However, another player might begin a fortress and build a fully functional re-creation of the game space invaders using only the levers, pumps, constructions and fluid mechanics that are provided by the game itself. It is entirely feasible that a player might begin a game and get a rudimentary fortress going, and then, after hitting a point of self sustainment, realize that there is nothing else the game requires of them, and then stop. Having no directives but a huge world at their disposal, the player is free to do everything, anything, or nothing. This mode of interaction emerges specifically because of Dwarf Fortress’ philosophy of player freedom. The article that we read talked at great length about Dwarf Fortress’ process of creating huge amounts of raw history, and then players re-claiming and humanizing that history through interacting with the game and other people who play the game, making art, stories and other works related to the game ( Dwarven Epitaphs, 135, 149). Perhaps most importantly, Dwarf Fortress is (along with all the others things I’ve said “Dwarf Fortress is” in this blog post) a game in which the player makes their own fun. In this sense, the Adams brothers don’t really create the worlds of Dwarf Fortress as much as they create the ingredients of those worlds, and everything that happens afterwards is left to chance and algorithms.Īnd, as a result of having no embedded goals or narratives whatsoever, a player is put in a precarious position of freedom. Even the pre-existing generated histories of the world that effect where a player comes from or who they are capable of interacting with at first, by virtue of proximity, emerge as part of a dynamic system that created them, along with hundreds of thousands of other events or places or peoples, at random. There are simply no embedded narratives at all. In this way, every narrative that occurs within Dwarf Fortress is emergent. Players in the game’s Adventure mode are given full freedom to go anywhere in the world, talk to anyone, or kill anything with absolutely no narrative or gameplay restrictions. In the Fortress game mode players are told only to survive, and they can do that however they see fit, building any structure that they feel like and subsisting on any means necessary, outside any narrative bounds. What I mean is this: Players in Dwarf Fortress are given a huge degree of agency and extremely little direction. And because there are so few guidelines given to players as to “how” to play, (especially given as there is no winning), I think that Dwarf Fortress can be most effectively categorized not as a sandbox, but rather, as a toolbox. The mechanics of the game, though highly arcane and requiring a great deal of prior knowledge and training to operate (see below):Īlso allow the player an extremely wide range of action in either of the game’s “gameplay” modes. Thinking about games as things that are “played”, Dwarf Fortress allows its operators seemingly infinite opportunities for play. For one, it possesses mechanics that allow interactivity, and secondly and most importantly, it very strongly establishes a space for play. However, on top of those features, Dwarf Fortress also possesses two characteristics that tie it very heavily into the world of games. From these criteria probably the most accurate description of it would be “procedural interactive art” or something like that. Dwarf Fortress cannot be won, it features few objectives and makes very few concessions for the player or operator. This definition of the Adams’ project runs up against the traditional definition of a game in a number of ways. We want a cheap fantasy universe generator”. In 2006, Tarn posted on his game development forum, 12Bay Games, that “We don’t want another cheap fantasy universe. However, I think one of the most useful definitions for thinking about Dwarf Fortress comes in the form of a statement from one of the creators of the game, Tarn Adams. Dwarf Fortress is one of the few works that was featured in the MoMA’s exhibition “Talk to Me: Design and the Communication between People and Objects” in 2011, so by that virtue, I suppose it could be called a museum piece, or more generally, a piece of art. I started playing it probably around the time that the article that we had to read was written (2012), and then, as now, I’m not necessarily sure that I would call it a “video game”, or at least, not strictly. Let me start by saying that I have a lot of experience with Dwarf Fortress by Tarn and Zach Adams.
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