Roguelikes and Grinding

[a327ex]

I've been thinking a lot about the Big Five model and how it relates to games, more specifically the relationship between the indie game development community and the types of games it likes to make more.

One thing to note about indie developers which I already wrote about here is that it seems to me they're more tilted towards openness to experience than conscientiousness. This is because indie game development is a fairly creative field and so it will attract people with that personality profile more.

This means the types of games indie developers want to make will appeal, in general, more to what they enjoy playing, as well as to games that lend themselves to the creation processes that indie developers enjoy, which generally are processes that are not very structured. See how McMullen describes one such process here:

This creates several personality blindspots where an audience that exists in the general population will not be served that well because that audience and the games they enjoy aren't represented in the indie game development community. And this blindspot brings me to roguelikes!

Roguelikes and Grinding

In my view the two main aspects that makes roguelikes interesting (and here I mean procedural generation, permadeath, lots of items/systems coming together to create varied situations) is that they appeal to the need for "new" and that they're challenging. The need for "new" is something that is higher in people that are high in openness to experience, while the appeal for a good challenge is higher in people that are high in conscientiousness.

However, one aspect of gaming that is looked upon negatively by most indie developers is the aspect of grinding. Grinding is something that also appeals to people who are conscientious, but it loads on different facets than challenge (each trait is divided into multiple subtraits, see here).

Indie developers in general are mostly fine with the challenge aspect but are not fine with the grind aspect. Maybe the aspect that commands challenge is higher among creatives in general, I don't know. But the fact is that most indie developers despise grinding. And this creates a blindspot where most roguelikes made will not have that many grindy aspects to them. The most popular grindy roguelike I think is Rogue Legacy:

There are other roguelikes that are also grindy like this one, but the general solution has to been, rather than have permanent character upgrades like this, to have unlockables/achievements that increase your pool of available items in a single run. The problem with this solution is that unlockables/achievements cater to the completionist personality, which I personally don't think correlates that well with conscientiousness. So in the end that solution is not a solution at all because it simply ignores a group of people.

One of the counter arguments against grinding, other than the normal "it's a waste of time" or "it's unethical", is that grinding is opposed to challenge. If a game is grindy, the fact that you can just spend more time to beat the game's challenges rather than simply getting better at the game through your own skill means the challenge is somehow diminished. And this is a fair argument, especially when it comes to roguelikes.

Possible solutions

So the situation is such that there exists a population of people who likes roguelikes but is not being served by the ones that exists today properly because of not enough grind, but if you add grind to a roguelike you risk ruining the challenge aspect of it. The question then becomes, how do you increase grind without diminishing challenge? Is it possible? And I don't know the answer to that yet.

There are examples of games that are both grindy and challenging, something like Dark Souls, for instance. This is a game that can be beaten with no grind by an experienced player, but for players who aren't as experienced they can grind out stats and different equipments to get through some challenge. Maybe this model is useful, where the game has grind but it's used as a backup mechanic in case the player can't progress at some point.

Another possibility is to just ignore the challenge aspect in turn and focus more on the grind. A game that does this well I think is Path of Exile and ARPGs in general. These are very grindy games that are somewhat challenging but really not that much. If you have the levels and you spent the time you will get through the content no matter what. This doesn't seem to affect these games negatively that much, they're simply catering more to the grind aspect rather than the challenge one.

On a sidenote, PoE is a very grindy game so it appeals to conscientious people, but it's also a very customizable game with lots of room for creativity in your build, which appeals highly to open people. This is also represented well by how people play the game: some people enjoy going an entire league and beating all content with a single build, others enjoy getting their build to yellow maps or so and then trying another build ad infinitum. PoE also caters a lot to the completionist personality (which I previously mentioned as liking unlockables/achievements) with their challenges system.

One way in which ARPGs in general have found to increase their challenge, PoE not being an exception, is to have a hardcore mode. This is a permadeath mode, where when you die you lose your entire character. Maybe this is another path forward, where in a roguelike, instead of the default option being permadeath, when you die you simply get thrown out of the dungeon, it generates another dungeon, but you keep some or most of what you acquired in the previous run and you balance the game around that fact. And then for those people who have mastered the game or simply want more challenge, they can enable hardcore mode (like you can do in PoE) where if you die in the game you die in real life.

There are certainly more ways in which we can approach this problem and try to solve it, but I don't honestly know which solution would be better. The point is that there likely are a huge number of people not being served properly by current roguelikes because of a personality blindspot amongst indie developers, and a different approach to the formula would likely be helpful to get games to reach those people more.