As I recall from my game of many, many years ago, I got the amulet to the surface and was greeted with, “Oops, that’s the fake amulet. Go back down.” I’m pretty sure that’s the last time I played it.
Would you please edit your comment, and preface it with a spoiler warning?
When I consider watching a movie, one of the first things I do is read a complete plot summary, including the ending. When I do this and no longer want to watch the movie, in my mind, that’s not a sign that any experience was spoiled, but rather that it just wasn’t very interesting to begin with.
Conversely, I have played Nethack on and off for decades, have read countless spoilers about it, yet still haven’t won and still find it interesting.
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?
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
But there are movies that can be spoiled because of the big plot twist.
Eg. The Sixth Sense, Fight Club, to name a few (and [anime] Your Name, even the recently released Cosmic Princess Kaguya)
And then there are some movies where the plot is so obvious that you could have a LLM one-shot predict the whole thing.
That said if the movie/game/whatever is released for a couple years, I think the spoiler warnings should be optional regardless.