PC Gamer Interview RE: Roguelikes (Patreon)

A writer for PC Gamer was recently looking to interview people knowledgeable about the roguelike genre and community at large, so got into contact with a few individuals including myself, who I guess might be a relatively reasonable option :P

I have no idea when or if the article will actually be published, or what will be included, but in general with topical interviews like this the idea is that participants answer a bunch of questions, even in great detail, and there ends up being maybe one or two sentences about what you said, or maybe even a direct quote, and that's it. You may not even be quoted at all and nothing you say makes it into the article, but at least the interview content could be used as background for further research on the author's part. In any case, as you know I'm all for helping promote traditional roguelikes, so yeah I was obliged to do my part for the community and give some input :D

Seeing as I did write up rather lengthy responses, in case some of you are interested in this topic, I'll reproduce the entirety of the interview here (it was originally conducted via email).

Here's their original pitch they were approaching with:

I'm working on a piece about the genre specificity of "roguelikes." It's always been interesting to me why there's such an emphasis, by hardcore roguelike players, to insist that the only authentic roguelikes need to have no progression system, or even in ASCII art only, and I'd love to ask you some questions about why there's such a lack of compromise there. Why are many in this community steadfast on keeping roguelikes pure?

So yay, more definitions... I usually don't get into definition discussions much anymore (call me jaded!), but again, here it's for a greater cause that could theoretically have a modicum of impact xD

On with the questions...

1 - Let's open with an extremely loaded question. What is a roguelike?

Mmm, loaded... Prepare for lengthy answer full of details and caveats :P

Actually wait... just last year I put a lot of time into writing an article on that very topic covering my opinion, one that is shared by a majority of the core traditional roguelike audience. I think you'll find that piece pretty informative in general, and I'd just end up repeating all those same observations and analysis here.

As an addendum here it's worth pointing out that among said audience we would generally just use the term "roguelikes" to refer to games belonging to the good old genre that's been around for decades, but because mainstream use of the term has expanded well beyond what we consider roguelikes, nowadays it's often become necessary to take a step backwards and use the full term "traditional roguelikes"* for clarification.

On that note, if I had to isolate a single most important factor delineating the difference between roguelikes and roguelites (or between traditional roguelikes and "roguelikes," if one must), it's that the former are turn-based whereas most of the popular newer alternatives are real-time. When examining a game to see whether it's really a roguelike, in most cases that's the biggest difference people will point out first before moving on to the other 3~4 common aspects. Testing a player's reflexes and timing as opposed to purely analytical skills naturally has a strong impact on the entire play experience, and while some players certainly enjoy both types of games, they clearly belong to separate categories with some players only enjoying one or the other because they're so different from one another.

*I had a hand in getting that official tag added to Steam last year :)

2 - So, I've always been fascinated why that above question engenders so much angst, especially compared to other genres in gaming. We're comfortable with calling both Doom and Counter-Strike first-person shooters, despite the fact that those two games are very different. Same with, like, Civilization and Into The Breach. Those are turn-based strategy games! (Though I guess you could say Civ is 4X if you wanted to get more granular.) So why doesn't that carry over into roguelikes? Why do people get so passionate about defining exactly what can be called a roguelike?

As far as categorization goes, to many people familiar with the genre's roots and classic games, "roguelike" is a lot more specific than simply "turn-based strategy" or "first-person shooter,"

Interestingly, remember we did used to call other first-person shooters "Doom clones" (as a sort of a representative game that helped popularize the genre, not unlike Rogue) until they really branched out so much in terms of mechanics and content that a more generalized label felt more appropriate. But even then, these other games under the FPS umbrella still share a lot in common with Doom in terms of gameplay experience--you run around collecting pickups, choose the best weapon for the situation at hand, and take advantage of fast reflexes and a high freedom of movement to kill things.

As per my article referenced earlier, and similar writings by other traditional roguelike devs and players alike, roguelikes draw on a more specific list of criteria that many more modern games also dubbed "roguelikes" don't meet, or even outright violate them, so there's a fundamental disconnect between these new roguelites and where the genre originated.

This whole situation might be seen differently if the traditional roguelike style died off and was replaced by these new games, but it wasn't! Traditional roguelike development is more vibrant than it's ever been, with ever-growing numbers of new RLs being released each year, and many older ones still in active development after years or even decades.

Exactly where these divergent branches are allowed to overlap and still be called "roguelikes" is technically up for debate even in the core community, especially when one gets down to the nitty-gritty details of games which are clearly much more adjacent to the roguelike genre in that they're at least turn-based but have other unique features that set them apart from what we're used to seeing with traditional roguelikes.

And people can get really passionate about those nitty-gritty details, with different people placing different levels of importance on each element, based on the particular roguelikes they have experience with. I think the initial fire for that passionate defense of the roguelike definition comes from the fact that this very different set of games has started to only recently appropriate the term ("recently" in terms of roguelike history, since the genre is far far older than roguelites), and that passion then spills over into defending even more specific definitions, partially due to the large and sometimes vague set of potential criteria players have identified as part of what makes a roguelike.

Over on r/Roguelikes there used to be heated arguments on this topic popping up every week (they could get pretty nasty... that's where most of our warnings and bans came from :/), and these arguments were not only very repetitive but would even completely take over other threads. It eventually got so bad that with a mandate from the community we essentially banned discussion of roguelike definitions earlier this year. These arguments rarely lead to changes in viewpoint, anyway, but worth noting is that if people can get this passionate about traditional roguelikes and relatively similar strategy games that share many of the same characteristics, it's not at all surprising to also see passionate defense of the term against appropriation by these real-time games and other distant relatives.

Personally I don't think this is a war that can be won at this point, a sentiment that has grown in the community over the past few years, so many of us just use "traditional roguelike" to differentiate if we have to.

3 - As a total aside: Are there still people out there who believe a roguelike needs to be presented in ASCII art only? Or has that kind of gone extinct?

There are indeed such people! And in fact some with even stricter definitions than that (and take them very seriously), like for example that a roguelike must be playable via SSH. So definitely not extinct, although the vast majority of the core roguelike community is not strict on such technical points, instead focusing on the spirit of the genre and gameplay elements.

4 - Why is that taxonomy important? What do you think we lose if roguelikes aren't strictly defined?

As to why the distinction is important, the most common reason cited by the community at large is that it "makes finding actual roguelikes harder." Searching game distribution platforms (or even the web in general) for "roguelikes" will now pull up an overwhelming number of games which aren't at all related to what you're looking for if what you want is the traditional stuff. Steam has helped somewhat alleviate this issue with its newer "Traditional Roguelike" tag, which makes filtering for them somewhat easier, though even there it might just be a matter of time before that, too, is littered with unrelated games. (It's already become somewhat polluted compared to when it was first introduced, simply because it was a lesser-used tag so some devs would prefer using it over the more crowded general "Roguelike" tag.)

On the other hand you also have the importance of identity. I mean we had a perfectly fine term for this genre for a couple decades* and there is a certain loss of identity when a mainstream majority starts using that term to mean something rather different and we can no longer use it to have the same meaning it once had, at least not without considering the audience.

I don't think the definition actually needs to be so "strict," to use the word in your question, just not so loose as to include this massive swath of mostly unrelated games :P. But that's part of what got us here in the first place, that there is no one clear definition of what a roguelike is, so it's naturally evolving over time based on its use by different parties, and the speed of that evolution has accelerated considerably in the last five years!

*The origin of the term "roguelike" is interesting and encountered controversy of its own--check out the summary of Slashie's detective work here.

5 - Why do you think people enjoy discussing that taxonomy so much? It's not like you consistently see a bunch of strategy game fans break down what can, and cannot, be considered a strategy game. What is it about roguelikes that provides so much fuel for that conversation?

Well again, "roguelike" is much more specific than "strategy game." I think for better comparisons here you'll need to look at (for example) metroidvanias or shmups for communities that have similar arguments.

To the point, though, a main reason behind that fuel would be that there seems to be a relatively nontrivial collection of elements vital to the roguelike experience, but not everyone agrees on every point, or the importance of each of those points, so there's a lot of nuance to argue over. I also think the propensity to discuss this particular topic in so much detail also likely stems from the type of players who enjoy traditional roguelikes in the first place, a pretty analytical, detail-oriented bunch, a huge portion of which who are themselves programmers or at least work in IT fields and are big on breaking things down and categorizing them as part of a problem-solving process.

Though I wouldn't say the community at large enjoys these conversations so much anymore, especially over the past year or so. Serious discussions used to be more common, but now it's mostly become a joke since the majority realize no one is convincing anyone else so what's the point? xD Of course, any time someone new joins a roguelike community they're almost bound to bring it up again sometime.

As I mentioned before, definition discussions are banned on r/Roguelikes now because it's not really enjoyable for the participants who throw insults at each other, or the others sitting on the sidelines of these repetitive arguments, and on the Roguelikes Discord server (the largest of its kind) the topic comes up quite frequently, but many of the responses are jokes. One of the jokes is of course "number of days since we had what is a roguelike discussion..."

6 - There's a good chance you got into this in the first answer, but I'm curious if you're more of a roguelike conservative or a roguelike liberal. Like, are you the type to call, like, Darkest Dungeon a roguelike?

Okay we'll start with Darkest Dungeon is not a roguelike ;)

In the community we generally use "roguelike purist" to describe someone who follows a stricter definition.

I do indeed personally subscribe to a pretty clear traditional definition as outlined in my article, though at the same time as a moderator of numerous roguelike communities I realize that the spectrum of roguelike definitions is huge, no one is really convincing anyone else, and different people are entitled their own interpretations.

For this reason, in stark contrast to r/Roguelikes where we remove a lot of roguelite posts (often half the posts every day are roguelite posts that get removed), over on r/RoguelikeDev (where I'm the only active mod and have built it up into quite a resource and community over the years), I basically just let people use whatever definition they want in order to participate, even if it means we do end up with a number of real-time games on the sub and it gets on the nerves of a number of other participants.

(Honestly it bugs me, too, but policing this definition is not something you really want to get into if possible... plus at the same time when it comes to development we have the excuse that gamedev is often about innovation, and I certainly wouldn't want to be guilty of stifling that!)

I did, however, actually set up r/TraditionalRoguelikes last year as a fallback for the people who couldn't stand the fact that roguelite posts were sometimes allowed on r/Roguelikes.

7 - Anything else you'd like to add!

Hm, I could clearly go on forever (I do a lot of writing :P), but that's enough for today, though I'd be happy to expand on anything I've mentioned above if you have more questions, or if you'd like to ask about anything else.

Either way, I'd be interested in checking out the final article--let me know :)