The merits of the novel when compared to modern media such as film and television are always in hot dispute. Librarians across the country plead that books challenge the imagination and engage the reader in a way moving pictures never can.

Enter the roguelike, a small niche genre populated by games powered solely by ASCII graphics. What this means, is that the playspace is rendered solely in numbers, letters, punctuation, and other unicode characters.

Nethack, the most well-known of the genre, has the player exploring a randomly generated dungeon 100 levels deep to find the Amulet of Yendor. Of course, then you have to escape with it.

What the genre lacks in graphics, it makes up for by challenging the player to use his or her imagination to visualize the world. Playing Nethack is similar to reading an interactive book (way better than a choose-your-ending) -- you read about your actions and you watch crude representations move around and as a result, you create your own mental image of the gameplay.