I think the point the author is trying to make is that "roguelike" is emphatically not actually a genre but describes both the development process and the end result, at least in the "traditional" sense.
In the same sense that some strongly distinguish "FOSS" from software which is just "open source" or just "free as in beer", I think Roguelikes to many people indicates not only the "style" of the game but both the development style and shared history of the game.
The "lowest common denominator" roguelikes like Angband, ToME, Nethack etc. are pretty dissimilar games, apart from some shared procedural generation and dungeon crawling aspects, but they all share either a literal or spiritual lineage to the original Rogue game, itself written as a kind of demo for the curses library in BSD UNIX.
Hack began life as a Rogue-clone written by a highschooler on the school's PDP-11, was rewritten a few times, eventually ended up becoming a collaborative effort on the "net". Angband is based on the gameplay of UMoria, a rewrite of Moria in C for Unix, itself originally a rogue clone for the VAX written in BASIC/Pascal/assembler because UNIX didn't exist for the VAX then and the developer missed playing Rogue from the PDP-11.
To some Roguelikes aren't just a "style of game" but a community that encompasses both playing, developing, distributing, and modifying the games. Many people have learned coding from making small modifications to Roguelikes , which are in turn modified by others, similar to game mods today.
Unlike most game mods, however, because of the open-source nature of "traditional" Roguelikes, they tend to be "forked" and released under new names as large monoliths, which can themselves be forked. Instead of the modern phenomena of installing 100+ mods to your favorite RPG, a developer would throw 100+ patches into Angband and call it YAngband, and then some other person would throw another 100+ patches and call it NeoYAngband.
I agree that at the end of the day being pedantic is pretty silly and people shouldn't lose sleep over something as silly as this, but I also think it'd be sad to forget about the community of "original" roguelikes and abandon the practice of kids picking up the last generation's game and forking it.
Thing is, that hasn't happened -- it's just that "games that mechanically resemble roguelikes" have become sort of mainstream, and the group of people who just want to play games and be done with it has grown much faster than the sort interested in the old way.
In the same sense that some strongly distinguish "FOSS" from software which is just "open source" or just "free as in beer", I think Roguelikes to many people indicates not only the "style" of the game but both the development style and shared history of the game.
The "lowest common denominator" roguelikes like Angband, ToME, Nethack etc. are pretty dissimilar games, apart from some shared procedural generation and dungeon crawling aspects, but they all share either a literal or spiritual lineage to the original Rogue game, itself written as a kind of demo for the curses library in BSD UNIX.
Hack began life as a Rogue-clone written by a highschooler on the school's PDP-11, was rewritten a few times, eventually ended up becoming a collaborative effort on the "net". Angband is based on the gameplay of UMoria, a rewrite of Moria in C for Unix, itself originally a rogue clone for the VAX written in BASIC/Pascal/assembler because UNIX didn't exist for the VAX then and the developer missed playing Rogue from the PDP-11.
To some Roguelikes aren't just a "style of game" but a community that encompasses both playing, developing, distributing, and modifying the games. Many people have learned coding from making small modifications to Roguelikes , which are in turn modified by others, similar to game mods today.
Unlike most game mods, however, because of the open-source nature of "traditional" Roguelikes, they tend to be "forked" and released under new names as large monoliths, which can themselves be forked. Instead of the modern phenomena of installing 100+ mods to your favorite RPG, a developer would throw 100+ patches into Angband and call it YAngband, and then some other person would throw another 100+ patches and call it NeoYAngband.
I agree that at the end of the day being pedantic is pretty silly and people shouldn't lose sleep over something as silly as this, but I also think it'd be sad to forget about the community of "original" roguelikes and abandon the practice of kids picking up the last generation's game and forking it.
Thing is, that hasn't happened -- it's just that "games that mechanically resemble roguelikes" have become sort of mainstream, and the group of people who just want to play games and be done with it has grown much faster than the sort interested in the old way.