How Love Island, sudoku, and ’90s malls fit into the Roguelike Celebration

polygon.com:

Is Love Island a roguelike? There’s plenty to compare between the British dating reality show and the video game genre, according to researcher Florence Smith Nicholls, who will discuss the topic during a lightning talk at this year’s Roguelike Celebration.

Roguelike Celebration will be held Oct. 20 to 22 in a custom-built online space — a multi-user dungeon (MUD) — themed like an ’80s or ’90s shopping mall with high fantasy elements. Alongside the talks and events that are part of the celebration, the MUD (built by Emilia Lazer-Walker) will include puzzles for attendees solve, making it a game in and of itself.

“We wanted to preserve that feeling online, and so poured a lot of energy and love into making a digital space that felt unique and had that opportunity to surprise you with all the little touches using the shared language of loving roguelikes,” Roguelike Celebration organizer Alexei Pepers told Polygon.

Lazer-Walker told Polygon that keeping the online space text-only was a “necessary compromise” to be able to build out a custom MMO that’s used just two days a year with a totally volunteer team. “But we also knew our audience — as people with a love for ASCII graphics and retrocomputing — would be into that,” Lazer-Walker said.

The Roguelike Celebration takes a “simultaneously hyper-specific and extremely broad” approach to the definition of roguelike, Lazer-Walker said, allowing for both breadth and nuance in the sometimes hard to pin down genre. The conference lineup includes everything from “procedurally generating mid-2000s reality shows,” to discussion of the writing of Jorge Luis Borges, and a talk “arguing that hand-authoring sudoku puzzles is better than procedurally generating them,” Lazer-Walker said.