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> The term “Roguelike” is not a well-defined term. Ctrl+F "Berlin" no results. The author didn't even discover the Berlin interpretation in their research, whi

> The term “Roguelike” is not a well-defined term. Ctrl+F "Berlin" no results. The author didn't even discover the Berlin interpretation in their research, which suggests there was none. Roguelike is a well-defined term, though there are multiple competing definitions. This article presents none of them. > Roguelikes are about complexity. Oh ok, I guess all RTS and 4X games are roguelikes now. Let's also include flight simulators and management tycoon games because they're complex too, right? > Roguelikes are about using an unpredictable toolkit with complex interactions in order to overcome unpredictable challenges. I.e. roguelikes are video games. Somebody call the press. > Super Smash Bros Brawl multiplayer is like a Roguelike! Yeah we've pretty much just abandoned all definitions at this point. All games are now roguelikes, according to this article.

DoItToMe81 5y ago
Yeah, I'm with you on this one. "Roguelike" was, for more than twenty years, essentially defined as a game that is turn based and grid based in the vein of Rogue, centered around traversing procgen levels and usually with permadeath and dungeon crawling as key focuses. It wasn't until game journalism sites and their fans started going "um... roglik is when hard..." that use shifted, and the current use describes basically nothing. I think the Berlin interpretation puts too much weight on periphery aspects of the genre, but this shit is just ridiculous. If you use the standards these people do to define Roguelike with anything more popular, it becomes plainly obvious how absurd it is. You could call the Warhammer 40K tabletop a Doomlike because it has chainsaws, demons, the ability to be customized, scifi guns, the firing of said scifi guns and space marines, despite not even being a first person shooter or a video game.
- prox 5y ago
  I started playing Project Zomboid, and for me as I learned it, Zomboid is rogue-like. Not sure if that is true, but I always equate it with permadeath. Not really sure how I picked that up.
  - Der_Einzige 5y ago
    Project Zomboid is based off of an ACTUAL rougelike by the name of Cataclysm, Dark Days Ahead. I highly recommend that you check out CDDA.
    - prox 5y ago
      Will do, thank you!
  - usrusr 5y ago
    Because in the wake of story driven games taking up almost the entire single-player market, "try this part again" has become so much of a default assumption that its exclusion would inevitably become a focus point. And the other big element, a strong element of randomness, that's really just secondary to permadeath, because permadeath without random would be a tragically repetitive slog (unless you make memorization the entire point) and random without save/retry would be kind of wasteful, as players would rather proceed even further than restart. When you don't aim for replayability, the xkcd random number implementation ("4") would be as good as any.
    - morelisp 5y ago
      "Permadeath without random" is a fundamental feature of STG design, and I think we're about ten years out from some overbudgeted influencer deciding to call those "roguelikes" and it sticking.
slightwinder 5y ago
> Roguelike is a well-defined term, though there are multiple competing definitions. This article presents none of them. Isn't multiple competing definitions the opposite of well-defined? How overlapping are those definitions?
- User23 5y ago
  A glance at any dictionary will show a plethora of words that have multiple incompatible definitions. Some, like cleave, are even their own antonym. Nevertheless each sense of the word is well defined. The issue isn’t a lack of well-definedness, but rather one of confusion.
wheelerof4te 5y ago
Simplest definition possible: Try Nethack and see if you "get" it. If you do, congratulations! You now know know what a roguelike is.
- falcolas 5y ago
  No need to go back that far. Dungeons of Dreadmor will suffice. It's basically Rogue with a shiny coat of paint.
  - Der_Einzige 5y ago
    Nethack is one of the finest games ever made, and more modern rougelike simply do not possess the soul that nethack does. All fans of the genre should try nethack at least a few times.
    - jamesgeck0 5y ago
      Nethack is fine, but it's a blatantly unfair game with many obtuse mechanics that is close to impossible to win without either knowledge from external sources or run-ending trial and error. I'd argue that Cogmind, or Brogue CE, or Caves of Qud possess more of the Rogue soul than Nethack does.
      - Der_Einzige 5y ago
        Losing is fun, and rougelikes are the quintescential version of this. Sounds like you need to git gud. Cogmind is pretty fun and enjoyable, but Brogue is missing large swaths of content compared to other rougelikes (though I do love it given that it pioneered Dijkstra maps!), Caves of Qud has a static map and is thus significantly less emergent than other rougelikes. I couldn't even keep myself interested enough to get far, despite enjoying the SSeth video about it. You should have recommended Cataclysm, DDA - a game which also has "obtuse and unfair" mechanics and "is close to impossible to win(or do well in) without either knowledge from external sources or run-ending trial and error."
aparticulate 5y ago
Topic is pretty dead horse at this stage, it's from 2011 which makes it slightly more reasonable. The raw tonnage of gaming discourse since then is astonishing. Dark Souls - probably one of the most discussed-to-death games ever - hadn't even come out yet, for instance. Not even a single Skyrim "I took an arrow to the knee" meme
Ygg2 5y ago
There is something to be said about all video game genres being wrongly named. I mean when you look at some romance written in first person, that takes place in Victorian era, you don't call it a First Person Victorian novel. You call it a romance novel. Art is usually named after feelings it evokes and less on the actual techniques used. Maybe puzzle/idle games are only games that actually have descriptive names. You play a puzzle game because you want to solve a difficult problem. You play a shooter because you want some carefree violence. In lieu of that, Roguelikes definition misses the mark completely. You can have a Roguelikes experience without any of the stuff defined in Rougelike Berlin definition. Noita is real-time; Elona/Caves of Qud allows save and load; Elona has little procedural generation outside wilderness and random events;
zorbathut 5y ago
Haha, man, it's weird when a post you made ten years ago, that isn't even linking to its main site (see http://www.mandible.net/2011/04/25/roguelikes-the-misnamed-genre/ http://www.mandible.net/2011/04/25/roguelikes-the-misnamed-g...), hits the front page of something somewhere. For what it's worth, I was absolutely aware of the Berlin interpretation and was giving it about as much attention as I think it deserves. In my opinion the Berlin interpretation is not a sane definition of a roguelike, it's a point-by-point description of what the common roguelike of the day was. It's a ridiculous gatekeepy way to design a genre; just imagine the definitions we would have got if "first-person shooter" had been defined in the wake of Doom ("a first-person shooter involves using a set of six to twelve weapons, bound to the number keys, to kill demons") or in the wake of Battlefield ("a first-person shooter involves large team battles with matchmaking and gradual unlocks of sidegrades, which can be bypassed by paying real money"). But the point of that post wasn't to attack the Berlin interpretation, rightfully or not, it was to trace the outlines of a concept that I think a lot of people aren't isolating. The existence of the Berlin interpretation - which was a lot more popular back then - was, and to some extent still is, blinding people to the interesting parts of the genre. The interesting part of an FPS is not the exact number of weapons available; the interesting part of a real-time strategy game is not the fact that units move smoothly, and not on a grid; the interesting part of a roguelike is not whether it's made with ASCII art. It's an implementation detail. My attempt in that post, made kind of hamfistedly as anyone would say about something they wrote over a decade ago, was to get at the interesting parts of a roguelike and try to draw a loose outline around them. If I were to write this today, I'd spend a lot of time talking about the XCOM 2 expansion pack, which I think made some fascinating steps towards being this kind of game. Yes, specifically the expansion pack. In the base game, you can more-or-less plot out your build order before you start the game; you can know what will show up at every step, you can know when you'll get certain items, you can roughly predict when you'll get certain abilities (modulo soldiers dying, of course), there's no unpredictability. In the expansion pack, though, they throw a bunch of random events at you that can seriously influence your build order. Maybe you get double-speed research, for a single research item, that you must either cash in immediately or abandon; this can mean you're encouraged to pick somewhat-random equipment. You can also be given the opportunity to buy weird unique items that are permanent upgrades to, again, somewhat-random equipment, so maybe in one game shotguns are really good and in another game it's sniper rifles that get the random bonus. Again, this can change your strategy significantly. And finally the big enemy monsters have random traits - they're weak to things, strong to other things, and all of this is re-rolled every game. This isn't an enormous amount of variation. But it's significant, and this is the thing that I'm pointing at; situations where the player is left thinking "wait, hold on, how do I navigate this? how can I put these bonuses and penalties together into something really awesome for me?"
verdagon 5y ago
The author obviously did a lot of research, explained roguelikes' roots, and has an interesting take on something that a lot of the great roguelikes have in common. It was a good read. Also, if you read to the end of the article, they aren't saying to use their definition of roguelike, since the name is already taken.
- alexfrydl 5y ago
  Exactly. I'm not sure what the person you replied to is talking about. This article is clearly well researched because it covers many classic games on the timeline of roguelike history, from Dwarf Fortress to Civilization 5 to Super Smash Bros. …wait.
setr 5y ago
I've never cared much for the berlin interpretation (it focuses too much on the specific mechanics rather than the more abstract design principles than one would naturally associate with a genre), but this article's definition definitely bends far too strongly into its abstractions... to the point that almost every game is defined under his new term, and games that no one would put together... are put together. IMO a roguelike's defining feature is the "fairness" of its simulation (most of the world's rules are equally applied to all its denizens.. though some may be more equal than others with custom spells/abilities/etc), in combination with the inevitable ADnD dungeon-crawling and RPG elements. The grid-based, turn-based, modality, procedural generation, etc of the berlin are too pointed to be relevant IMO. Though procedural generation is a little interesting because I feel like it inevitably falls out of any game targeting a "fair" simulation -- how much good is a hand-rolled map design if you can't also hand-design the mechanics and interactions with the entities in the map? So it naturally lends itself to ceding control over the world generation itself.. and of course if your rules are fair and sane enough that the player can use them with their uncontrolled and arbitrary strategies and combinations.. then they're probably good enough to randomly smash together by the machine. So the monsters gain their flexibility, and everything just works -- so why not. The only issue is leaving the AI flexible enough to deal with the fact. And permadeath kind of just falls out of the procedural generation mechanics as well Thus its not that roguelikes are an endless interaction with complexity.. its that the game-universe itself operates more closely to a proper simulation of the universe (not a detailed sim, mind you, but not a sim that simply revolves around the player(s) ala megaman), and complexity of the interactions are a natural outcome. And then differentiating between say a colony-sim (DF), a 4X and a roguelike is largely on the basis of the scale at which the player interacts with the simulation (colony, country, individual, respectively). [Note: you also have actual simulators, but they're clearly a different kind of interaction -- In DF the simulation is in the backseat, whereas in EURO TRUCK SIMULATOR 2 the simulation is the main point] Of course you could probably differentiate even more within that.. but there are so few games that actually make a real effort at any kind of "fair" simulation that the game name alone is sufficient. Which is also why Noita feels like it belongs with the other roguelikes, despite violating most of the berlin interpreation -- it implements a "fair" simulation. There's probably a better term for "fair".
- 5y ago

DoItToMe81 5y ago

Yeah, I'm with you on this one. "Roguelike" was, for more than twenty years, essentially defined as a game that is turn based and grid based in the vein of Rogue, centered around traversing procgen levels and usually with permadeath and dungeon crawling as key focuses. It wasn't until game journalism sites and their fans started going "um... roglik is when hard..." that use shifted, and the current use describes basically nothing. I think the Berlin interpretation puts too much weight on periphery aspects of the genre, but this shit is just ridiculous. If you use the standards these people do to define Roguelike with anything more popular, it becomes plainly obvious how absurd it is. You could call the Warhammer 40K tabletop a Doomlike because it has chainsaws, demons, the ability to be customized, scifi guns, the firing of said scifi guns and space marines, despite not even being a first person shooter or a video game.

prox 5y ago
I started playing Project Zomboid, and for me as I learned it, Zomboid is rogue-like. Not sure if that is true, but I always equate it with permadeath. Not really sure how I picked that up.
- Der_Einzige 5y ago
  Project Zomboid is based off of an ACTUAL rougelike by the name of Cataclysm, Dark Days Ahead. I highly recommend that you check out CDDA.
  - prox 5y ago
    Will do, thank you!
- usrusr 5y ago
  Because in the wake of story driven games taking up almost the entire single-player market, "try this part again" has become so much of a default assumption that its exclusion would inevitably become a focus point. And the other big element, a strong element of randomness, that's really just secondary to permadeath, because permadeath without random would be a tragically repetitive slog (unless you make memorization the entire point) and random without save/retry would be kind of wasteful, as players would rather proceed even further than restart. When you don't aim for replayability, the xkcd random number implementation ("4") would be as good as any.
  - morelisp 5y ago
    "Permadeath without random" is a fundamental feature of STG design, and I think we're about ten years out from some overbudgeted influencer deciding to call those "roguelikes" and it sticking.

slightwinder 5y ago

> Roguelike is a well-defined term, though there are multiple competing definitions. This article presents none of them. Isn't multiple competing definitions the opposite of well-defined? How overlapping are those definitions?

User23 5y ago
A glance at any dictionary will show a plethora of words that have multiple incompatible definitions. Some, like cleave, are even their own antonym. Nevertheless each sense of the word is well defined. The issue isn’t a lack of well-definedness, but rather one of confusion.

wheelerof4te 5y ago

Simplest definition possible: Try Nethack and see if you "get" it. If you do, congratulations! You now know know what a roguelike is.

falcolas 5y ago
No need to go back that far. Dungeons of Dreadmor will suffice. It's basically Rogue with a shiny coat of paint.
- Der_Einzige 5y ago
  Nethack is one of the finest games ever made, and more modern rougelike simply do not possess the soul that nethack does. All fans of the genre should try nethack at least a few times.
  - jamesgeck0 5y ago
    Nethack is fine, but it's a blatantly unfair game with many obtuse mechanics that is close to impossible to win without either knowledge from external sources or run-ending trial and error. I'd argue that Cogmind, or Brogue CE, or Caves of Qud possess more of the Rogue soul than Nethack does.
    - Der_Einzige 5y ago
      Losing is fun, and rougelikes are the quintescential version of this. Sounds like you need to git gud. Cogmind is pretty fun and enjoyable, but Brogue is missing large swaths of content compared to other rougelikes (though I do love it given that it pioneered Dijkstra maps!), Caves of Qud has a static map and is thus significantly less emergent than other rougelikes. I couldn't even keep myself interested enough to get far, despite enjoying the SSeth video about it. You should have recommended Cataclysm, DDA - a game which also has "obtuse and unfair" mechanics and "is close to impossible to win(or do well in) without either knowledge from external sources or run-ending trial and error."

aparticulate 5y ago

Topic is pretty dead horse at this stage, it's from 2011 which makes it slightly more reasonable. The raw tonnage of gaming discourse since then is astonishing. Dark Souls - probably one of the most discussed-to-death games ever - hadn't even come out yet, for instance. Not even a single Skyrim "I took an arrow to the knee" meme

Ygg2 5y ago

There is something to be said about all video game genres being wrongly named. I mean when you look at some romance written in first person, that takes place in Victorian era, you don't call it a First Person Victorian novel. You call it a romance novel. Art is usually named after feelings it evokes and less on the actual techniques used. Maybe puzzle/idle games are only games that actually have descriptive names. You play a puzzle game because you want to solve a difficult problem. You play a shooter because you want some carefree violence. In lieu of that, Roguelikes definition misses the mark completely. You can have a Roguelikes experience without any of the stuff defined in Rougelike Berlin definition. Noita is real-time; Elona/Caves of Qud allows save and load; Elona has little procedural generation outside wilderness and random events;

zorbathut 5y ago

Haha, man, it's weird when a post you made ten years ago, that isn't even linking to its main site (see http://www.mandible.net/2011/04/25/roguelikes-the-misnamed-genre/ http://www.mandible.net/2011/04/25/roguelikes-the-misnamed-g...), hits the front page of something somewhere. For what it's worth, I was absolutely aware of the Berlin interpretation and was giving it about as much attention as I think it deserves. In my opinion the Berlin interpretation is not a sane definition of a roguelike, it's a point-by-point description of what the common roguelike of the day was. It's a ridiculous gatekeepy way to design a genre; just imagine the definitions we would have got if "first-person shooter" had been defined in the wake of Doom ("a first-person shooter involves using a set of six to twelve weapons, bound to the number keys, to kill demons") or in the wake of Battlefield ("a first-person shooter involves large team battles with matchmaking and gradual unlocks of sidegrades, which can be bypassed by paying real money"). But the point of that post wasn't to attack the Berlin interpretation, rightfully or not, it was to trace the outlines of a concept that I think a lot of people aren't isolating. The existence of the Berlin interpretation - which was a lot more popular back then - was, and to some extent still is, blinding people to the interesting parts of the genre. The interesting part of an FPS is not the exact number of weapons available; the interesting part of a real-time strategy game is not the fact that units move smoothly, and not on a grid; the interesting part of a roguelike is not whether it's made with ASCII art. It's an implementation detail. My attempt in that post, made kind of hamfistedly as anyone would say about something they wrote over a decade ago, was to get at the interesting parts of a roguelike and try to draw a loose outline around them. If I were to write this today, I'd spend a lot of time talking about the XCOM 2 expansion pack, which I think made some fascinating steps towards being this kind of game. Yes, specifically the expansion pack. In the base game, you can more-or-less plot out your build order before you start the game; you can know what will show up at every step, you can know when you'll get certain items, you can roughly predict when you'll get certain abilities (modulo soldiers dying, of course), there's no unpredictability. In the expansion pack, though, they throw a bunch of random events at you that can seriously influence your build order. Maybe you get double-speed research, for a single research item, that you must either cash in immediately or abandon; this can mean you're encouraged to pick somewhat-random equipment. You can also be given the opportunity to buy weird unique items that are permanent upgrades to, again, somewhat-random equipment, so maybe in one game shotguns are really good and in another game it's sniper rifles that get the random bonus. Again, this can change your strategy significantly. And finally the big enemy monsters have random traits - they're weak to things, strong to other things, and all of this is re-rolled every game. This isn't an enormous amount of variation. But it's significant, and this is the thing that I'm pointing at; situations where the player is left thinking "wait, hold on, how do I navigate this? how can I put these bonuses and penalties together into something really awesome for me?"

verdagon 5y ago

The author obviously did a lot of research, explained roguelikes' roots, and has an interesting take on something that a lot of the great roguelikes have in common. It was a good read. Also, if you read to the end of the article, they aren't saying to use their definition of roguelike, since the name is already taken.

alexfrydl 5y ago
Exactly. I'm not sure what the person you replied to is talking about. This article is clearly well researched because it covers many classic games on the timeline of roguelike history, from Dwarf Fortress to Civilization 5 to Super Smash Bros. …wait.

setr 5y ago

I've never cared much for the berlin interpretation (it focuses too much on the specific mechanics rather than the more abstract design principles than one would naturally associate with a genre), but this article's definition definitely bends far too strongly into its abstractions... to the point that almost every game is defined under his new term, and games that no one would put together... are put together. IMO a roguelike's defining feature is the "fairness" of its simulation (most of the world's rules are equally applied to all its denizens.. though some may be more equal than others with custom spells/abilities/etc), in combination with the inevitable ADnD dungeon-crawling and RPG elements. The grid-based, turn-based, modality, procedural generation, etc of the berlin are too pointed to be relevant IMO. Though procedural generation is a little interesting because I feel like it inevitably falls out of any game targeting a "fair" simulation -- how much good is a hand-rolled map design if you can't also hand-design the mechanics and interactions with the entities in the map? So it naturally lends itself to ceding control over the world generation itself.. and of course if your rules are fair and sane enough that the player can use them with their uncontrolled and arbitrary strategies and combinations.. then they're probably good enough to randomly smash together by the machine. So the monsters gain their flexibility, and everything just works -- so why not. The only issue is leaving the AI flexible enough to deal with the fact. And permadeath kind of just falls out of the procedural generation mechanics as well Thus its not that roguelikes are an endless interaction with complexity.. its that the game-universe itself operates more closely to a proper simulation of the universe (not a detailed sim, mind you, but not a sim that simply revolves around the player(s) ala megaman), and complexity of the interactions are a natural outcome. And then differentiating between say a colony-sim (DF), a 4X and a roguelike is largely on the basis of the scale at which the player interacts with the simulation (colony, country, individual, respectively). [Note: you also have actual simulators, but they're clearly a different kind of interaction -- In DF the simulation is in the backseat, whereas in EURO TRUCK SIMULATOR 2 the simulation is the main point] Of course you could probably differentiate even more within that.. but there are so few games that actually make a real effort at any kind of "fair" simulation that the game name alone is sufficient. Which is also why Noita feels like it belongs with the other roguelikes, despite violating most of the berlin interpreation -- it implements a "fair" simulation. There's probably a better term for "fair".

5y ago