dpeg wrote:A sad but undeniable result of the poll is that about three quarters of Crawl's player base are illiterate. For them, the cognitive burden of assigning meaning to abstract glyphs is too high, and they have to be characterised as semiologically handicapped. Of course, this is not at all their own fault: Given the rampant decline of public education in the West, most notably the US, this trend did not at all come as a suprise. Fortunately, the Devteam was aware of this in advance and, selflessly and laboriously as ever, provided a pictorial mode. We realise that tiles players will only ever comprehend about 25-35% of what's going on in any given game, but if the pictures of Dungeon Crawl can put just one young person temporarily out of their intellectual misery, even if only for mere moments, this world has become a slightly better place for it.
A dim ray of hope for the reading capabilities of today's youth is that they seem to be able to tick boxes.
The reason I play tiles is not because I'm illiterate, it's because ASCII is retarded. Remembering which glyphs represent which entities is not a difficult task, it's just mundane and boring to look at. There's nothing exciting about fighting an army of letters in a dungeon made out of punctuation. It's like playing a game of chess without the chess pieces.
"OK, these bottlecaps represent the rooks, these nickels represent the pawns, these paperclips represent the bishops, these pen caps represent the knights, this thumbtack represents the queen, and this jelly bean represents the king."
Sure, you're still technically playing chess, but why the hell would anyone prefer that over normal chess pieces? There's no reason to play it like that unless you're lacking actual chess pieces. However, Crawl
does have tiles, so why the hell would I ever want to play it in ASCII? Why would I want to look at a "g" representing a goblin when I could look at an actual goblin? ASCII is in no way superior to Tiles, and is directly inferior in many aspects. I cannot understand why people who play using ASCII act superior, even though they are clearly in the minority. I know the first roguelikes had ASCII graphics, but that was due to the technical limitations of the time. This is the year of 2013, not 1980. Why are roguelikes still being made in ASCII? Why is this even a thing?
I started playing Crawl in ASCII. Someone ported the ASCII version to the Wii and put it on the Homebrew channel many years ago, which is how I originally discovered Crawl. It was an old, outdated version of the game, but I tried it out and I enjoyed it so I looked it up online (that was back when Crawl was v0.5, the port I found was v0.4 IIRC). When I saw I had the option to choose between tiles and ASCII, I chose tiles.
Do you honestly mean to tell me that this -
- is somehow superior to this?
Even the tiles minimap is more sophisticated than ASCII Crawl!Also, since you called us illiterate, allow me (a lowly tiles player) to correct your spelling:
characterised - should be characterized
suprise - should be surprise
realise - should be realize
Friday, 19th April 2013, 05:51 
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