The Run
it all starts here ...
The Run
What is the minimum unit of fun?
My roguelike project is guided by ambivalent formalism. On the one hand, I want to understand the structures of the roguelike. Conversely, the more formalist I get, the more I squeeze out all the fun of thinking about these games. However, roguelike is a poetic form of video game, and to see it that way, it is necessary to use some formal concepts. Today, it will be the run.
Balatro is a dangerous game. This statement will resonate with everybody who has played it. If your brain has a Balatro shape, all you know is that you load the game, and suddenly, you haven’t eaten for a week, and a vulture is snacking on your innards. It happens. Besides being a game that perfectly blends the pleasures of card games with the wackiness of house rules, Balatro’s power resides in the perfect design of its runs. It seldom takes more than 10 minutes to play a run. Ten minutes is negligible. We also often know precisely why we’ve lost, so what would be the problem playing another run not to make the same idiot mistakes? That’s what we thought a month ago, the last time we looked up from the screen.
Balatro is perfect because the duration of the run is perfectly balanced. Secrets are presented to the player as new jokers, and there is a progressive learning curve regarding why and how we can win and lose the game. Each run is a perfect storm of duration, knowledge acquired, and understanding of one’s failures. That feedback loop between gameplay time and cognitive processes makes Balatro uniquely appealing.
Returnal has a different take on the run. By eliminating the possibility of saving mid-run (added afterward, but in this case, I think it is relevant to look at the developers' intentions), each attempt at passing a biome in Returnal is an exercise in anxiety, stress coping, tactical thinking, and luck. Playing a Return run reminds me of playing a solo in a live concert: everything can go wrong while you’re walking this tightrope of following the rules and finding ways around those rules. A run in Returnal can be a matter of a few minutes or an agonizing almost hour. It can be a tactical exploration of the generated level or a rushed race to the end. While it is possible to play many runs in a row, Returnal is designed to be exhausting, demanding maximum attention and dedication from each run.
The concept of ”the run” is central to roguelikes. A run is a coherent attempt at finishing a roguelike. The run is defined by permadeath since it will end when the player character dies. The run is the defining manifestation of permadeath as affecting the design of roguelikes. Each run needs to be satisfying, with its gameplay progression in the instanced run and in all the previous runs. That is, players need to be challenged in the run, but they need to be able to use the knowledge from all previous runs to overcome the game's obstacles.
A run is also a consequence of the procedurally generated content in the game. It is the gameplay instantiation of the generator's seed. Each run is different from the past ones due to the randomization. At the same time, each run is similar to past ones, as the nexus of the player skills connects them all. What players learn is the lens through which each new run is seen.
Some games have the puzzle as the minimum unit of gameplay. Others, the level. Roguelikes can only be understood with the run as its minimum unit. Runs have smaller components, like the different biomes in Returnal or each of the antes in Balatro. But those are less important for the roguelike experience than the run. If a run is unsatisfactory, it does not matter how good the levels or the puzzles are; the game will fail as a roguelike.
From a game design perspective, the run is the most crucial element of the roguelike in terms of player experience. The game's success or failure depends on how the combination of the pressure of permadeath and the variation through PCG creates this coherent unit of experience, which we call the run.
I’d say the run is at the heart of the poetic experience of the roguelike. The run gives unitary meaning to the instantiated world; it sets a goal and a direction for gameplay. It also raises the stakes, as permadeath forces all choices to matter. It also makes the meaning of a particular gameplay experience to be contained in an actual formal unit. Here’s where I have more work: the roguelike is a poetic form of video games. The run is then something like the instantiation of that form in a particular sequence of gameplay events experienced by a player. The run is to the roguelike what stanzas are to the sonnet.
That also means, I think, that the reason why roguelikes are socially popular has to do with the contained unit of the run. A run is easy to record, stream, or write up. It’s fundamentally a narratable unit of a game. When narrating it, we see a glimpse of the roguelike form and its potential in the shape of a particular instance of that game. Like a Borgian machine, the run contains the game only as a reflection.
Without the run as the minimum unit of meaning and fun in the roguelike, we wouldn’t be able to understand the importance of rituals and metagames in the cultural construction of this form. From the run, everything else makes sense. It is the defining phenomenological unit of the roguelike, what we see and experience when playing any of these games.
[NARRATOR: yes, there are many more reflections about the run I want to make. But this is just a sketch, a note to myself and others, an obligation to, at some moment, write this down in a more detailed way. This text is a run in the broader context of my roguelike project]