RANDOM QUOTE
from
The Last Moments of a Doomed Race
"Hey guys, watch this," said Gorm...
Recently, I was talking to the Editor In Chief and discovered something about him I did not know: when he games, he needs a story. I have known him to obsessively pursue higher statistics in some games, level-grinding in console RPGs like Phantasy Star III and completing equally plotless skill-grinding in games like The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind, so I had assumed that the mindless pursuit of numbers was not a problem. But no, he assured me, roguelike games are simply not his cup of tea because they don’t have stories.
For the edification of those unfamiliar with the term, let me explain the concept behind roguelikes: they are RPGs that usually have bare-bones ASCII graphics, utilize a keyboard-driven interface, and share a number of features with their great-great-granddaddy, Rogue. The most important and universal feature is that of random dungeon generation. These games were first developed many moons ago by *NIX programmers, and the open source world is full of them now; despite their text-based graphics, more roguelikes are being actively coded and played today than ever before.
Roguelikes have no plot. There is usually some sort of justification given for your exploration of the dungeons, but it resembles nothing so much as the first page of the instruction books to old NES games like Zelda, where you got your storyline handed to you. Zelda played exactly the same, and offered just as satisfying (or unsatisfying) an experience, whether you had any clue whatsoever what it is you were putatively attempting to accomplish. I did not know the main character’s name was Link until I had beaten the game twice. In Rogue, as well as NetHack, one of the more popular derivatives, your goal is to acquire the Amulet of Yendor. There is not really much else to go by. There are no cut-scenes, no real plot-points that expose character growth or the evolution of the world… Nothing.
Where am I going with this? I recently saw an article on gaming blog GameSetWatch that linked to a collection of message board postings relating to a randomly-generated, no-narrative game called Dwarf Fortress, described as “an ASCII game which includes both a roguelike adventure mode and a city management mode similar to Dungeon Keeper.“ The game looks interesting enough that I feel compelled to download it and try it out, but what I found most intriguing were the message board posts.
When playing in city-management mode, the turns are divided into years which are in turn divided into seasons. A group of gamers at SomethingAwful.com decided to have a round-robin game of Dwarf Fortress in which each participant would play for one year while posting about their activities and the evolution of the game on the message board, then emailing the save file to the next person on the list at the completion of their allotted game time.
No narrative? While some of the posts are as dry and pathetic as you would expect from some basement-dwelling troglodyte describing what he did in a turn-based game, others are a marvel of in-character prose, and they add a depth of character and plot to the proceedings that are simply amazing. The entire game session is full of lulls, but it also ends up being–over the course of the full run–the epic tale of an outpost far from the center of civilization, attempting in vain to tame the surrounding elements before finally falling prey to disaster and tragedy. It is like Tolkien telling the story of Roanoke Island.
Check out the first post by the player whose prose I most enjoyed; it is very early in the game, so the legacy of loss, natural disaster, starvation, and warfare has not really gotten started yet, but it is still a great read.
A glance at the pseudonym of the author reveals the inspiration for much of his character’s personal voice, but derivative or not, it is an amazing act of creation inspired by a text-based video game and the writings of the players who went before him. I took the time to read the whole collection of posts in chronological order, and while it was somewhat painful to slog through at times, the story really is engrossing. People flit in and out of character, and the prose mixes internet humor with epic pathos to greater or lesser effect, depending on the author.
When I finished the posts, I had to wonder whether or not a desire for storytelling in a game is, in whole or in part, a reflection of the player’s lack of imagination. Clearly, Dwarf Fortress told a story to these players, and I have no doubt that a game of NetHack or Rogue would have resulted in just as engrossing a story-line. The imagination of these players was ready and willing to create background and depth, even when the game presented only a bare framework. Is the Editor (and, not incidentally, myself) simply too lazy to generate his own story?
Obviously, there are fundamental differences between the experience of playing a story and that of generating a story as one plays. But is it the difference between reading a novel and writing a novel, or the difference between reading a novel and reading a poem?
« previous post next post »I suspect I would enjoy Dwarf Fortress the same way I enjoy Civilization, Sim City, Populus, The Sims, etc. It’s a sandbox game–it’s about crafting something.
Roguelikes, however, are just about mastering a mechanic, and even when you get the game down cold, you can never really say that you have had an impact on anything–it’s always the same mechanic, with a bit of random noise added. Without a decent story to counterbalance that, I’m just not interested. (I’ll stick with Tetris.)
I gave up on Morrowind for the same reason, even though by all accounts, it has a decent story arc and lore for the setting. It felt so open-ended that there were no real goals. No goals I cared about, anyway.
Also, the setup of the game was crucial for the storytelling these guys got into. If they were just playing Nethack by themselves, I doubt they would develop such a close attachment for their characters. You can’t, after all–in roguelikes, characters are disposable almost by definition, as is the world in which you’re playing.
All that aside, the way they were able to create a story is just awesome. It feels like they took the tradition of telling stories around a campfire and combined it with technology (games, message boards, e-mail, etc.) to create something new out of something old.
