Roguelikes and Addiction: Dying for a Good Time

The roguelike genre is unique in the way it is keeping the spirit of coin-operated games alive by forcing the player to start from the beginning every time they die. Someone unfamiliar with the genre might consider such a concept cruel. They are correct. However, recently there seems to be a breakout hit for the roguelike genre every few months that forces players to die over and over, and they can’t seem to get enough. What is it about roguelikes that make players start from scratch, over and over for millions of collective hours? Perhaps it is because they are designed down to every line of code to simulate the feeling of gambling. Like continuing to pull the arm of a slot machine no matter how many times you lose, the feel, look, and sound of these games are fine-tuned to keep you seated for run after run. In the way that they target the part of the human mind that gets attached to inconsistent reward, roguelikes are created from the same DNA as slot machines, but each wield their power for very different purposes. While casinos aim to squeeze out as much as they can from gamblers, roguelikes are playfully activating the same part of the brain for a less malicious purpose, simply the joy of playing.

To be clear, a roguelike is not any game that starts from zero after every death. Pac-Man, for example, is not a roguelike, despite not retaining any progress from previous attempts. In 2008 we saw the first ever International Roguelike Conference in Berlin, where an official definition was collaboratively produced by developers in attendance. This has come to be known as the “Berlin Interpretation” (Hatfield), and while it is not an immutable definition, it has been the standard until today. The Berlin Interpretation claims that any roguelike-to-be must:

• Be turn-based.

• Have randomly-generated environments.

• Include permanent failure and death.

• Have a single, unified command set (no separate menus).

•  Not follow a linear path.

• Force you to discover the nature of any items you find.

  
  

The Berlin Interpretation has been the standard since 2008, but the genre has evolved since then, that evolution being known as a subgenre called the roguelite, denoting games that follow some but not all of the Berlin guidelines. Most often, this refers to games that do not erase all progress on death, but other variations include real-time combat instead of turn-based, and certain items having basic descriptions. The lack of a true save wipe upon every death allows for adaptation of the original formula, including incremental upgrades or unlocks to make an individual “run” (one attempted playthrough of the game, resulting in either death or victory) marginally easier, as well as shortcuts, as seen in Enter the Gungeon, so you can skip a lower level of which you have already proven mastery over. True roguelikes that follow the Berlin Interpretation are extremely few and far between, and roguelites have more than surpassed them in popularity. As a result, for the purposes of this essay, roguelites will be included, and often prioritized, in discussion of the genre. Many of the biggest innovations have come from roguelites, and to discredit their contributions would be a disservice to the discussion.

The genre is named after the game Rogue, released in 1980. It is in many ways extremely simple, especially visually, but in other ways quite complicated, even compared to its spiritual ancestors. It was created by Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman while they were university students because they wanted to develop a game that they themselves enjoyed (Wichman). Their idea was to have the computer generate the dungeon instead of the developers, allowing for a unique layout every time— different enemies, items, room layouts all made for unique experiences and forced the player to adapt to different scenarios. According to Wichman, “I think Rogue's biggest contribution, and one that still stands out to this day, is that the computer itself generated the adventure in Rogue. Every time you played, you got a new adventure. That's really what made it so popular for all those years in the early eighties.” Put that way, you can also see why it inspired so many other developers to create games inspired by Rogue.

Rogue inspired several games to come out in the years following its release, but by the 2000s the formula had mostly fallen to the wayside in terms of popularity. That would change in 2013, with the release of The Binding of Isaac, a roguelike inspired by the Biblical story of the same name. 

Visually, The Binding of Isaac is a very unappealing game. It features blood, gore, feces, and everything in between, and enemies are horrendously monstrous and deformed. While the game is not quite as challenging as Rogue, it is extremely oppressive. It feels as if the game is praying for your downfall at every step. For that reason, it may be surprising that some fans of Isaac are willing to put literally thousands of hours into the game, just to have their progress erased each time they succeed or die. They start from zero again and again and never seem to get bored of the repetition, or even sick of the putrid atmosphere. Perhaps it is not this Sisyphean nightmare that Isaac excels at, but the fact that it gives you the opportunity to push back on these harsh conditions and control them. The buildcrafting opportunities mean a good player can use the meager resources of the world and create a version of Isaac that takes the demonic nightmares and disintegrates them. The proper combinations of mutations and transfigurations will leave Isaac looking more disturbing than the previously formidable demons he battles against, but he will dispatch them with ease. Once the run ends, you are right back to square one, wondering if you’ll ever have a run that perfect again. No reloads or respawns, one shot to make your drawn lot work, and then you will never see that perfect combo ever again. For that reason, a single perfect build can make two dozen failed attempts feel completely worth your time. 

Far more reminiscent of real gambling is Balatro, a poker-inspired roguelike. The goal, like any other roguelike, is to survive for as long as possible or risk starting over again. You begin with a regular 64-card deck, with each played hand (straight, flush, etc) being worth a certain number of points. Garner enough points within a certain number of played hands and you beat the Blind and move on to the next, this time with a higher score requirement. As the game goes on, you can manipulate the cards in your deck and collect special Joker cards that grant you additional effects.

Why do people play Balatro? Perhaps it is that feeling of mastery. Outside of the cost to purchase the game, Balatro involves no real money, but it doesn’t seem to matter. Chasing the feeling that you have manipulated or even broken the game to the extent that you are scoring tens of millions of points higher than the limit after struggling for dozens of hands is addictive. And yet, Balatro does not end. No matter how perfect your deck is, the Blind score will continue scaling faster and faster until your Quadrillions of points are no longer enough to keep up. You are guaranteed to fail. But perhaps next time you can make it one round further. And so, Balatro begins again.

Games can have either intrinsic or extrinsic modes of progression. Fighting games, for example, are well-known for having a steep barrier of entry because of the lack of progression. In fact, they are similar to roguelikes in this sense. Street Fighter matches start with two players on even footing. They fight a best of three match, a winner is declared, and the match comes to an end. As a result, if you have an incredible match and outplay your opponent, your character does not get any stronger. That winning match won’t have any effect on your next match, where you will once again have to tip the scales in your favor. The appeal of fighting games is overcoming your opponent with only your innate skill at the game. Players spend hours practicing in a training mode to perfect their skills. This is dramatically different from most games. In Final Fantasy titles, your party levels up as you defeat your enemies. You will become more skillful in some aspects, mostly through game knowledge and strategy, but if a boss is too powerful, you can keep fighting weaker enemies until your damage stat is high enough that you can win. That is not the case in Street Fighter, no matter how long you spend practicing, you won’t outperform a stronger player until you get better. 

In roguelikes, intrinsic motivation takes on a different meaning. It represents your ability to adapt. In an individual run, you will receive extrinsic rewards in the form of stronger abilities and combos, which will disappear upon death. However, you will also be challenged in your decision making skills countless times in each run. In fighting games, intrinsic progression means improving at reading your opponent and successfully executing complicated combos, but in roguelikes it more frequently means using your past experiences to make educated decisions and calculated, long-term gambits, the results of which may not come to fruition for ten or twenty minutes.

It is impossible to ignore the connection between gambling and gaming. A 2018 study found that 78% of gamers are gamblers, and 70% of gamblers are gamers. Problem gamblers and problem game players showed a weaker but still significant overlap at 10.5 and 24.1% (Sanders). Those with addictive personalities seem likely to develop problematic habits with both hobbies, as both are remarkable sources of dopamine and other chemical messengers. Although the evidence is not conclusive, there are also some studies that indicate that online gambling may be even more addictive than in-person gambling (Gainsbury). Online gambling is rising in prevalence, and the format makes it more likely that underage gambling might be taking place. As a result, online gambling is a likely pathway to addiction.

The landmark Skinner box experiment hypothesized that if animals are rewarded with food upon pressing a lever, they would become increasingly more likely to press it again, quickly learning that certain actions resulted in what we now call positive reinforcement. Professor Saul McLeod of the University of Manchester summarizes this experiment well. He explains that if the food was supplied at a consistent rate of five presses, animals would press the switch fairly often to get the reward. This is known as fixed-ratio reinforcement. However, separate groups were tested with what is called a variable-ratio schedule, where food would be supplied at a random rate of anywhere from one to several dozen presses. These animals would press the button hundreds of times, obsessing over getting the reward, even after they had eaten far more than they would normally want to (McLeod). The inconsistent reward schedule also had animals “extinguish” this behavior far later than fixed-ratio reinforcement, and as a result never seemed to get tired of pressing the lever. This is the exact reward structure of slots and other forms of gambling, constant inputs and inconsistent and random rewards.

Games often follow these same types of reward schedules. For example, battle passes in games like Fortnite allow players to buy access to a fixed-ratio reward track— in a way, paying for low doses of dopamine. After completing a certain number of quests or gaining enough experience, you are rewarded with a new skin or item. The aforementioned Gacha games use the variable-ratio reward structure, where you keep buying pulls until you find the rare drop that you were hoping for, resulting in occasional yet large bursts of dopamine, which is the far more addictive structure. Roguelikes fall under this variable-ratio category too. Waiting for the appropriate elements of the game, whether that be resources, buildcraft components, room layouts, or any of the other dozen randomized components of a given run. However, unlike slot machines and card games, these titles give the player perhaps hundreds or thousands more opportunities to adjust their odds and adapt to the given situation. Blackjack or Solitaire strategies certainly exist, but leave quite a bit up to chance. A Balatro run will have an experienced player making dozens of decisions and calculations every minute. They are not at the mercy of the odds, they are competing against and overcoming them.

Vampire Survivors takes this one step further, the roguelike most reminiscent of gambling, and it is entirely by design. The game’s developer, Luca Galante, was formerly a programmer in the casino industry. Vampire Survivors also perfects the “flow state” of slot machine play by making the game exceptionally simple and constantly visually entertaining. Upon defeating certain larger monsters, you can pop open a treasure chest, at which point a slot machine will literally play out on your screen, spinning to give you a random reward. When the slot stops on the result, colorful gems and lights flood the screen. Some rare chests will fire off five slots at once, reminiscent of the newer slots where you can gamble on many games at once. If you can survive long enough, your combo of weapons and other abilities will completely fill the screen to the point that even experienced players will be unable to parse any useful information. It can be genuinely disorienting to look at due to the amount of particles and effects covering the screen.

Vampire Survivors is in many ways the easiest and simplest of the games discussed in this paper, although some knowledge is necessary to survive long enough. However, it has nailed the formula of simple inputs from the player resulting in chemically perfected feedback from the game.

There are clear parallels between roguelikes and gambling, and in some cases the genre has directly taken casino science to optimize systems. The main difference is that roguelikes are not monetarily predatory. That begs the question, why has the genre gained so much popularity? At least for gambling, the obvious answer might be potential monetary gain, but the Skinner box experiment’s findings appear to prove otherwise. Perhaps then gambling and roguelikes have the same appeal; feedback to the player’s actions. Simple input/output. This appears to be a fundamentally human experience, but our brains are wired to become obsessed with inconsistent output, as per the Skinner box findings.

This is not to say the two categories are equivalent. The key difference between them is randomness. Casinos try to make the player feel like they are in control of a random game through unclear systems and false choices. Roguelikes initially seem random, but the more you play, the more clear it is that you are in control of the odds. The player uses their adaptation skills to contend with the game’s randomization. If you can adapt well enough, the random elements can be overcome nearly every time. In all of the roguelikes discussed today, top players have a great chance of winning every time. On the other hand, the best casino gamblers will still lose a lot of the time.

The parallels between the two are not insignificant. Both are created to entertain the audience. But the same could be said about film, television, music, and other genres of games. It would be irresponsible to consider them equal in risk for the consumer. Roguelikes, and games in general, are new enough that it is difficult to gauge their long-term effects on our psychology compared to other higher-risk hobbies such as gambling. At this time, experiencing the dopamine rush of a successful roguelike run cannot be proven to have any more negative effects than other forms of gaming. There does appear to be a high probability that human brains are wired in such a way that roguelikes are positioned to be particularly amicable to such a reward structure, which is perhaps a large reason that the genre is taking off so quickly. These games are relatively simple to develop from a technical standpoint compared to big-budget AAA games, but they are immensely challenging to design and fine-tune to the point that they become enjoyable and not too punishing or too easy. The successful titles of the genre have made Skinner’s box into a medium of entertainment by making death and rebirth feel exciting and rewarding, and that in itself is an achievement.

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