My MA thesis asked one question. Does experience with roguelikes change how players feel about the genre's harshest rules?
The question
Roguelikes are built on rules that look like punishment. Levels are generated fresh every run, the game is hard, and when you die you lose everything and start again.
Some players love exactly that. Others bounce off after an hour. I wanted to know whether experience with the genre is what separates them, and whether a veteran and a newcomer read the same rules in two different ways.
MA thesis · 2026
Title
Roguelike Player Experience: An Investigation of the Predictive Relationship Between Genre Experience and Psychological Need Satisfaction
Program
MA in Digital Game Design, Bahçeşehir University
Advisor
Asst. Prof. Çakır Aker
Method
Online survey, 58 players
How I tested it
I ran an online survey through gaming communities on Reddit and Discord, and through my own network. It gave me 58 valid answers.
Each player got an experience score built from five things. Did they know the term? How many roguelikes had they played? How many had they played a lot? How experienced did they say they were? How much did they like the genre?
Then I asked about four feelings while playing.
Competence
Feeling capable of meeting the challenge.
Autonomy
Feeling that your choices are your own, and that they matter.
Immersion
Feeling present in the game's world.
Attitude to failure
Seeing a failed run as useful, not as a loss.
What I found
How much of the difference between players is explained by their experience with the genre.
Attitude to failure31.2%β = .56 · R² = .31 · p < .001
Autonomy29.9%β = .55 · R² = .30 · p < .001
Competence25.4%β = .50 · R² = .25 · p < .001
Immersion0.2%β = .05 · R² = .002 · p = .72 · no link found
The more experience a player had with roguelikes, the more capable they felt, the more their choices felt like their own, and the more they saw failure as useful. All three are large effects.
Immersion did not move at all. It seems to depend on the particular game, on its story, art and sound, and not on how many roguelikes you have played.
In most genres you build competence by succeeding. In roguelikes you build much of it by failing.
What it means for design
Frame failure early
New players have not yet learned that a failed run teaches them something. Onboarding can say so. Hades does it with story: every failed run moves the plot forward.
Give newcomers another kind of progress
Upgrades that carry over between runs give new players a sense of progress while real skill is still forming. How much of that a game needs depends on how experienced its audience is.
Tune for experience, not only skill
Adaptive difficulty usually watches how well you play. It could also account for how well you know the genre, because that changes how difficulty feels.
What feels punishing to a newcomer and motivating to a veteran can be the very same mechanic.
Limits
58 players is a small sample.
A survey taken at one moment shows a link, not a cause.
People who answer a survey like this tend to be invested players.
I asked about the genre as a whole, which blurs anything that differs from game to game. Immersion is the clearest case.
Two of the measures were new and need more testing.