Ascension - The Beginning

Alice the lawful human Valkyrie entered the Mazes of Menace a determined girl. Impressive, considering the hundreds and hundreds of men and women who went before her, never to be seen again. Did they die deep below the earth, somewhere in the twisting dungeon passages? Did any pass into Gehennom, the underworld? One thing she was sure of: even if any of the adventurers who went before her found Moloch's Sanctum and recovered the Amulet of Yendor, even if the bravest and luckiest had carried the amulet to the surface and up to the Elemental Planes, none had ever crossed the Astral Plane to place the amulet on the altar of her God. She was certain of this because Tyr had called for her to retrieve it, as Tyr had called so many before her. She was to do something no one had been able to do.



She had been trained for courage, strength, and honor. Alice entered the dungeon with almost nothing beyond her longsword and a fantastically enchanted small shield, the armor of the Valkyries. She found food to keep herself alive, armor woven with magic, and even transformed her simple sword into Excalibur, one of the swords of legend, by dipping it in a fountain. But days later, at the bottom of the Gnomish mines where she hoped to find a luckstone, Alice was flailing at an unseen enemy, weak from curses and from hunger, confused and scared. She prayed to her God Tyr for aid. If Alice's head hadn't been swimming from evil magic she might have smiled at her God's sense of humor as Tyr satisfied her hunger, leaving her near dead and confused. Moments later she died at the bottom of those dark mines, hallucinating so badly that even she didn't know what killed her.

The tragedy of Alice's short adventure feels significant when looked at closely, but in fact it was a tiny tragedy, one repeated perhaps a thousand times. Alice was my most recent character in Nethack, a game I have been playing without a single win for ten years. Where the time-value of most games is measured in hours, this speaks for it as a very special game. A great deal has been written about Nethack in the 20-something years since it began (though it has evolved a great deal since then), and it is often praised for it's design and challenge. Wikipedia provides a good starting point to get caught up, but for an introduction to the roguelike genre of which Nethack is a part, John Harris' @Play column is a must-read.

The very very short version is that Nethack is a turn-based dungeon crawl through procedurally generated levels in which many of the useful tools like potions, scrolls, and wands are randomized with each new game (thus a purple potion will turn you invisible in one game, but in another it may poison and kill you instantly). It is soul-crushingly hard for the beginner, but incredibly fair once you know its secrets. It allows the player an incredible range of options, assigning different actions to most of the lower and uppercase letters of the keyboard. Because of the complex interactions of its rules, and because the dungeon and the identity of the magical items a player needs to survive change each time, the game continues to challenge and surprise me after a decade of off-and-on play, even though I have never won. And while I have played hundreds of other games in my life, Nethack has remained the ultimate delight (and source of frustration) in gaming since I was 14.

I've been playing a lot of Nethack and one of its variants, Sporkhack, recently, and I've also been thinking a lot about why it is I can find so much enjoyment in the more casual-friendly games I work on at Adult Swim and a game that took me weeks of play to even remember the keys. So I've decided to challenge myself to finally ascend, to win, and in the process to try and better understand what about Nethack works so well for me, and what I can take from the game and apply to the titles I work on everyday. I want to think hard about casual vs. hardcore and where Nethack truly falls on the spectrum, and also about player investment, player improvement, cost of failure, and more.

To encourage the careful play that will be an absolute requirement if I'm going to actually win the game, I'm going to continue narrative recollections of the characters I attempt, and also reflections on the game and its design. I'm not really sure where I'll end up as I try to carry design lessons from Nethack into my daily work, but one thing is certainly already clear: I've got plenty of time to think about it before I have a chance of winning. Nethack 1, Tucker 0.