Why do I even like roguelikes?

Kind of a companion piece to last year’s Roguelike Celebration talk by Alexei Pepers about the different ways that practitioners approach procgen. Whereas Alexei’s talk was about the people who make roguelikes, Lisa Brown’s talk is about the motivations of the people who play roguelikes.

Inspired by the Quantic Foundary Gamer Motivation Model, Lisa describes roguelikes in terms of action, social, mastery, achievement, immersion, and creativity. She leverages her experience as a game designer to point out different parts of specific games and how they tie into the model.

Tracing the different gameplay elements from particular implementations to player motivations is valuable for understanding a how decisions that are made when constructing the mechanics of a game eventually resolve themselves in the aesthetic experience the players have. It’s also a useful reminder that different players have different preferences.

Which is yet another reason why there’s no one perfect generator. Every generative system has a purpose embedded in it. Or maybe embodied by it is a better phrasing–the shape of the system is a form of procedural rhetoric that tells us something about the thing it is modeling. And because different generative systems have different end goals, they naturally tend to have shapes that reflect those goals. When you are building a generator, you want to make something that has the right kind of generative space, where the range of artifacts that it produces is interesting but doesn’t contain anything broken or unusable.