Misery, Death, and Slime Molds: My Love Affair with Roguelikes

One of my favorite pastimes in this modern world of 3D movies (who ever thought those would come back around again?), beautiful multiplayer online games, and graphics cards more powerful than my entire first computer, is to play in the humble genre of roguelike games.  But what exactly is a roguelike?  It is a game that is, in most respects, a lot like 1980's Rogue, the first graphical computer game.  Given that they are classified by their similarity to a particular game, roguelikes for the most part share a set of common features:

Dungeon Crawl: At least one of those monsters is about to get stabbed

• They are "graphical" like 8====> is graphical: that is, the graphics are made up entirely of ASCII characters, with characters like | or # representing the walls of the dungeon, .'s the open spaces, and every letter of the alphabet in many colors for the various monsters, such as k, N, or the dreaded D!  The advantage here is that these games can be played in a terminal window, which is handy if you like that kind of thing.  Your character (and sometimes other humanoid creatures) is represented by an @, which is allegedly supposed to bear some resemblance to a head and shoulders as viewed from above.  I'll let you make your own judgment.
• Randomized items.  Oh my goodness.  The appearances of the most useful items in the dungeon (scrolls, potions, wands, spellbooks, etc) are randomized at the beginning of each game.  And there are some bad items, so you can't just try 'em all and expect to get very far.  Figuring out how best to utilize the stuff that you find without getting yourself killed is the main challenge here, aside from the hordes of monsters you have to use the stuff on.
• I mentioned the dungeon: the vast majority of these games are "dungeon crawls", in which your goal is to descend to the bottom of a dungeon, retrieve an item or accomplish a task, and escape with your life.  Most of them are also based heavily on Dungeons and Dragons, although to avoid litigation the resemblance isn't too strong; so, no beholders or drow here, but plenty of dragons and "deep elves".  The layout of the dungeon is also randomized.  There are typically a few special, static levels, but they are usually inhabited by extra nasty creatures, so knowing the layout ahead of time only helps a little.
• Finally, roguelikes are hard.  Possibly even Nintendo hard.  There are two reasons for this.  The first is permadeath.  That is, when (not if) your character dies, that's it.  You need to make a new one and start all over again, new dungeon, new items and all.  The second is instadeath.  It is pretty easy to die in one turn if you're doing it wrong, but instadeath is not uncommon even if you're being really careful.  

There are quite a few games that can be easily classified  as roguelikes: NetHack, ADOM, and Dungeon Crawl (in its various incarnations), and Angband (in its much more various incarnations) are the most popular, and there are a host of others.  I have only played the first three with anything resembling focus and determination, and in the five-ish years since I got into them I have won at NetHack a total of 7 times, and the others, 0.  So, almost 1.5 wins per year.  Hard.

(While the above games are most certainly roguelikes, there are some that straddle the fence.  Some argue that the Diablo games, with their randomly-generated areas and treasures, are a certain kind of roguelike; but given that the winning strategy on many of the boss fights is to run in, pew-pew away, and die, repeatedly, I think that some of the tactical flavor and subtlety can be lost.)

So who, in God's name, would submit themselves to such a thing, and for "fun" no less?  Does the thrill of very occasional victory outweigh the extremely frequent agony of defeat?  I have to admit that on the occasion of each of my NetHack wins, I was more excited and scared than at most action movies or life events, considering for minutes on end the possible consequences of each of my options.  It is very focusing to have a challenge to overcome.


But I think it is overly simple to look at these games in terms of the reward-to-effort ratio, which despite the preceding paragraph is still extremely low.  I think there's something that appeals to my inner masochist about these games.  I've been playing Dungeon Crawl a lot lately, and as you can see from these charts, I have lost a truly epic number of characters with not a single win to my name.  Every once in a while I will get a character up past level 8 and start to have a really good game, and then get killed around level 12-15.  Those few levels take about as long as all the previous ones put together, so this represents a substantial investment in time and effort.


Almost inevitably, though, something goes wrong, and everything comes crashing down around me, and this is the point: pretty much as happens in real life, everything I have built and worked for is regularly destroyed or rendered worthless in a matter of moments, whether it's my fault or not.  I find something darkly compelling in the idea that the result of so much time, effort, and emotion can be shredded by coming down the wrong staircase and having my brains creatively redistributed by a nearby ogre.  Or by foolishly drinking the wrong unidentified potion.  Or by swerving the wrong way in the car.  Or by desperately reading the wrong scroll in the heat of battle.  Or by saying the wrong words to the wrong person at the wrong time.  I wonder if seeing the bad things in my life played out in microcosm, over and over, helps remind me that I can recover from them, that I can always start over, or if these games appeal to me simply as a morbid time-sink.  If I have learned and had fun with a game that ended prematurely, is it truly a failure?  Or am I just fascinated with a metaphorical mirror on all the little defeats that make up daily life?