The ritual
The daily as shared practice
This is the last in a series of three short works in progress that are part of my roguelike project. This newsletter will go on hiatus until January 24th, 2025.
I was there and didn’t pay much attention to it when it happened. It turns out that the invention of one of the most significant elements of roguelikes took place right next door in Copenhagen. When Doug Wilson was living in Denmark, Spelunky was at its height of popularity, and he and game developer genius Nifflas came up with a novel way of playing Spelunky. In their account, each day they would play only one run. Whatever the result was, that would be the day's run. From that ritual among friends, the daily was born.
In roguelikes, the daily is a run that can only be made once a day, resulting in a score that is often compared with all the other players in the world. The procedural generation seed is the same for all players, and there’s frequently an element of added challenges to the daily. In Slay the Spire, the daily has specific and novel constraints in the forms of limited decks, different relics available, or other types of penalties. In Spelunky, there are no extra challenges, but the run is a competition for money and time, rewarding the fastest as we as the greediest players.
The daily is a social phenomenon that builds on two central elements of the roguelike form, permadeath and procedural content generation. Permadeath ensures that the stakes are high when playing, even more so when death is definitive. Once a player dies in the daily, there is no other chance to play1. The daily uses permadeath as a literal constraint to create an enhanced experience of risk and reward.
At the same time, the daily challenges the idea that procedural content generation will always make the games random, potentially making roguelikes solipsistic affairs. By sharing the seed across all players, the daily creates a community of play. The multiple stories and experiences that articulate roguelikes get synchronized through the daily. We all play the same gameworld, and we can all share what we experience, how we die, how we win, and how we pull the craziest moves or perish in the silliest ways. The roguelike form makes each game profoundly singular. The daily makes the game a shared joy.
Videogames are only illusory to a single person’s experience. The emergence of streamers and Youtubers illustrates how games are always played with and for others. Games are social practices. Roguelike dailies are the shared social practice of their procedurality of joy.
There’s perhaps a more interesting angle here. Videogames are technologies for playing with software2. But the roguelike daily is not just a videogame: it’s a ritualization of play. If the ritual is a performance that binds communities together, the ritualistic performance of the roguelike as a form is daily. It’s the equivalent of reading a poem out loud, playing a piece of music for a loved one, or for an audience that will hate it. The daily is the roguelike epic, a performative form of a poetic form that creates community, generates stories, and binds us all in the fugitive pleasures of play.
Well, of course there is. But that is not the way the daily should be played! And here, once again, there’s an example of why the rooie rules are more important than the rules of the game: there is no codified rule that states that the daily can only be played once (I know, scores don’t count anymore after the first run in some dailies), but there’s an agreement that the daily is played only once).
As games are technologies for playing with computations, among other things.