by lackadaisicallexicon

Most Homestuck fans, steeped as we are in both literary tradition and the pop culture of our age, are familiar with the concept of “leveling up” in a video game—by defeating enemies in battle, you receive experience points of some kind, which are automatically exchanged for battle prowess at certain specified thresholds. Easy as pie.

Levelling up in Homestuck is a little different.

Now, to be sure, it still contains some vestige of the old system. SBURB is still an adventure game. In fact, most of the extra things that make the echeladder such an elegant system of measuring and furthering player growth are due to the fact that it is in an adventure game, one that requires personal growth as much as, if not more than combat prowess. To put it shortly: when you beat up monsters, you get experience, and stat boosts.

But the echeladder does not deal in levels. Rather, it uses Achievement Rungs. Essentially, it places action of any kind, be it hitting a few imps in your bedroom with a hammer or throwing your hat down on the ground in an excessively dramatic fashion, in a place of utmost importance. The only way to level up in SBURB is to move forward, and the scaling system is based not on how high your level is compared to your action, but the relevance of the action itself. Contrast this

with this:

SBURB sees no need to reward players greatly for things that don’t advance their personal growth. The monetary and physical rewards of scaling the echeladder are too major to squander on hat pofs, but a less than day of hard adventuring sent John to the top of his. In a sense, it’s positive reinforcement, ensuring that players continue to perform relevant actions in exchange for the strength to keep up with their friends’ abilities and successive challenges.

The jump to the god tiers is similar. God tier players have powers far beyond that of normal players—even before reaching that level, John was capable of summoning a hurricane powerful enough to stifle oil fires all over the Land of Wind and Shade, and he’s grown exponentially since, but the price of power is having to face death, and being willing to lose your life for relevance (bladekindeyewear, a favorite theorist of mine, has a post on this, but I won’t go into it here). What’s important is that growth doesn’t end at godhood: the existence of Achievement Badges ensures many more growth strata to come.

The echeladder promotes agency among players, rewards them not just for muscle but for mettle, and makes the game a true adventure: one where everything that’s important to the adventurer, from a hat pof to escaping the smoking ruins of your destroyed game session by flying half a moon into the domain of grumbling eldritch monsters for the purpose of detonating a bomb containing two dead universes to destroy the thing that bomb is actually creating.

The echeladder is an all-encompassing system of realized potential as well as strength, and it’s a major force in the shaping of the players’ individual strengths. With all that going for it, it’s little wonder that even the most adverse situations can be overcome in the comic—the players are always ready for whatever Hussie throws at them, so long as they put in the work to climb the ladder.