Dwarf Fortress

For the past week or so, I've been playing extreme cat breeding sim Dwarf Fortress.

If you're a Serious Internet Person, you've probably at least heard of it. It's got some significant infamy for how nuts it is on so many levels. Let's examine some of these levels of nuts, shall we? (Yes.)

The game looks like a 5 year old got a hold of his dad's typewriter and just went nuts all over the Johnson report. It's an ASCII game, so everything is represented by text characters rather than images. It is impenetrable to the untrained eye. The only way to work out what letters are supposed to represent is through checking it and memorising it. Even then, the same letter can mean a bunch of different things, depending on its colour or its background or friggin anything. You think you're being attacked by elks? They're elephants, idiot. Jeez.

Admittedly, this is made a lot less terrible by the graphics mods that are available, but it's still a nightmare. A group of migrant dwarfs arrive, and you're supposed to be able to tell that is a fish dissector. First you're supposed to imagine that there are any contexts where a fucking fish dissector is useful (there aren't), then you're supposed to work out that the blob he's holding isn't an arrow or a tiny word or whatever. It's horrible. Fucking hours I must have spent pressing [k] and hovering over objects that are meaningless.

Speaking of meaningless, there's no goal. There are no explicit objectives. It's like The Sims, but the members your love hexagon of lesbian astronauts (which represent 'your fortress') is destroyed by the postman (which represents 'a skinless elk that vomits poison dust') because you didn't double-lock the door. You gotta make your own fun, which you do. You start naming your dwarfs after in-jokes that nobody else will get or see. You put the cages of the crundles that have been pissing you off for the whole game in the magma pit. The game doesn't reward you for doing shit like that. The game doesn't reward you for anything. You're making up what you want to do, and seeing whether or not the game will fuck you over before you can do it.

The only way that the game ends is by your dwarves dying. In the first game I played, a cave spider blocked the way to the farm so my dwarfs all either starved or were eaten by the spider. You work really hard to build up an impenetrable fortress where you can make statues of the dwarf you named after yourself all day, and inevitably it is not so impenetrable.

Even if it is impenetrable, you just get bored. I get some serious Paradise Syndrome playing this game. I'll make a beautiful fortress that's never gonna be destroyed. It's huge, everyone's happy and there's no way for anybody to invade it. So I cut a hole in the wall to let the goblins in. So I send the army into the caverns to piss off some demons. So I get deliberately sloppy with my mining safety, see if I can't flood the place with magma. Losing is fun. That's the Dwarf Fortress motto. It's in the help menu, it's all goddamn over the wiki, and it's true.

I love Dwarf Fortress. If you wanna play, go over to the site and download that shit right now. If you wanna know how to play before you start (which you do, it makes no sense without someone explaining the basics) check out capnduck's excellent youtube tutorials. If you want an in-depth look at how a typical game might go, check out the Boatmurdered Let's Play, which gets very hilarious very quickly. If you've got time to waste and you're ready to get lost in your own mistakes, check it out. It's like nothing else I've ever played.