Through the Lens: Video Games - Game Design Theory - page 128

In 1980 a PC game called Rogue was created, which spawned a niche
genre that is still alive today. In fact, it may be more popular now than it
ever was before. That genre is called roguelikes.
People argue about what makes a roguelike a roguelike, but generally,
the genre follows a few conventions: random map generation, turn-based
play, a single controllable unit (a character, as opposed to a party), score-
based play, and permadeath (permanent death). Many roguelikes have
ASCII symbols instead of artwork, are set inside dungeons, are highly in-
fluenced by D&D , and have very high levels of inherent complexity.
Roguelikes are a great example of what single-player games could
be if they were randomized, but they are also a great example of the ex-
cesses of the digital medium, often having thousands of arbitrary pieces
of information that players must know in order to excel. I highly recom-
mend that any game designer become at least marginally familiar with
some of the best ones, such as Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer
(NDS), Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup (Windows/OSX/Linux), or perhaps
even my own 100 Rogues (iOS/OSX).

Video “Games�
To round out the chapter, here are some categories of video games that
aren't really games at all.

MMOs

Examples: World of Warcraft , Ultima Online , Guild Wars , Eve Online

MMOs (massively multiplayer online video games) are not games.
MMOs usually include games (such as a raid in World of Warcraft ), but
they also contain purely social activities, narrative bits, and many other
things. To call an MMO a game is as silly as calling an amusement park
a game.
With that said, there is no reason why the games inside MMOs can-
not be great, but by placing a great game inside of an MMO you're dra-
matically limiting your audience. Also, you're usually going to run into
the problem of the metagame taking over, which tends to happen in any
system that has a heavy amount of metagame (such as RPG elements).

Skinner Boxes

Examples: Farmville , Diablo , World of Warcraft , Pokémon

Some have said that use of the term Skinner box is inappropriate or some-
how misleading with regard to something like Farmville . I disagree—I
think that Farmville works precisely the way that Skinner's operant-con-