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Comment by abustamam | Hacker News Reader

I play a lot of experimental games where not knowing what the plot is is the point of the game. Doki Doki Literature Club is one such game. The experience is the point, not the plot.

Many films are meant to be experienced, not just read or watched. Otherwise what's the point of a movie when you can just read a screen play? Or what's the point of a screen play when you can just read a synopsis?

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1) NetHack is not one of those games

2) If you want to avoid spoilers, you should probably avoid discussion threads about the subject, because people will often discuss their experiences in such threads

1. It doesn't have to be for the experience of the plot to be important.

2. Fair point but with a game like nethack I'd say a majority of folks are interested in discussing the development of nethack without necessarily discussing the plot. HN has no concept of spoiler tags nor topiced threads so it's not really easy to contain the discussion per-thread.

Besides even if you don't care about spoilers, a lot of people do, regardless of your thoughts on how you personally like to experience media.

I actually tend to live a remarkably spoiler free life, but that's mostly by avoiding threads that would give spoilers on things I care about.

Like, it's fine to care about spoilers, you just can't expect a random community that doesn't even have the concept of spoiler tags to accommodate your desire. Doubly so since that desire is competing with the desire of others to discuss the topic.

I'm also not even sure where you'd draw the distinction with a game like NetHack - how do you discuss a change on how to acquire Excalibur without discussing how to acquire Excalibur, or spoiling that you can reliably acquire it?

I agree, you can't expect this community to hide spoilers about stuff. I have seen random spoilers in topics that weren't even about media (in classic HN fashion, random tangents start to talk about books or movies). Sometimes they would attempt to mark a spoiler by adding a bunch of lines of spoiler, then the reader could just collapse the comment thread.

That said, I haven't played enough nethack to even understand the spoilers so I'll probably forget about it. I'm primarily in this thread because because my dad introduced nethack to me when I was a kid, so seeing 5.0 is an incredible accomplishment and the meta discussion about it is fascinating.

I agree Nethack is not one of those games. People always pretended it was, though. They called "spoilers" what would be called documentation in most games. No one didn't use them (the "unspoiled" win mentioned elsewhere in the thread was a stretch even if you take them at their word). It was supposed to be theoretically possible to find out core game features from e.g. random rumors, but that was completely hypothetical - I'm pretty sure at no point in Nethack's development was it ever playtested with new players.

Not just random rumours, there are multiple specific mechanisms built into the game that explain core features, which a curious player can stumble on and then deliberately mine for information.

NetHack in many ways has common heritage with text-based adventure games of the 1970s and 80s, such as Zork. NetHack’s in-game currency is even a reference to Zork! Solving Zork without spoilers is also extremely difficult, despite lacking the tactical combat of NetHack. However, playing Zork with spoilers completely ruins the game, whereas NetHack is still a lot of fun even for highly spoiled players.

Agree 100%.

I watched Million Dollar Baby for the first time a year or two ago. I thought it was just a boxing movie, something like rocky or something.

I don't think reading the synopsis would have affected me like that movie did. I thought about it for days afterwards.

Never watched, or even cared to watch, but now I'm curious! Thanks for the rec!

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