No player is an island

Informal formalisms

I write about roguelikes due to a paradox. They are the only videogames I obsess about. And I am terrible at playing them. I write about roguelikes to understand that paradox.

So far, I have proposed that the roguelike is a poetic form of videogames, defined by permadeath, procedural content generation, and secrets. These three attributes are “formal,” even if it’s more French than Russian formalism. I want to add two characteristics to the form of the roguelike. These characteristics are, I think, part of the poetic form of the roguelike, but they are less about how the videogame is designed and more about how it projects itself towards an audience. These characteristics describe how an implicit audience should play this poetic form.

The first characteristic is the multiplayer nature of most roguelikes. No, I am not delusional. I know that most roguelikes are single-player games, at least nominally. Yes, there are exceptions, from Risk of Rain 2 to RoboQuest, but the poetic form of the roguelike is almost always a single-player game. However, at heart, these are multiplayer games. The importance of secrets drives players to share and discuss how to play the game, from Reddit to YouTube. And because of the self-contained nature of the run, the roguelike makes for phenomenal story machines to tell others.

From the Roguelike Celebration to the Temple of the Rogue, the poetic form of the roguelike wants the experiences to be shared, the secrets to be discussed, and the stories to be told. These are multiplayer games we play alone.

The second characteristic of the roguelike as the poetic form is the importance of rituals in the gameplay experience. Play scholar Thomas Henricks proposes that rituals and play are modalities of experiencing the world. Play is about dealing with the unexpected, while the ritual is about steadying variability so something is shared and stable in a world of entropy. Because of secrets and procedural content generation, the form of the roguelike makes every game experience, every run, a new instance of the game. At the same time, procedural content generation creates recognizable patterns, and as we play roguelikes, we also become better at recognizing how to play the game. Roguelikes become, as we play them, more rituals than games.

Today’s daily challenge in Slay the Spire. I played this daily throughout the lockdown in the worst days of the COVID pandemic. It was a ritual of sanity and connectedness.

This tension between variability and the shareable experience of the steady and stable can be seen in an innovation of the roguelike form: the daily. What started as a ritual among friends became a way of playing the game and, finally, a shared ritual among players. We all play dailies and share the same game, generator seed, and ambition to go through the same run. The poetic form of the roguelike, so rooted in change, randomness, and unpredictability, creates a unique experience of togetherness, reminding us that nobody ever plays alone.