ABSTRACT
In April 2015, I was fortunate enough to join a live stream that featured Nick Scratch, Austin Walker, and Cameron Kunzelman—members of a group of streamers called Stream Friends—playing my roguelike game, Caves of Qud. 1 Caves of Qud is set in a far-future, postapocalyptic Earth populated by mutated animals, robots, and sentient plants. The Stream Friends were cooperatively playing as a single character, and they had just descended into the depths of the game’s first dungeon, a shale cavern called Red Rock. As they paraded into the darkness, they stumbled on a pack of aggressive, humanoid hyena creatures called snapjaws. Carefully, they assessed the danger of the situation. They scanned their surroundings for corridors to use as choke points, boulders to hurl at the snapjaws, and anything else that might help them survive.
