There’s three events that I always hype (or try to, if I remember them), the charity speedrunning events AGDQ and SGDQ in January and July, and the two-day online conference Roguelike Celebration in October.
We already announced Roguelike Celebration’s preview event a couple of weeks ago, but the main event is Saturday the 171h and Sunday the 18th. They’ve posted their lineup for this year. Just to remind you, you’ll need a ticket to attend, which cost $30, but you can usually get a free ticket if you ask nicely. I encourage you to pay if you can however, since it allows them to pay for their human-provided text transcription, to pay their speakers, and to keep the server running.
A interesting thing about Roguelike Celebration is that while it’s mostly about roguelikes, naturally, they also have other interesting talks, and they always seem to find good subject. A few highlights this year, Andrew Plotkin is giving a talk about mazes in games, there’s a talk about randomness in a Fire Emblem game, and “stealing roguelike mechanics from Microsoft Word.” There’s one about recovering and modernizing one of the original Hack games (I suggested that one!) and one about cellular automation in roguelikes. Oh, and the Caves of Qud people are talking about localizing their procedurally generated texts.
There’s always a bunch of interesting talks each year, and although they go online after the conference, if you show up you can offer questions to the speakers, talk with them yourself in a MUD-based conversation space, and talk with the other attendees, who tend to be crazy intelligent types themselves. It’s all a lot of fun, and if you’re reading Set Side B, there’s a good chance you’ll enjoy being there, so please consider giving it a try!
