NetHack: A History and Analysis

1 Introduction

2 History

3 Gameplay

4 Culture

While other great games needlessly languish in obscurity, NetHack is nearing its twentieth year with a dedicated development team and active player community. Not only do these players enjoy the game, they strive to make the game itself and the experience that surrounds it better. Games, regardless of their quality, must appeal to an audience. This may be as brash as sex and violence, or as subtle as a superior physics engine. NetHack manages to appeal to a relatively wide audience because of its complexity, difficulty, history and, as this section of the study will explore, its openness and flexibility. Part of this openness can be attributed to NetHack's game design philosophies. The most rewarding challenge in NetHack is not to retrieve the Amulet of Yendor, but the process of mastering the extensive system of actions and interactions. NetHack players find something appealing about a clever strategy or some unusual aspect of the game. On the NetHack newsgroup, rec.games.roguelikes.nethack, there are regular posts of Yet Another Funny Message Combination that announce to the community some interesting coincidence in game. Part of the popularity of games stems from their ability to let people live out fantasies and escape the constraints of normal life. While NetHack does operate as a fantasy escape, its greatest appeal is its open-ended gameplay. Passive media like television and films can also be escapes, but only games can allow the player to be an active participant. Most games, however, must force the player to do certain things, limiting the potential freedom that the medium could achieve. NetHack does not force a single story onto the player. It merely provides a space where the user is mostly free to do anything she wants. While there are some mandatory story elements (you must complete a quest, you must defeat the Wizard of Yendor, etc.), most of the story is freeform, changing from game to game. When one player tells another about their latest adventure, it is more about the decisions they made than about those mandatory story points. Some of the greatest stories are come from spectacular deaths. The situation that Wagner James Au described above nicely captures the sense of freedom a player has in NetHack. NetHack is neither the first nor last game to offer the player a dynamic, interactive system. NetHack, almost 20 years old, inherited this aspect from Rogue, a game written 25 years ago. Rogue's developers had tired of the predictability of adventurelike games: After you played through a game a few times, there was nothing new. As an example of modern games, Grand Theft Auto 3 is nearly universally praised for this sort of non-linear gameplay. In GTA3, your character can decide to work for a gang for a while, then proceed to commit random acts of violence, and finish the night with some random exploration of the city. Yet GTA3, while popular, probably will not match the longevity of NetHack. GTA3 is fundamentally limited by its lack of freely available tools that allow players to change the game. While GTA3 is quite flexible, players cannot simply add a new type of car, for example. Furthermore, NetHack attracts a certain kind of player, ones who are naturally curious and often possess some programming ability. It takes a certain predisposition to preservere with NetHack's long learning curve. Because many NetHack players have these traits, many have tried tinkering with the code. Some fix bugs, some try adding entirely new features. If the idea has merit, it may even be integrated into the offical source, like the Wizard Patch. If not widely approved, the idea could spawn an independent game. One of the most popular variants of NetHack, SLASH'EM, started this way. SLASH'EM's designers wanted to add a wider variety of features that were not strictly fantasy, like guns and lightsabers. The open source development model has been part of NetHack's culture before it even existed. NetHack itself owes much to the open source model that Rogue was one of the first to pioneer. Because of that, NetHack has been able to evolve into the wonderfully complicated game it is today. Since players are given the power to play with the innards of the game, there is a good chance someone will add an interesting feature. This philosophy has found broad appeal in more utilitarian software development, most notably in the Linux operating system. The ability to see and change the code has far greater benefits than disadvantages. "Mods", or modifications, can extend the playable life of games, illustrated by more recent games like Half-Life and Battlefield 1942. Even after players have completely mastered the original game and tire of it, a mod can revitalize it. Although Half-Life proper is no longer popular, it survives as a platform for popular mods like Team Fortress and Counter-Strike. Battlefield 1942's own success is based in part on the very popular Desert Combat mod, which converts the World War II-era weapons and vehicles into modern, Gulf War-era armaments. It seems that the lesson pioneered by NetHack is this: By allowing players to experiment with the original game, with specialized tools or raw source code, people will play that game longer. The game might become even better. Games like this could inspire the next generation of great games. And even when these new games are released, there is a very good chance that NetHack will still be around, better than ever.

5 Conclusion

NetHack is like the coelacanth, the prehistoric fish. Both are, in a sense, living fossils. Neither has changed much in many respects: the coelacanth still lacks a true spine and NetHack still lacks real graphics. It is easy to dismiss both as extinct, belonging to eras long gone, but that would be an error. Both the coelacanth and NetHack are very much alive. NetHack can trace its origins directly back to the game Rogue, which was an innovation at the time. Coupling rudimentary text based graphics with a dungeon that changed every game, Rogue offered the promise of nearly unlimited replayability. NetHack has kept true to that philosophy, remaining at heart a game about exploration and experience, rather than sensory immersion, narrative or characterization, elements that modern games rely on. Still, NetHack remains popular among a certain group, which lovingly guides its evolution. NetHack's open-ended nature, both in game and in its development model, have allowed it to remain vibrant over 20 years, with no end in sight. Usually, the "Net" in NetHack generates the most confusion, but I'd like to say that the "Hack" is more significantly misinterpreted. While the "Hack" refers to hack and slash action, I think a more apt interpretation can be found in the original programming sense of the word. According to definition 2 in the Jargon File, a hack is "an incredibly good, and perhaps very time-consuming, piece of work that produces exactly what is needed." 22 The need? For me, a game that does not dally in the unecessary. In the end, it's all about the finest gameplay ever crafted.

6 Notes

1. Glenn Wichman. "A Brief History of Rogue." 1997. http://www.wichman.org/roguehistory.html 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Petri Kuittinen. "Rogue - Exploring the Dungeons of Doom (1980)." http://www.hut.fi/~eye/roguelike/rogue.html 5. Petri Kuittinen. "The Dungeons of Moria (1983)." http://www.hut.fi/~eye/roguelike/moria.html 6. Kuittinen, "Rogue." 7. Wagner James Au. "The Best Game Ever." Salon, January 27, 2000. http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/01/27/nethack/index1.html 8. Michael Stephenson. Personal communication, May 12, 2003. 9. Dylan O'Donnell. "Frequently asked questions on rec.games.roguelike.nethack." http://www.spod-central.org/~psmith/nh/rgrn-FAQ.txt 10. Au. 11. Ibid. 12. Dave "Fargo" Kosak. "The GameSpy Hall of Fame: NetHack." http://www.gamespy.com/legacy/halloffame/nethack_a.shtm 13. Ibid 14. Stephenson. 15. NetHack 3.4.3 in-game information. 16. Ibid 17. Erik Inge Bolsø. "Balrog." http://www.mo.himolde.no/%7Eknan/roguelike/ 18. NetHack 3.4.3 in-game information. 19. Geoffrey and Elizabeth Loftus, "Why Video Games Are Fun," pp. 10-42 in Mind at Play: The Psychology of Video Games (New York: Basic Books, 1983). 20. Tommi Syrjanen. "Re: YANI: Tourist photography." Newsgroup posting, rec.games.roguelikes.nethack, 5/29/2002. http://groups.google.com/groups?q= zen+samurai+group:rec.games.roguelike.nethack&hl=en&lr=& ie=UTF-8&selm=7j7klns1la.fsf%40cronotopology.tcs.hut.fi&rnum=5 21. Au. 22. Raymond, Eric S., editor. "The Jargon File." http:// info.astrian.net/jargon/

Node your homework. This writeup was based on a case study I wrote for a class on the history of video game design. It has been extensively updated and revised. /msg me any comments or corrections.



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