Ten Thousand Lifetimes with Roguelikes

Summary

Ten Thousand Lifetimes with Roguelikes Angband When I was a kid, a few factors combined to give me what I suspect will be a lifelong neurosis about video games: my basic respect for my parents’ authority and opinions, my mother’s extreme disdain (it seemed to me, at least, at the time) for any and all electronic gaming, and my borderline obsession with same. My brother and I weren’t allowed a game system until, after much parental deliberation, I gather, we received a Super Nintendo for the Christmas of what I think was one of my middle school years. Unfortunately, Mom’s yielding on this issue didn’t mean her suspicion of video games had abated, and I can still remember pretty vividly the discomfort I felt whenever I was playing and she was around, radiating a high-intensity aura of disapproval that made me feel somewhat ashamed to be wasting my time like this. It wasn’t enough to stop me, of course. But it was always there. I don’t mean to make my mom out to be some kind of harridan, much as it might seem so in the context of today. Now, video games are moving inexorably into the mainstream, and all the kids like me—kids who would happily spend six hours straight playing Final Fantasy II whenever we could get away with it—have become perfectly healthy and normal adults and sometimes even had kids of our own, many continuing all the while to play video games. Back then, I think my mom had every right to be suspicious of them, and it’s probably good that I feel a little uneasy, a little guilty even, when some new game captivates me and I spend just a little more time than I probably should playing it. But anyway. My dad was an engineer, and as a result we had computers growing up, certainly before we got that SNES. I don’t remember computer games having quite the maternal stigma that consoles did. I was, as can be gleaned from the preceding paragraphs, kind of a nerdy-ass kid, into Tolkien more because I sensed somehow that he was a Thing than because I actually like...