pphs/postpartum.html

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   4     <title>Rogue (1980) (2013)</title>
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  10     <h1>Rogue (1980) (2013)</h1>
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  12       <blockquote style="font-style: italic;">
  13         what idiot called it roguelike instead of roguehate
  14       </blockquote> - <a href="https://twitter.com/pillowfort/status/322083264175144960">@pillowfort (Mat Jones)</a>
  15     </div>
  16     <p>
  17       (What follows is some mostly unorganized thoughts about
  18       designing and playing the game, and then some unorganized
  19       explanation of the code changes. The title of this modified
  20       game, by the way, is <em>Rogue (1980)</em>, to distinguish it
  21       from <em>Rogue</em>.)
  22     </p>
  23     <p>
  24       This game was an experiment. Not in the usual sense of
  25       "experimental" game design as something mechanically unusual,
  26       but rather as a system designed to prod at a particular problem
  27       - abundance of violence / lack of romance - when played. It's
  28       not trying to be a "correct" implementation of dating in a
  29       roguelike setting. Rather I'm considering how "deep" our combat
  30       mechanics actually are (they're not, and most modern games are
  31       actually less so than <em>Rogue</em>), and what we demand of
  32       them vs. what we demand of dating mechanics.
  33     </p>
  34     <p>
  35       I was trying to reverse-triangulate a game design for a
  36       universe in
  37       which e.g. <a href="http://auntiepixelante.com/triad/">Triad</a> is
  38       unexceptional. If comfortable cuddling rather than explosion was
  39       the default theming of our puzzle games, what might that games
  40       industry have produced during its formative years?
  41     </p>
  42     <p>
  43       I chose <em>Rogue</em> to start with because its core design can
  44       be traced up to many modern titles, often barely changed or even
  45       simplified. That's kind of bullshit, isn't it?  Thirty years and
  46       we're still making games with the same kind of rules about the
  47       same kind of violence, then claiming we don't try emotion
  48       because it's "difficult" to mechanize. I also chose it because
  49       it's a game I enjoy and know well.
  50     </p>
  51     <p>
  52       I don't want to unpack too much about my own game here
  53       because, who cares? I'm no expert at games criticism. But I do
  54       want to mention a few things.
  55       </p>
  56     <p>
  57       Adding flirting to the game made the combat mechanics so much
  58       grosser. In roguelikes you kill a <em>lot</em> of stuff, usually
  59       unprompted and as an invader. But no one would
  60       call <em>Rogue</em> a violent game. Well, when you put in a
  61       flirt command, that ends. Just by having a non-violent choice
  62       the resort to combat mechanics, otherwise unmodified, becomes
  63       more disturbing. I'm convinced if we had made even token efforts
  64       towards including this stuff early on, there's no way we'd be
  65       looking at such gross shit like <em>Far Cry 3</em> today. The
  66       dissonance would be too great.
  67     </p>
  68     <p>
  69       Similarly the source code is still loaded with references to
  70       "kill", "enemy", "attack", etc., even for non-violent
  71       actions. Problematic units run through the architecture,
  72       content, and output of the program creating a structural,
  73       intersecting push back against my attempts to add non-violent
  74       options. The age of the code means it's fragile and creaky, and
  75       the changes required to fix this would be destabilizing beyond
  76       what I could deal with given the time I had to make it.
  77     </p>
  78     <p>
  79       Although you can attract multiple monsters, at the end of the
  80       game you can only leave with one. This is my least favorite
  81       decision - I'd rather you be able to leave with all nearby
  82       monsters when you quit. But again, the base game encodes a very
  83       specific (and inaccurate) notion of violence - one specific
  84       entity is the cause of killing you. Mapping that system into
  85       "non-violence" then forces monogamy.
  86     </p>
  87     <h2>Mechanical Stuff</h2>
  88     <p>
  89       <em>Rogue (1980)</em> adds two character attributes and three
  90       verbs to <em>Rogue</em>. The first attribute
  91       is <em>orientation</em>. It's a set of six on/off flags. Every
  92       monster has a randomly-generated orientation. The player also
  93       has an orientation attribute, which would maybe better be called
  94       presentation - the degree to which the monster's orientation
  95       mixes with the player's determines the probability of a
  96       successful <kbd>f</kbd>lirt. There's no notion of gender or sex
  97       beyond this representation; that may mean there's no notion of
  98       gender or sex at all depending on how you interpret it.
  99     </p>
 100     <p>
 101       Successful flirting raises the other new
 102       attribute, <em>interest</em>. When interest gets high enough,
 103       the monster stops attacking the player and starts
 104       accepting <kbd>g</kbd>iven gifts.
 105     </p>
 106     <p>
 107       Orientation also determines how a monster reacts to gifts, as
 108       the item ID is hashed to produce an "item presentation". Gifts
 109       raise interest much faster than flirting.
 110     </p>
 111     <p>
 112       Once interest is high enough, you can <kbd>E</kbd>mbrace the
 113       monster to end the game. You get a score bonus proportional to
 114       the experience points the monster would have given for a kill.
 115       An optimum score is now reliant on getting the amulet and then
 116       dating a <tt>D</tt> or <tt>P</tt> on the way back up. Dating
 117       them is not actually harder than dating any given <kbd>B</kbd>
 118       or <kbd>K</kbd>.
 119     </p>
 120     <p>
 121       At one point during development embracing enemies was an
 122       alternate method to get rid of them rather than another endgame
 123       state. If you succeeded they disappeared and dropped a new kind
 124       of food item, a date. It was too goofy, and too much
 125       "romance-as-conquest". At another point when I was frustrated
 126       with debugging the pre-ANSI C, I was just going to write a much
 127       longer false context and release <em>Rogue</em> unmodified, but
 128       I'm not a good enough writer and that was too lazy even for me.
 129     </p>
 130     <p>
 131       The source code alternates between calling <kbd>@</kbd> and the
 132       player "he" and "she" with a preference for the masculine.
 133       There's only one instance of a neutral "him/her". Interestingly
 134       it's in the context of <kbd>W</kbd>earing, which is the action
 135       most closely associated with real-world gender roles, even
 136       though <em>Rogue</em> has no gendered clothing. (Wichmann also
 137       says armor was a late addition to the game, so maybe it's just
 138       because it's from a different developer than the other
 139       comments.)  This is years before e.g. the D&amp;D manuals would
 140       do the same. In roguelike communities today, I don't think I've
 141       ever seen anyone call the original <kbd>@</kbd> a woman.
 142     </p>
 143     <p>
 144       Do you have a problem with any of this stuff? Cool! I'm just a
 145       mostly-conventional cis man who spent my formative years
 146       playing <em>Rogue</em>, the real one. Which is to say, I'm sure
 147       I'm blinded to a lot of things going on here. Roguelike culture
 148       has always been big on remixing and reinterpreting. I would love
 149       to see reconstructions of <em>Hack (1985)</em> and <em>Angband
 150       (1990)</em> and so on, even just descriptions of what they might
 151       be like. Or any feedback / reactions really.
 152     </p>
 153     <h2>More Reading</h2>
 154     <ul>
 155       <li><a href="http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4013/the_history_of_rogue_have__you_.php">The
 156       History of Rogue: Have @ You, You Deadly Zs</a> on Gamasutra;
 157       Ken Arnold and Glenn Wichmann weigh in in the comments.</li>
 158       <li><a href="http://www.wichman.org/roguehistory.html">Glenn
 159       Wichmann's <em>A Brief History of "Rogue"</em></a>, this one
 160       accurate to our universe.</li>
 161       <li><a href="http://www.blackgreengames.com/games.html">Black
 162       &amp; Green Games</a> publishes some neat things that might as
 163       well be <em>Counts and Courtship</em>. (Other people have as
 164       well, but those are the ones I'm most familiar with.)</li>
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