institution of permanent death. When you die in the game, you cannot return to a previous save state. You cannot reclaim your avatar and retry the situation that killed you.
Therefore, progress in Rogue is not progress in the traditional sense. Descending lower in the dungeon and advancing in character levels are secondary to the real meat of the experience: understanding gameplay systems and how they interact. Through experimentation and exploration, which are core design tenets of the genre, you slowly become a better player.
You needn’t build yourself an ancient mainframe to play Rogue, though, which is now available as a browser-based Java game. The genre built by this graphical adventure continues to thrive in small, dedicated corners of the larger gaming community, and I’d like to highlight a few titles on the next page that I’ve played recently.
These are by no means definitive or exhaustive; I hope to pique your interest in others, such as direct inspirations Hack and NetHack, the charming platformer roguelike Spelunky, the intimidatingly ambitious Dwarf Fortress, and the less unforgiving Shiren the Wanderer.
