Messages

1

Other Announcements / Re: Results for the 2013 Roguelike World Survey has been posted

« on: July 17, 2014, 02:02:48 PM »

My ground for defining roguelikes will be boobs. You know when you see great boobs, but you can't define them as mathematical set of attiributes.

You ask, and the internet delivers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhxAoREt6Pg
http://www.wikihow.com/Make-Boobs-on-Mac-Grapher

Which I guess proves your point, as there are at least two competing formulas!

2

Other Announcements / Re: Results for the 2013 Roguelike World Survey has been posted

« on: July 16, 2014, 02:52:41 PM »

Should I feel non-smart for not understanding the evil of a list of features as the most helpful way for someone to grasp what is it we are talking about? am I an inferior human being?

An ancient question is: "What is man?"

A school of philosophy concluded:

Man will be defined as:

• Biped
• Featherless

So someone plucked a chicken and threw it into their compound.

Breaking things into lists is a very valuable and useful tool.  The term "Analyse" refers to just this - cutting up the complicated object into pieces we can understand.  Vast leaps forward in knowledge have come because of our ability to do this.  Abstracting "gravity" from all the other stuff that happens when stuff falls gives a nice clean understanding.  The problem is that when cut through the sinew to separate the organs, you lose all of the relationships between the parts.  This "Sum is greater than the parts" problem I think is what mushroom patch is frustrated with.

My own view is the fault is on the reader who decides to ignore all subtlety just because a list showed up.  I suspect such readers wouldn't have read a five page essay on roguelikes either.  If the Berlin Interpretation would have been a five page essay, people would have just sniped key sentences and used them out of context, in effect creating a list for future people to slavishly follow.

I also believe there *is* a genuine advantage to analysing roguelikes.  While we always lose essential relationships between those qualities, it is a lot easier to think of what it means to have a "Single player character game" than it is to always compare back to the holotypes.

So, when someone eventually makes a 7drl that matches all points of the Berlin Interpretation but isn't a roguelike (which people have been threatening since day 1!), it really doesn't prove that there is anything wrong with the Berlin Interpretation.  It merely underscores that "roguelikeness" is not a checklist of features, just like "human" isn't a checklist of features. 

But, it is *useful* to note that "Humans are bipeds", even if "Biped" isn't a necessary or sufficient definition of Human.  (In particular, someone who loses a leg isn't kicked out of humanity! (anymore))

3

Other Announcements / Re: Results for the 2013 Roguelike World Survey has been posted

« on: July 15, 2014, 06:33:34 PM »

While this discussion doesn't change my view of the Berlin interpretation that much, I've got to hand it to JeffLait who, as a guilty party, showed up to explain himself and take whatever abuse was waiting for him -- and he's done it with impressive equanimity at that. Kudos.

Thank you!  I certainly wouldn't expect you to change your opinion.  You have a very interesting and logical roguelike definition, just not one I find useful.

re: JeffLait's never played a Japanese roguelike, this is a case of what happens when I assume. I think this Japanese roguelike stuff provides a nice angle for situating your work in a broader context after the fact, but sure, it's not exactly influence or continuity. Nethack's a pretty solid source to draw on in any case and developing for a console might be a reasonable excuse not to target the vt100.

Having six buttons and a d-pad is the real reason to abandon the vt100.  Further, I looked into vt100 emulation, but you can't fit 80x24 on the GBA screen.  Windowed views of Nethack are *NOT* Nethack, IMHO.  An important part of Nethack is that you see the entire dungeon when blindfolded.  Without this, you have a different game.  As soon as I realized I was not making a 80x24, I had to start to rethink everything.  When you abandon glyphs, 8x8 stops being a useful tile size, forcing me right to 16x16 tiles, which then gave me a very tight window on the action.  These constraints probably sent me right where the Japanese Console Roguelikes already were :>

Again, this is why I like a history-free approach, as you can then validly compare POWDER and Shiren's choices without having to worry if they come from convergent evolution or from direct ancestry.

re: Beneath Apple Manor: Why don't I declare it not a roguelike out of hand because of the release date vs. when the rogue developers started on rogue? I don't know what the original release looked like and I'm not optimistic about finding a copy or reliable information about it. I see more about releases five years later -- that's a long time. I also see suggestions that it largely copied another game by another author. These factors make me want to reserve judgement on whether there is an influence one way or another. I'm somewhat suspicious of this kind of exercise anyway.

I don't know much beyond the Wikipedia page and what Slash had discovered.  In any case, the author seems to have commented that he had no influence from Rogue, and I'm willing to go with that.

Mind you checking the edits there I see at some point someone claimed that DND was a roguelike that predated Rogue, which is ridiculous as DND isn't a roguelike.

The closing comments about disclaimers in the Berlin interpretation are mostly fair. It's true that there is prominent mention of a canon, which is mysteriously missing from certain derivatives of the Berlin interpretation and totally absent from discussion based on it that I've seen around here (although I think that part is less mysterious).

Yep, damn internet.  At least anytime anyone bugs you about the Berlin Interpretation you can just throw that back in their face :>

About why I say mangband and related angband variants are cut out by the Berlin interpretation: They're not turn based (as understood by posters I've encountered here -- although I find the notion of turn based play put forth in those discussions incoherent), they're not single player, and the notion of permadeath in these angband variants does not correspond neatly to the mechanics of angband or other roguelike games (the closest thing being nethack's amulets of lifesaving). No one really knows how many high or low value factors you can flout and stay in good standing -- it would be better if this were not a debate that ever occurred.

Odd, I thought mangband was turn based by my definition.  Single Player is a strange accusation, again showing the danger of putting anything online.  There is nothing in the Berlin Interpretation saying Single Player.  It says Single Player Character: you are playing one character.  Dungeon Master is a single player game, but is not a single character game.  So, Mangband only really violates the last clause of that sentence: "that character's death is the end of the game."  The main reason for that clause, however, is to make it clear each game session is a fresh start.  This is an important nature of roguelikes - you don't bring anything with you - which is violated in a lot of modern variants.  Japanese Roguelikes tend to have a special chest to store stuff in between lives, for example.

I do agree that there should be no debate about how many of these checks you need to be a real roguelike.

There probably is some justice in your claims that the way the lists are used is not in keeping with the spirit of the Berlin interpretation. 2008 was well before the appeal of lists to the reptilian core of the human brain became widely known among internet users. The lack of foresight in employing lists this way might therefore be forgiven. Still, I think the Berlin interpretation (or "7 Weird Reasons Your Game Is Not A Roguelike") ought to be updated to something that looks like a definition more than a Buzzfeed listicle.

I think we can agree that Buzzfeed has been harmful to human interaction :>

I'm not sure, however, how you could ever hope to present something like the Berlin Interpretation without using a list.  And as soon as you use a list, you'll trigger this behaviour.  It would be interesting to see a more modern interpretation, but I will note that at the various IRDCs I've been to the consensus is to leave it alone.

As you note with the reference to the canon being conveniently dropped, I'm pretty confident any reference to "THIS CANNOT BE USED AS A CHECKLIST" would also have been lost.  Nonetheless, I do agree that it would have been useful to make that more clear.  But, I should caution this is my own opinion.  I don't remember the discussion well enough to confidently assert it was everyone else's, it could be some participants did/do view it as a checklilst...

4

Other Announcements / Re: Results for the 2013 Roguelike World Survey has been posted

« on: July 15, 2014, 02:27:01 PM »

In response to JeffLait, I think I should say my post from last night was a bit too strongly worded (late, drinking, etc.)

Thank you.  Similarly, if my post seemed too defensive, do not fear if it was out of being offended.  I very much respect the civility with which this discourse is running, and hope to keep it that way!

Regarding POWDER, obviously Jeff thought it fit into a particular strain of roguelike game (Japanese console roguelikes) and counts Nethack as a strong influence. This sounds like a good story to me and should have satisfied critics, considering other clear points of continuity in terms of idioms and mechanics.

Except....  This is why I don't like a definition which requires knowledge of intent/history.

You are quite right to suspect POWDER to be based on Japanese console roguelikes.  After all, the author obviously had access to a GBA and a Flash card, so presumably would have no limits as to exposure to them.  Embarrassingly, however, I have not played any Japanese roguelikes.  I did not even know about them until Sheep started pointing them out to the community, which was after I already had gone a long way in making POWDER.  So, historically, there was no transfer from Japanese Roguelikes to POWDER.  It was almost entirely from Nethack to POWDER.  Later on, Crawl snuck in (but mostly through a layer of indirection as I never could get into playing it, but I did liberally borrow many cool ideas), but the Shiren the Wanderer remains independent paths.

To me, the key part of your definition would be the "continuity of idoms and mechanics".  Which then raises the spectre of "What are these idioms and mechanics?"  Which leads us into the danger of people treating our musings as checklists...

For example, there are MANY ways of implementing a pen & paper D&D experience on the computer.  The best dichotomy is probably the DND vs Rogue one.  DND is room based encounters with party of adventurers with a sort of JRPG fight screen.  This matches D&D played without figurines.  Contrasting, we have Rogue, which uses a top-down grid, matching D&D with figurines.

I'm not sure what logic you mean when you say "by that logic." My point was not that every Japanese game designer had played rogue. Rather, it is that rogue would have been widely available in the formative years of Japanese programmers who would go on to create the console games of the late 80s, the 90s, and 00s. Where you see a clear influence, it is therefore reasonable to surmise it is direct influence, not coincidence. As you say, that's not proof. It would be an interesting thing to get one of these designers to do an interview and go on the record about this matter.

True, I just don't see any clear influences listed.  I wouldn't call top-down grid based combat with procedurally generated levels and permadeath a clear influence either.  As that we know can be independently discovered.  There is no need for us to look for such influence, however, as I'm willing to accept either answer.

On the other hand, isn't Spelunky very much a continued discussion on the game called Rogue?  It is very much written by someone who liked rogue, and is engaging in a conversation about the game?  And Diablo III is very clearly a roguelike, being the third iteration from what was admittedly an attempt to make a better Angband.  And circling back to the start of this thread, we lose any ability to tell an author that they aren't making a roguelike: if they claim they are part of the conversation,  how can we gainsay them?

There's a limit to what can be called continuity. Is Spelunky a game that implements roleplaying game mechanics and content, following the tradition and idioms of rogue, moria, hack, and larn? No, obviously not. It shares one idiom with these canonical games: Random level generation, monster placement, and item placement. It's a platformer, it's quite linear. It differs fundamentally in mechanics, theme, style, you name it, and in a way that has no precedent within the genre -- you can't point to a continuous lineage that would show incremental progress toward Spelunky and which might place it in a subgenre. It's a thing unto itself, with a roguelike influence at most.

And this is why I am favour of trying to write down what some of these essential idioms and traditions are, so we know when we cross them.

To be clear, I do agree with you that Spelunky is outside of "Roguelike".  But I do not agree with your claim we can just look at the broken continuity and declare it separate.  If we were to erase Diablo I and II from the record, suddenly Diablo III looks like a sudden departure from the roguelike genre.  Yet with them there, we have a strong line of continuity.  Similarly, there could be a series of games we are unaware of that link the two smoothly.

We also have the problem that games are no organisms (or if they are, are more like bacteria...) as they really don't care about straight lines of descent.  Nor do I want them to!  The last thing I want is anyone changing their game to match a genre!

In any case, because of this we have the problem of back-crosses.  Rogue Legacy can be seen as a continued discussion of Spelunky, but it pulls in so many of the idioms and traditions of roguelikes that it almost becomes the cross-over game needed to establish continuity for Spelunky!  The only problem is the temporal issue, but, again, I'm very suspicious of a definition that relies on history...

Similarly, Beneath Apple Manor was *not* a conversation on Rogue, having predated it.  But it looks an awful lot like rogue!

I don't have enough information on hand to evaluate the claim that this game is a roguelike. My inclination is to say no, because I don't believe in a Platonic notion of roguelikeness the way some here seem to.

Why do you need information though?  Don't you just need the date?  It was written before rogue.  Therefore it cannot have been influenced by rogue.  Therefore it cannot be a roguelike.

This notion becomes problematic without reference to history and influence. You could plausibly argue that Dungeons and Dragons is the original roguelike. The idea of random content generation comes directly from Dungeons and Dragons. It has all the theme and mechanical aspects, it's just not implemented in software.

To come full circle, the D&D board game Wrath of Ashardalon is extraordinary close to being a roguelike in physical form.

Again, it seems crazy to me to presume there was no influence of rogue on Japanese console roguelikes until there is proof one way or another. The standard of evidence usually applied in this kind of situation is one of plausibility more than proof. When material is available to someone and they produce a work that appears to share crucial, nontrivial features with this material, the conclusion is usually that there is a direct influence.

I have seen too much convergent evolution in the world to be so ready to conclude direct influence.  Further, I'd say non-trivial features are not indicative of direct influence.  Non-trivial, necessary, features are those most likely to be there because of convergent evolution.  Like fins on a whale, they will keep showing up whenever people try and solve the same problem.  Using @ for the character, by contrast, is a trivial feature that is a pretty good sign of a direct descent.  Indeed, glyph choice is probably the strongest sign what games the developer was influenced by.

I don't think the "Copenhagen Interpretation" is a pretentious name. It's a name chosen to assign credit in a diffuse way to fundamental scientific work by some of the great minds of the 20th century.

A power point presentation style specification for roguelike games doesn't quite match the scale of achievement there.

Er...  The fact that nothing involving roguelikes will match the achievements of Quantum Mechanics is moot, isn't it? 

The Berlin Interpretation is a name chosen to assign credit in a diffuse way to a fundamental work on the research of roguelikes.

I think it's been influential, I just don't think the influence has been good. I agree it shows a fair amount of work and thought on the part of those involved. But it cuts out games that are obviously roguelike (multiplayer angband variants) representing a branch that predates the "interpretation" by more than ten years and could use a lot of work. It downplays the importance of tradition. Its weighted average/requirement-oriented specification nature turns discussion into a garbled mess of trying to figure out how to weight what. Its lack of reference to history and influence mean that literally any game is up for evaluation -- see surprisingly frequent reference to the Civilization series in these discussions.

I don't know if any bad influence is a result of the document itself.  Looking at it again, how does it downplay tradition when the very first general principle is:

"Roguelike" refers to a genre, not merely "like-Rogue". The genre is represented by its canon. The canon for Roguelikes is ADOM, Angband, Crawl, Nethack, and Rogue.

There are your holotypes!

It doesn't cut out multiplayer angband variants.  It intentionally states it isn't meant to cut out anything.

Missing some points does not mean the game is not a roguelike.

(Though, I am a bit curious which one of its criteria cuts out the multiplayer *bands....  Unless you mean Diablo, which does fall a foul of Turn-based.  But some people would define Action-RPG for the Diablo franchise and branch it off Roguelike, so it does seem reasonable that any definition of roguelike shouldn't precisely match Diablo....)

I'd agree that the line This list can be used to determine how roguelike a game is. is problematic.  I am unapologetic about trying to create a list of concrete idioms and traditions for people to identify & debate over, however.  And I'm pretty confident that even if we had said This list cannot be used to determine how roguelike a game is. people still would have used it to bludgeon each other over the head in checklist style approaches.

The fact Civilization keeps showing up is probably because there is surprisingly little work to change a Civilization Game Engine into a Roguelike.  This is why I, personally, would move Single Player Character and Tactical Challenge up into high value factors.  Permadeath, also, is depressingly absent from Civilization as it often encourages a save & restore gameplay.  (In my mind, Permadeath refers to consequences - you can't rewind time and try again.)  I think Civilization would keep showing up whether or not the Berlin Interpretation was ever written.

5

Other Announcements / Re: Results for the 2013 Roguelike World Survey has been posted

« on: July 15, 2014, 01:25:42 PM »

It does not help that when each individual built their own definition, they did it with a different corpus of games.  For example, when I started on POWDER I was a bit concerned people would declare it Not A Roguelike, so added my own definition to the page.  My definition included this interesting item:

There's a difference between having one's own definition and deciding that a public definition should reflect one's own opinion, and just going on and putting it in there.  I'm looking forward to side-scrolling roguelike person adding "* It does got to scrolls sidewaysz.  Thatz the real rougelikez stuffs right there."

At the time I wrote the definition on zincland, I wasn't sufficiently aware of the *band community to realize that some roguelikes didn't scroll sideways.

Which is what is nice about getting together a diverse group of people to try and build a consensus; the result can better reflect the variety of opinions.

6

Other Announcements / Re: Results for the 2013 Roguelike World Survey has been posted

« on: July 14, 2014, 08:43:17 PM »

Responding to JeffLait's comment -- About Japanese roguelikes, roguelike games were surely present on computer systems at Japanese universities by the mid-80s (e.g. rogue was included in 4.2BSD, released in late 1983). Then of course there's Japanese Berkeley students. I doubt this is a case of convergent evolution.

I also doubt it is convergent.  I was responding to AgingMinotaur's suggestion that your social-evolution theory would have disenfranchised them.  However, I brought up JNethack because it shows that Nethack was most definitely played in Japan as of '93.  It seems clear that for a JNethack port to be made, it had to be played earlier than that as well, but I couldn't find any historical proof going farther back.  I do not agree with your claim that since 4.2BSD was present, all Japanese game designers must have played Rogue!  By this logic, every video game since '83 is a roguelike since every video game author had access to it.  The proof I think both of us would like would be for the authors of the various Japanese Roguelikes to have made statements that they were influenced by/reacting to rogue or a derivative of rogue.

On the other hand, isn't Spelunky very much a continued discussion on the game called Rogue?  It is very much written by someone who liked rogue, and is engaging in a conversation about the game?  And Diablo III is very clearly a roguelike, being the third iteration from what was admittedly an attempt to make a better Angband.  And circling back to the start of this thread, we lose any ability to tell an author that they aren't making a roguelike: if they claim they are part of the conversation,  how can we gainsay them?

Similarly, Beneath Apple Manor was *not* a conversation on Rogue, having predated it.  But it looks an awful lot like rogue!

When we seek to decide what we call a roguelike, it is helpful to know why we are trying to identify such things.  If your goal is to find games that were influenced by Rogue, then Spelunky is definitely a roguelike; and Beneath Apple Manor is not.  And Japanese Roguelikes live in limbo until we find evidence to put them one way or other.

Personally, I'm not interested in that as a metric.  I'm more interested in games that are "similar'" to rogue.  The advantage is you don't need to know where the game comes from to decide if it is a roguelike or not, it can be judged independently of its history.  It is also useful in trying to understand how these games work, as I'd say there is a much bigger difference between Diablo III and Rogue than there is between Beneath Apple Manor and Rogue!

I figured the name "Berlin interpretation" was chosen in parallel with the "Copenhagen interpretation." Pretty pretentious, imo.

Was it though?  (Embarrassingly, I had to look up pretentious.  I often see it as a generic throw-away insult, so was not sure of its precise meaning.)

At the time, I might have agreed with you... But probably because I feel the Copenhagen Interpretation is also a pretentious name.  (Hell, at least we wrote something down for people to complain about!)  But now?  I think it has very much lived up to the name.

Firstly, note it isn't the Berlin Definition, nor Berlin Solution or Berlin Answer.  The word Interpretation is there to reflect it is how we interpreted the meaning of Roguelikes.  Next, note the inclusion of "Berlin", thereby localizing it to one spot (and somewhat implicitly, time).  This implies there could be a Stockholm Interpretation to compete with it.  So, as to the words themselves, there is no great claim of value present.

So the next question, is it worthy of being associated with the Copenhagen Interpretation?  On an absolute scale, obviously not.  But that is pretty poor yardstick to judge anything to do with roguelikes by.  The question is, has the Berlin Intepretration had the same influence on Roguelikes as the Copenhagen Interpretation had on Quantum Mechanics?

Well, neither of them hopefully had influence: Shut up and calculate vs Shut up and code!  So let us say influence on the discussion of roguelikes.

So what influence did it have?

Prior to it, most "definitions" were just ad-hoc lists by random people on the internet.  Often copied randomly off each other.  I was always surprised to see my own random list used as an authoritative source!  We had these things, roguelikes, that were already taxonomically grouped largely by this "Discussions on Rogue", but no clear idea of what they were.  Well, that is untrue, I'd say there were lots of clear ideas of what they were, we just were unable to articulate any of our reasoning.

This example is rather different.  We actually got a fair number of the interested parties together face-to-face to try to figure something out from this muddle.  This achievement shouldn't be trivialized.  We then continued the conversation on-line afterwards to polish stuff a bit, and created the work that is seen there.  It didn't start from the thin air either, it very much built on all the discussion that had gone prior to it.  So I would claim it does represent a significant amount of work, effort, and dedication on the part of the authors.

And, judging by history so far, it has proven to have a lot of cultural value.  It provided what was entirely missing at that point: a standard to start the argument from.  You may disagree with it, but at least we have a standard point to say: "yes, but..." to.  Proof of this assertion follows simply from the fact it apparently is still being discussed.  More interestingly, when I read the other various definitions in this thread, I can't help but notice most of them are already there in that document.  Indeed, looking over it again I can definitely find a lot to quibble about, but there is nothing particularly wrong about it.

Your own idea of "roguelike means derived from rogue" is entirely missing, but not because we weren't aware of it.  IIRC, Sheep started the conversation asking whether we were trying to find games like rogue, or find games derived from rogue.  And our consensus was to do the former.  And, we did try to be clear about that:

"Roguelike" refers to a genre, not merely "like-Rogue".  The genre is
represented by its canon.  The canon for Roguelikes is ADOM, Angband,
Crawl, Nethack, and Rogue.

In some ways, if you favour a holotype definition, you can just stop there.  Do you agree with that canon or not?  Everything else is just trying to identify what separates the canon out in a useful manner.

I'm surprised how thoroughly your post confirms my suspicions about the Berlin interpretation, e.g. its "progressive" stance on graphics versus criticism you expected to receive re: POWDER.

Not sure what those suspicions are...?  And your example makes no sense  to me.  Its stance being "progressive" is entirely IMHO.  If you are suggesting it is aligned with my own views, well, of course.  The intent was to make something that would be mostly aligned with all participants views.  It should be clear it isn't entirely aligned with my views, however, as I wouldn't have included ASCII graphics at all.  Nor likely Turn-based or Grid-based - I'd argue both of those are part of Tactical Challenge that I'd want to move into a high value factor.... But that is the nature of committees.

I liked the part about how one might "naively" expect rogue to the prototype for roguelikes.

It does seem strange to argue that Rogue isn't a roguelike.  To clarify, I don't argue that way.  I'm in the naive camp, and like to use "hacklike" to qualify the sub-genre that enshrines complexity.

It seems the roguelike world could've been spared a certain amount of trouble had the Berlin interpretation been presented to the public with the candor it has been in this comment.

The nature of the internet is you can't control how things are presented to the public.  It was presented with frankness and sincerity, and naturally triggered a surprisingly civil discussion about all of its immediate failings.  That apparently people then went around bashing each other over the head in Roguelike Wars by slavishly following it?  Well, I'm actually not too sorry to hear that.  Pedants will always exist.  And the fact that, as imperfect as it is, it remains a go-to definition, certainly means we did something right?

7

Other Announcements / Re: Results for the 2013 Roguelike World Survey has been posted

« on: July 14, 2014, 03:24:12 PM »

It's probably fair to note, though, that even upon its conception, the ("so-called" ) Berlin Interpretation wasn't intended to be definitive, but rather to list some typical features.

The definition of roguelike has long been contentious, long before the lightning rod that is the Berlin Interpretation was put out there.

It does not help that when each individual built their own definition, they did it with a different corpus of games.  For example, when I started on POWDER I was a bit concerned people would declare it Not A Roguelike, so added my own definition to the page.  My definition included this interesting item:

Complex interactions of properties. While the commands for a roguelike are simple, the potential interactions are not. My favourite example is equipping a silver ring as a weapon in order to damage a creature vulnerable to silver, but not one's other weapons.

Rogue, which one would naively expect to be the touch-stone for roguelikeness, fails this test.  It is something I got out of all of my playing of ADOM and Nethack and reflects the little experience I have with the huge *band family.

The term "Berlin Interpretation", rather than "Berlin Definition" is rather intentional.  The model is off the Copenhagen Intepretation: an attempt by so-called experts in the field to come to an agreement about something inherently non-agreeable.  Of course, the result is something no-one is entirely happy with.  But what I like about the Berlin Interpretation is it puts a stake in the ground for starting point, something we did not have before.  I know the inclusion of "ASCII display" may seem ridiculous to the modern crowd, but;

• It was actually a significant issue at the time; and quite progressive for it to be moved to the low list.
• I'm not sure how much videogame genres should encompass.  Personally I'm for them focussing solely on gameplay, but I think practically in many people's minds it will also include art-style and setting.

It is also important to note that genre construction, as an aspect of taxonomy, is by definition going to be imprecise.  We are not dealing with abstract mathematical constructs here.  There is a precise definition for Topology not because the things that are topologies have a precise definition, but it was decided to redefine things to match a precise definition.  Our goal with a roguelike definition is a functional lens for us to better understand games.  A precise definition for roguelike would be pretty useless.  There is no gain to evenly dividing games into Roguelike and Non-Roguelike camps!

So why bother at all?

There is gain to identifying what is it that causes us to think of some games as roguelike, and some games as not.  We can then choose to keep or discard these items in other games.  Or identify them in existing games and better understand what mechanisms caused us to enjoy/hate those games.  I consider it very convenient to have "Sci-Fi" and "Fantasy" and "Romance" as genres, despite the fact that obviously any particular novel may or may not respect those divisions.

What makes something a roguelike isn't any particular feature.  Just like being "plot-driven" doesn't make something a fantasy novel.  But, you can't just make a checklist either!

Compare it with taxonomy of animals.  Often these do devolve to checklists: species A differs from species B due to a slightly longer clavicle.  But these lists very much are designed merely to distinguish existing species - we could invent an animal that catastrophically fails any checklist based taxonomy system.  Instead, there exists the holotype for each species, which represents the complete animal to match against.

Though I do agree it can form an unhappy condition for defining RLs. OTOH, I think the danger of relying too much on technosocial genealogy is that one risks excluding classics like Powder, the whole spectrum of Japanese Roguelikes, or even ADOM (for being closed source, whether of not you personally consider that a cardinal sin).

Techno-social?  I guess I should read the entire thread...  But isn't POWDER very much a derivative of Nethack, and ADOM likewise traces Omega and Nethack?  Unless you only count inheritance via code, in which Nethack is no longer a Roguelike, as, AFAIK, Hack is a clean break from rogue?

My main argument against genealogical approaches, however, is that there is a lot of convergent evolution in videogames.  And, the cases of convergent evolution are probably the most interesting for genre definition, as they represent an attractor in the game-play space.  When two games have the same gameplay because one was inspired by the other, it doesn't tell us as much if two independent people were led to the same gameplay.  OTOH, I'm not sure how "clean" the Japanese Roguelikes are from western influence, Nethack had a Japanese port since '93.  And, of course, we know the Diablo designers were aware of *band.

Also, regarding "war stories", YASDs and the like, yes, this points to the unique strengths of the RL genre – and relies a lot on both gameplay qualities and Internet culture.

War stories apply to all video games worthy to be called video games.  It also seems a pointless thing to add to a definition.  How am I supposed to write a game that has war stories?  Answering this starts to ask the question of what sort of warstories, and runs us into something that is starting to look like the Berlin Interpretation: a list of techniques/gameplay elements found in most roguelikes that seem to be most necessary for generating a roguelike experience.

So, in summary, I'm all for debate about what makes a roguelike, but mostly because I want to learn of new ways of looking at games to understand how they work and how they differ from each other.  In the end, I don't particularly care where anyone draws the line between roguelike and non-roguelike, and find it entertaining how much people are now using it as a catch-all for "Procedural".

8

7DRLs / Re: Success/failure terminology

« on: March 06, 2014, 11:32:35 PM »

I'm in the camp that regardless of the name we'll get just as many things marked complete that do not seem to be so to an external observer. Personally I have no problem with some people falsely declaring complete our success when they shouldn't. I model off naniwrimo, where you can quite simple submit fifty thousand "a"s and get marked as a successful novel.

That all said, better name may reduce the"run aways" at the end. I like Darren's names: success and unfinished. As Darren says, you don't finish the challenge if you don't have a finished game!

9

Early Dev / Re: Roguelike Incubator

« on: June 04, 2012, 08:42:01 AM »

A sub forum... how is that different than early development feedback?  Except maybe we add some karma system for people to game/cry about?

The original proposal seemed bolder.

There should be no diffusion of responsibility.  The people in a cabal should feel beholden to each other to test and produce.  This ties into the branding idea - the set of games produced by a cabal are in some ways a product of the cabal as a whole, so each member should want to require those games to be good enough to represent them!  As I said, a sign of success is if games within the cabal are killed/not released as they do not pass muster!  If this doesn't happen, you just have a what Krice rightly fears.

This is why it is an essentially elitist proposal.  "Serious" is a serious word.  Think of it more of a busking troupe, each member of a troupe develops their own act, but the troupe as a whole does not want shoddy acts!

Why it is not wholly elitist is because there is no monopoly on the idea of forming a such a team.  Any group of devs can form a cabal at any time for any duration mutually agreed upon.

I really think roguelike development suffers for not being team activities.  There are certainly teams, but they seem the minority.  So I understood this idea to be one of trying to leverage the advantages of team development but without actually trying to get a bunch of developers to agree on a single game.

I guess the first stage is for people to self identify with serious projects that they think they could get somewhere with by ARRP?  Then within that group people can decide if there are subgroups that want to band together.

It's a short timeline, so I'll have to do some thinking to see if I have a viable path to join such a group or not.

10

Early Dev / Re: Roguelike Incubator

« on: May 30, 2012, 03:55:44 PM »

Take the exclusionary principles and run with them... call it a roguelike cabal.

A cabal of roguelike developers forms with the intent of releasing a set of games.  Perhaps for a AARP as a destination?  They work internally, alpha/beta testing with each other to create something truly polished for the AARP deadline.  Failure to meet the deadline is encouraged: it is better to release nothing than to release something that reflects badly on the cabal.

Structured in this manner, there need not be a single cabal/incubator, but any group can spontaneously form one.

I quite like this idea as it helps promote more team-work in a field that is very solitary.  And it doesn't do so by forcing the developers to work together on the same projects (since they likely can't, being aforementioned solitary visions...)