CPL, CAL, MLG, WGS, TWL, ED, i38.. stop me if you’re getting bored already. Here, I will attempt to provide you all a little insight into what ‘Pro’ gaming actually is, the people– the money (or lack thereof), the fame and the failures.

2009 is the year, and we’ve got teams all over the bloody shop. MeetYourMakers, Fnatic, Complexity 20ID, Salvo, Dignitas, 4K, Reason and the list trails off into the ether with some successful.. and some less successful pro gaming teams. What does this mean? Does this mean professional gaming is now viable as a career? Can you earn money for headshots in todays world? Will I ever stop name dropping? How many commas can I write before you close this tab? Hit the jump to find out. (continue reading…)

In 1980, Ken Arnold, Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman conspired to write one of the first graphical games (of a sort) to be widely ported. For Ken Arnold’s part, he developed the curses library, which allowed the programmer to address a screen (in textmode) as a grid of character cells, rather than a stream of text. This shift brought “text graphics” to its full potential, and with it, Toy and Wichman produced Rogue. Later, Toy’s company, A.I. Design, would even produce commercial versions.

Following Rogue were so many games in the same style that the roguelike genre was established.

The original Rogue

Not only were the games similar in graphical style and in gameplay, but the higher concepts in these games are almost constant. At first glance, a traditional roguelike looks like a lo-fi game—either old, or produced by someone who is shy of graphics programming or lacking artistic ability. While any combination of these things may be true, they have little to do with the lack of graphical content—the focus is decidedly one of gameplay and some would find graphical content to get in the way: if the tiles are too small, there’s not enough space to make a graphical improvement, on the other hand, if the tiles are too large the visible map has been reduced by too much.

Nethack, augmented with a graphical front-end.

The gameplay focus has not stopped graphical adaptations by any means. Nethack, for example, has had front-ends made that essentially scrape the screen for information and render graphics and even play sounds based on events. Castle of the Winds was implemented with bitmap graphics directly, with no reliance on text. Despite its realtime gameplay, Diablo was originally compared to the roguelike genre, and might be seen as the first graphically strong roguelike. More recently, we’ve seen Mystery Dungeon games such as Shiren the Wanderer.

Roguelikes are commonly dungeon-crawlers in which the player is most often concerned with surviving random encounters and scavenging money and equipment from the dungeon floor. However, these features don’t define the genre–for example, DoomRL, Ragnorok and AlphaMan all have post-apocalyptic settings instead of dungeons, while Angband has shifted a lot of the character advancement to the surface, outside of the dungeon, where spells are learned and equipment is bought. But these changes could be seen as simple changes in scenery, and despite the different feel. More importantly, the essence of a roguelike game is more deeply rooted than any of these things, although it is intimately related. The true virtue of a roguelike game is the open-ended gameplay. Every part of a roguelike is full of potential. There is always the opportunity to find something new, some item or spell (or, in Alphaman’s case, device) that will drastically enhance the power of the character. Likewise, there’s the ever present opportunity to die perhaps due to a misstep or simply an unexpected and unfair onslaught of opposing forces.

Alphaman lets you use spare parts to create new devices.

While most games attempt a balance in the actual—presenting a balanced assortment of good things and bad, according to progress along the difficulty curve—roguelikes strive for a balance of potential. Everything is taken in combination, and every situation is created as it is encountered. The real fun comes from the fact that the player a real part of every situation. Most inventory items behave differently depending on the use—potions can usually be drunk, thrown, mixed or have things dipped in them. Rings can be worn or, in Nethack, eaten. You can aim a wand at yourself, or wield a dead carcass—if you didn’t eat it already… and when you’re really in trouble, you can get down on your knees and pray—it just might work.

Getting back to Diablo, it is very little like a roguelike, except on the very surface. If it had done the minimum required to present the roguelike experience, the game would be unfair and sales would probably have suffered. Even Shiren the Wanderer and Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja have been watered down to introduce a kind of fairness. These two titles, however, have not made a terrible compromise, and you still lose all of your on-hand equipment should you be defeated in these games. On the other hand, both have storage areas that preserve items and your character still survives. These games have been adapted expertly to fit the modern commercial gaming world without sacrificing the roguelike essence.

Shiren is a full-blooded modern roguelike.

Despite Shiren’s excellent adaptation, it remains a niche game. The niche is larger than it might be if so much care hadn’t been taken in its design, but as a whole gamers don’t seem to value open-ended gameplay as much as we value fairness in games. We still like the dungeon-crawl, and no end of games have been made in that form but with more emphasis on improving a character directly with an essentially linear progression of access to abilities and equipment.

It’s not likely that we will see this kind of freedom traded for fairness as a major trend in the near future, and we probably can’t even expect a large drive to reconcile the two either. Fortunately it may not be necessary, if the niche is big enough, we’ll continue to see the odd new roguelike show itself. After all, part of the draw of Rogue is that the game is intense, and no two sessions play quite the same.  The game always has a new surprise in store so the replay potential is near limitless.

For the interested, Wikipedia’s chronology of roguelike games and the roguelike review are excellent resources.