At a time when game developers seem intent on handling players with kid gloves and are quick to laud trivial accomplishments as achievements (“You took 10 whole steps in the right direction! Go you!”), it scarcely seems conceivable a complex time-consuming game with no victory condition could possibly exist. Yet that’s precisely how Dwarf Fortress is designed. Players are simply expected to lose and the Dwarf Fortress experience is fundamentally about how you lose. To lessen the sting, the game’s creators promise losing is fun.
It is not.
To play Dwarf Fortress in its primary Fortress Mode is to attempt to build something in a hostile environment. It’s an extraordinarily–detailed simulation requiring huge amounts of micromanagement in the beginning, lulling the unwary into believing they have full control over proceedings before viciously disabusing them of that notion. The endgame is always about witnessing that creation succumb to disaster. The stones may still stand, the constructions may remain intact yet the intrepid community that is the heartbeat of every fortress will be destroyed.
The grim final days of a dwarven colony are always a desperate struggle to stave off an unavoidable tragedy. Will the player’s avaricious dwarves, blinded by the promise of subterranean riches, be overrun by hordes of vile goblins or massacred by some ancient behemoth? Or will they instead suffer a less bloody if no less horrifying end, slowly dying of thirst and hunger as their stockpiles run out? It matters little how they meet their final doom, watching it unfold is never fun in the “whee” sense of the word.
Creatures fond of drink and industry
Among this unusual game’s many extraordinary achievements is it makes the player care for brave little ASCII graphics scurrying around. It accomplishes this by tracking each and every dwarf in the game, describing their appearance, their personality, their likes and dislikes, their relationships, their recent history and their current mood. The dwarves make friends, take lovers, get married and have children. They adopt animals as pets and are comforted by them. They keep grudges, get depressed and melancholic. They take delight in art, appreciate fine workmanship and commandeer workshops when the muse takes them. They throw parties when they’re happy, cry on each other’s shoulders when sad, they get frustrated and lash out when things turn bad.
Watching tragedy befall these characters is not fun. It is a great many things — reading the game log can be distressing and downright sickening — but the word to use isn’t “fun”. As outrageous a notion as it may seem to the unconvinced, a better description for the Dwarf Fortress experience is “Tolkien-esque” because the game is nothing less than a generator for epic tales.
Little story seeds are planted as the dwarves interact with each other and with the world around them. The leader of the expedition that founded the fortress weeps when she is voted out of the position of mayor. The guard captain’s husband, another ex-mayor, is a lush while their eldest daughter is a child prodigy. In another fortress on another world, an unfortunate dwarf is crushed by a stone bridge and the moment is depicted in a renowned wall engraving. That fortress elects a 12-year-old, popular for the parties he throws, to the office of mayor and the child-leader, napping and partying, later misses an important meeting with a liaison. These vignettes and little dramas are the building blocks for the player-artist and it is no surprise this remarkable game has inspired remarkable player narratives.
The Age of Myth
Yet the stories of the dwarves’ daily existence are but a small part of the unique Silmarillion-esque legendarium created for each procedurally-generated game world. Delving into each world’s feigned history through the game’s amazing, if little discussed, Legends Mode reveals just how much story detail is created during genesis and lets the player better appreciate gameplay events.
The downfall of one fortress would be brought about by a bronze colossus which the records show had strode the world for over a millennium, worshipped by humans and dwarves for its association with war, strength and metals in some centuries, feared for its rampages in others.
The records would also reveal the goblins who finally conquered the fortress had a longstanding grudge to settle. The fortress had been founded by seven from Stibbomrovod and dwarves from Stibbomrovod had fought two wars with the goblins from Zolak Anusp over nine hundred years ago. The goblins lost 250 of their number in those wars and never forgot it. Centuries later, those of Stibbomrovod would pay a heavy price for the transgressions of their forebears.
It is this sense of history that makes the Dwarf Fortress experience so memorable. If the late, lamented Origin could rightly boast “We Create Worlds,” Dwarf Fortress’ creators could justifiably declare “We Create Epics.”
Strike the earth!
That those epic experiences should come courtesy of an unfinished game whose development is fuelled primarily by passion and funded solely by donations is perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of Dwarf Fortress.
The making of the game is not unlike the game itself. One man, in a fey mood, sets off on what might seem like to many as a foolhardy quest to build a legendary artifact only he can envision in his mind’s eye. He’s been doing this exclusively for four years now, aided by his brother. The resources are scarce, the hurdles are many. This isn’t a safe and predictable design calculated to appeal to all. It’s sprawling and chaotic — just as Tolkien’s magnum opus grew in the telling, Dwarf Fortress expanded its scope dramatically since its conception eight years ago and continues to astound with its ambition — and it is entirely capable of cowing even experienced gamers.
Yet new gamers arrive every year, drawn to Dwarf Fortress by accounts of wondrous adventures to be had even though they know full well that it may defeat their attempts to wrap their heads around its inscrutable nature and eccentricities.
It may not be much to look at on the surface level even with user-created graphics mods but those who can look past the rudimentary graphics to see the complex underlying ideas will gasp at its audacity, its grandeur and its promise.
It was once said the English-speaking world is divided into those who have read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and those who are going to read them. It is tempting to claim the gaming world is divided into those who have played Dwarf Fortress and those who wish they could. Hyperbole? Perhaps.
It bears repeating, however, the game isn’t complete yet. Its creators say it is only one-thirds done and given how epic it feels even as a work in progress, you wouldn’t want to bet against Dwarf Fortress going on to become one of the greatest games of all time.
But if you did bet against that happening, and you did lose, well, sometimes losing is fun.
