Comment by MattCruikshank

The goal is to enjoy the process of discovery. These days people don’t seem to have the patience for that, or the tolerance for trial and error to achieve it.

I’m not just talking about gamers, either. I have noticed a huge change with the high school students I tutor in mathematics. They have no patience for my attempts to teach them how to solve the problems, they just want the answer. Give me the answer! Now! Now! Now! Luckily they have LLMs to answer all their questions now, so only the few students who really want to learn continue to ask me questions.

I digress.

As for the issue of dying repeatedly, that’s a mindset thing. When I die in a game of NetHack, I take a bit of time to reflect on why I died (roughly proportional in time to how far into the game I was) then I start a new game and check out what I have. Most roles in NetHack have randomized statistics and a partly randomized starting inventory, with the Wizard being a notable extreme. This along with the first few floors of loot tend to be enough to draw me right in to the next game.

Some people get seriously dejected when they die in the game. I think they’ve been trained by more modern games to see death as a flaw in the game, as though they were watching a movie and it suddenly skipped back to an earlier point (or even the very beginning).

With NetHack death is a normal thing, and very frequent for new players. This is not at all atypical for the arcade games which were popular at the time of its original release in 1987. Another way to look at it is like chess: on the road to becoming a grandmaster, you can expect to lose many thousands of games. How you respond to and learn from those losses are what ultimately determine whether you reach the top of the mountain.

"Every time I sat down to play [the game] it was like walking into a dark shed full of rakes, treading on one, and getting blatted in the face... and then I'd go back into the shed, thinking maybe it was just the one rake, when blat in the face again. So I thought, I'll just keep tanking the rakes and maybe I'll become psychotically in love with being rake-faced. And that's kind of what happened."

Yahtzee was talking about Dark Souls, but it applies. (Vigorously NSFW, https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=STrYyhEwkbY )

That said, I think Nethack is best experienced with liberal and unapologetic spoiler use.

Die. Die better. So many clever ways to die.