Some Building Blocks
Sketches for another future
It’s time to return to roguelikes. But first, a disclaimer. The best thing about my sabbatical is that I can prioritize my time. It is also the worst thing. I have spent the last week working on two new Ridiculous Software projects. BRZ will be my first exploration of health apps, while AIfred will explore the possibilities of voice assistants. I can’t wait to share more of these works, but they are not quite ready for the spotlight yet.
Focusing on these two projects means I have written less this week. The roguelike book project is now quite advanced, and an early draft of the main chapters is ready. I’ve also started working on my Luddite ethics project, and there’s material there I will be able to discuss soon. I have also returned to writing on the football book(s) I have been working on with Bo Kampmann Walther, which makes me very happy. And there’s even a new project that caught me by surprise and that I am pretty excited about …
What I have managed to ignore this week is this newsletter. I like forcing myself to think out loud by writing the ideas I am working on within this format. So, today’s newsletter is the sketch for the newsletter entry for next week. It is short, with more premises in bullet points than properly discussed arguments, but it will be both a teaser for what’s to come and a way to force myself to write again in a week.
So far, I have argued that roguelikes are a poetic form of the videogame, defined by their secrets, the use of procedurality, and permadeath. Roguelikes create communities and rituals, which are essential to their aesthetics.
All of this is great (or not, who knows!). But it still doesn’t answer the question that started this project: why is it that the only videogames that properly obsess me are roguelikes? So here’s a sketch of the answer, bullet points that I will expand on next week, and in the book:
- Roguelikes are fundamentally fun because they are unknowable.
- Most other video games are fundamentally knowable in narrow ways and, therefore, dull. For example, the level design telegraphs what I have to do, and the controller disciplines me to learn which skills to develop to complete the predefined tasks that will give me the pleasure of play. Almost all other video games feel like paint-by-numbers experiences1.
- My disdain for these other videogames comes from three places: I wouldn't say I like puzzles (which are not games2), I dislike the media envy of many videogames (books and films are better than videogames that aspire to be either), and I dislike the idea of packaged entertainment that is supposed to be “functionally correct”3.
- Intact things are not fun. Things that cannot be broken are not fun.
- Roguelikes are fun because they are always slightly broken black boxes. The pleasure of playing them is the back-and-forth, the action and reaction, and the slow process of getting to know them.
- Roguelikes are the poetic form of performativity with video games.
- The broader argument I want to make is that mainstream videogames are the forms of leisure of the high modernist project (as defined by James C. Scott, but also present in Pickering’s works). This project is defined by the assertion that everything is knowable, measurable, quantifiable throug scientific effort and calculation. The high modernist leisure project is also defined by making these calculations a part of our leisure and a way of domesticating our fun. That’s why we have gamification, but there’s a push to measure “the fun of a videogame” in the number of hours it takes to complete.
- Roguelikes live in this ideological ecology and are part of it. But they are also games from another future4. A future in which computational black boxes are necessary not for what they track or compute but about how they relate to us, and we relate to them. If Gordon Pask were a game developer, he would make roguelikes.
- The most important contribution of the roguelike form to videogames is their active refusal to be videogames.
I feel like these videogames I don’t like are the equivalent to the educational model that Paulo Freire despised. Where he saw the “banking model of learning”, I see the “banking model of play”, where videogames are supposed to be these containers from which players extract fun.
As I explained in this Early Access podcast interview with the great Mer Grazzini and Juan Lomanto. Yes, it is in Spanish. The fourth most spoken language in the world.
This is an old obsession of mine, which Doug Wilson and me wrote about in a paper with a clumsy title. My former students Mathias Schifter and Brin Zvan wrote a phenomenal thesis updating the ideas in that paper.
Yes, I stole Pickering’s title. But imagine a future in which Spelunky, and not Mario, defined the canon of videogames.
Good read Miguel! Hmm “the only games you obsess over are rogue like” but your obsession around FIFA felt pretty real back in the day 😉 … or maybe FIFA is rogue… like?
Isaac
love the comparison to “paint by numbers” game. However, is that not only true if you understand or comprehend the entire experience while consuming it? The unknown of exploring a gameplay mechanic, even though it might be part of a loop that eventually is known? Like playing Inside where new machines are spread throughout the entire game.