So, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I am working on a project on roguelikes. I want it to be a book. Not a long one, around 30k words, and knowing myself, some 300 endnotes.
The way I write is that I vomit words until I have the backbone, and then I seep through that production until it makes sense, maybe even to other people. Because I am obsessive, once I hit a stride, I have difficulty doing anything else until I feel I am done. I am not pleasant to be around when I am in that mood.
The news is that I am done vomiting. The pile is vile (see what I did there), but it exists. And I will be going through it very soon with the help of this newsletter. I plan to write summaries of the main arguments in the same order as in the final manuscript to test for sanity and to hear from potential readers (so, at the risk of being a naive internet person, please comment!).
As part of this writing process, I will occasionally share here not the finished argument but snippets of my writing as teases. This is the first of these fragment posts, my attempt at aphorisms (I’ll see myself out).
#1 (The project is currently called Eternal Returns: A Poetic of Roguelikes. I like Nietzsche.
I am not saying that roguelike developers have read Nietzsche or are debating the long history of the doctrine of eternal recurrence in Western philosophy. But their work, their poetics understood as not the functional, market-driven approach to creating games but the aesthetic, creative part of their work, understand roguelikes as being pleasurable for the same reasons that Nietzsche found the doctrine of the eternal return terrifying and joyful. There is beauty in returning, in different ways, to what was. It is a form of affirmation of the joys of playing.
#2 I ended up writing about the roguelike as a poetic form because I miss writing about literature. But my first drafts were about roguelikes as an aesthetic virus.
Roguelike is a form, but it is also more than that. It is an infection in the dying bodies of videogames—Spelunky infected platformers. Slay the Spire is the outcome of an infected deck builder, and Hades shows what happens to narratives (and Greek mythology) after the roguelike mutation. This roguelike virus infects designs and reveals otherness in the type of videogame these genres could be.
I still like this idea and will probably explore it here and in other formats (maybe even interactive formats …).
Next time this newsletter reaches your inbox, I will start a short series on a topic I have never written before: procedurality.
Holaa, aunque te escriba en castellano (por comodidad) te leo en ingles y ests muuy interesante lo que cuentas y sobre lo que quieres y ya estas escribiendo, con ganas d leer sobre la poetica de los rogues y la filosofia ya sea Nietzsche o cualquiera :)
I, for one, am excited to see where this goes.
As for word vomitting and then cleaning up, I would argue you just phrased writing an initial draft as a biological process with the textual representation or encoding of some meaning. Classic choice of phrasing even if the image is inherently disgusting.
Let us see where this roguelite(?) journey of writing about the genre(s) will take you, and subsequently us readers, and enjoy the ride. For isn't that the foundationally enjoyable element of roguelikes/roguelites? The journey and its many variations as we explore and learn of the different elements that make up life, or perhaps just a singular game, to be better prepared for future encounters.