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This is a long form essay that discusses my feelings about growing tired of AAA game development, and how Dwarf Fortress has been a positive light for me lately. I hope you enjoy it.
This essay will be transmogrified into a video that will be posted on my YouTube channel where I discuss video games, primarily fighting games. If that interests you, check out the channel! YouTube Channel
Without further ado, here's that essay. I hope you enjoy it.
AAA video game announcements and releases, by and large, have really started to… Bore me.
It’s not uncommon for me to see these massive, blockbuster announcements at The Game Awards or, rest in peace, E3, and come out on the other side thinking…
“Man. There was almost nothing in that show that I cared about.”
These games that they put on these massive blockbuster stages and announce like the second coming of Christ… They don’t really excite me at all anymore. And, I think the reason why they don’t excite me anymore is the same reason they’re even up on that stage. Video games are now much more relevant, cultural, blockbuster products. And, with that comes a lot of negatives.
I should say, some AAA games DO excite me, a LOT. One of my favorite games in recent memory was Elden Ring, a game that couldn’t have possibly been made in any other gaming landscape, requiring a dedicated team of brilliant people at From Software to meticulously craft its mechanics and world. Those people who sculpt models for swords I’ll never use, make AI for enemies I blow through without a second thought, and fill the world with content that makes it feel real and alive… Those people deserve to be paid for their incredible effort. They probably don’t get paid enough. And, those people don’t get paid unless Elden Ring is the kind of game that makes millions and millions of dollars. I’m glad that they made that game. I’m glad that video games that are on this massive scale can be this good.
However, I’ve found that as time goes on, games with that level of unique flavor and detail are few and far between within the world of AAA game development. It’s much more likely a game like, say, God of War 2018 will be announced.
(I should interject now and warn you, I am about to say some negative things about God of War 2018 in order to make a point about the gaming landscape. I don’t actually think that it’s a bad game. From what I know, it’s a really good game, and the several hours I played of it, I enjoyed. I’m just using it as an example. We cool? Cool.)
God of War 2018 is, for the most part, the kind of game that I’m exhausted with seeing on stage. They’ll show Kratos and his son, and all the pores on their skin, and some big cinematics along with some… heavily staged gameplay. It’s exciting, and pretty fun to watch. But, I kind of know what this game is going to be like when it finally comes out, because…
Well... Because I’ve already played it before.
What I mean is that, this game, with all of its modern flourishes and graphical fidelity, is still… God of War. It might have some slightly different mechanics, and a new skill tree system or whatever, and now you can see each hair in Kratos’s beard, but the game is still the same kind of video game God of War has been for the past decade plus. And when I play this game, and you play this game, we will have almost the exact same experience. We will all kill a cool boss, and we will all see Kratos have Dad feelings over his son, and we will all… Walk down this exact same path, moving in this direction, completing this same objective.
Games like this are intentionally homogenized, designed to be this same experience every single time. I feel like they’re almost like movies, where we get to participate in some of the events. Despite that participation, everything that can possibly happen has been predetermined, and any other outcomes that the developers didn’t intend have been sanded off so that the most possible people can have a specific experience within the game.
You are locked in a box, essentially. You might not be able to see the box, but if you play video games, you just kind of know that the box is there. You can’t just walk into the forest, even though the forest is technically there, because before you even get there, an invisible wall will stop you, or the game will say you’re out of bounds or something. There’s a “correct” way to go at all times, usually indicated by a specific marker on your screen, or even on your map if the game has one. That marker is saying “you must move in this direction”.
So, we stay in the box, and move in this exact direction, and see this exact cutscene, and fight this exact boss, and if we ever try to do anything other than this exact sequence of events… The game either actively prevents it, or just… Doesn’t do anything. This is pretty normal for video games. They kind of force you to put yourself in the position of the character and move along with what that character “would do”. If you don’t, you’re not “playing the game correctly”. You’re not having the experience that’s been set out for you to have.
I want to make it clear that there’s nothing really “wrong” with games like this. These games can have completely awesome, important stories. They can have thrilling gameplay elements and interesting decisions. Games like this are routinely pretty awesome, and, I’m not trying to say that every game that has this “boxed in” design style is just “bad”. That’s not the case at all. However, I find that a lot of AAA games tend to avoid stories that are genuinely impactful and say interesting things, and they tend to fall into the same gameplay concepts over and over again without any genuinely interesting iteration. They play it safe in order to be widely applicable. And every time I see one of these safe games on stage, and I think about the box, I can’t help myself from thinking.
“Eh. I just…don’t really care about this.”
This is sort of when I mean when I say that these games “bore me”. Video games like this don’t try to inject any sense of personal magic into what’s going on. Sure, there’s a kind of “movie magic” to it all, as the things they’re showing on screen are cool and memorable. But, there’s a distinct lack of experiential magic. These games don’t put the player into experiences that are dynamic and personal. There’s no giving the player something if it can’t be perfectly planned out, perfectly set up. When you have a perfect itinerary of everything that can or ever will happen in your game, you can’t really give the player something personal or unique to them. I can’t share a story about the game that will be unique in any way, because everyone else will have had all of those exact same experiences. My experience will be your experience, if this game does what it’s supposed to do.
Having that ability to give the player an experience unique to them, and allowing a game to have a bit of jank or weirdness in order to achieve that, is something that makes me excited. It's distinctly unsafe. I love when a game just kind of lets interesting things happen without forcing them to happen. It allows everyone who plays it to come back with a story that, possibly, nobody else has had before. Despite the fact that we’re talking about a computer program, it feels untamed and wild and alive. It feels like it has this touch of humanity.
I’ve had this feeling that AAA video games are becoming less and less human as time goes on. And, as that feeling has built, it’s been slowly poisoning my interest in the medium as a whole.
…
There are, of course, lots of other games in the space besides the AAA. I’m a lover of indie games, which often represent a genuine treasure trove of varied art styles, mechanics, and ways of giving the player unique experiences. For every major, blockbuster, AAA prestige video game, there are hundreds, maybe even thousands of indie games that are doing things I’ve never seen before. These games feel distinctly personal. They feel human in a way that a lot of games just don’t.
And, within the indie game space, there’s one game that has had this… Lasting power over a dedicated community of people for years. A game that offers strange, unique experiences every time you play it. A game that simulates so much detail that you’re bound to always notice something you didn’t before. A game that might make you delve into a wiki or watch a slightly too long YouTube video in order to understand something about it. A game that, because of its level of simulation, necessitated that its developers never truly develop an…”art style” for it until now. There were just much more important things to work on.
That game is Dwarf Fortress, and it recently released a full retail version on Steam after being developed by two brothers for twenty years.
This game is genuinely one of the most incredible things I’ve ever seen. It’s mesmerizing and hilarious and…emotionally moving. It can draw me in for hours at a time, and it feels like nothing, because I’m engaged and locked in and seeing the world it’s painting in front of me for the entire time. I have never felt that boxed in feeling playing Dwarf Fortress. I’m just… Enjoying the game world, and all of the surprise that it has to offer.
The game has been developed in some capacity since around 2002, and has been in consistent development since 2006. The brothers, Tarn and Zach Adams, are the only developers on the game. The fact that it’s been worked on for that long by two dudes alone puts it at complete odds with the kinds of big budget, broadly appealing games that I mentioned earlier. The game has also been completely free to download for that entire time on the brothers’ website, www.bay12games.com. The brothers do make money off of Dwarf Fortress’s development through community donations on Patreon, and I assume they have made a considerable amount of money off this new, overhauled Steam release, but that doesn’t make them sellouts or something. This game feels like a labor of love more than anything, and the money they receive is a thank you for entertaining people for so long.
There are now two versions of this game: the free, “classic” version for download on the game’s website, and the $30 Steam release version. You might notice that DF classic doesn’t really have “graphics” as we know them today. This version of Dwarf Fortress, the same one that has been consistently updated and played for twenty years, runs in what is effectively a sort of “souped up” command line. It uses simple ascii characters to represent all of the things you might see in the world, and there are no mouse controls. You use keyboard shortcuts to interact with everything in the game.
The classic version is, by the way, still incredible. Everything I have said, and am about to say about the game, is true for both versions. There’s actually little to no mechanical differences between them, and the classic version will continue to be updated alongside the Steam release. The version that you pay for on Steam includes a very good looking visual overhaul, and a much more immediately understandable user interface that includes mouse controls. If you’re short on cash, you can still try that classic version, but the Steam version is well worth your 30 REAL UNITED STATES DOLLARS, and I would encourage you to play this new version if you want to have the best, most modern experience possible.
So, what kind of game is Dwarf Fortress? It’s essentially a survival crafting game like Minecraft or Terraria, but combined with a city management game like City Skylines or Civilization. You play the role of a sort of… Overseer or manager. You set off into the wilderness with a group of seven dwarves, and it’s your job to give these guys little jobs and put them to work so that they can survive. The biggest thing you have to grapple with, however, is that you can’t really make your dwarves do anything.
This might be hard to conceptualize upfront, but, your dwarves are each their own individual people. They have thoughts and feelings. They have relationships, children, and family. They have dreams about the future. They pray to gods that they like, and they have favorite things. They can be traumatized. They can get married, and you can’t do a damn thing about it.
Your job as the player is to set up your dwarves for success by suggesting that they do certain things. You designate that a tree needs to be chopped, and if a dwarf is free and in a good mood, they will grab an axe and go chop it down. If you tell them to put wood in a certain area, and your dwarves are free and in good moods, they will put the wood in that area. At no point in the game can you force a dwarf to do something if they don’t want to do it. You can give them commands, sure, but they can choose to disobey you. They might want to complete another job first, or they might just be angry at you and refuse to do it. So, it’s important to make sure that you’re in it with them, and try to make them as happy as you can while completing what you want to get done.
Once you’ve overcome this mental hurdle, that Dwarf Fortress is a game where you participate with your dwarves, you will start to understand it a bit more. You exist in a co-dependency with these dwarves. They want to survive and live satisfying lives, and you have to set them up for success. If you do that well, everything will go smoothly. If you don’t do that well, then their happiness will decline, and that makes completing both of your goals more difficult.
So, let’s say you want to give your dwarves a place to sleep, so that they aren’t just sleeping on the ground. First, you need to dig out a little room somewhere by telling your dwarves to dig it out. After that, they’re going to need beds to sleep in. Beds are made out of wood, so you’ll need to tell them to chop down some trees. Then, you’ll need to tell them to build a carpenter’s workshop. This is kind of like your Minecraft crafting table. By clicking on that carpenter’s workshop, you can tell them to make a bed. A dwarf will go pick up some wood, carry it over to the workshop, and start cranking out beds. We can stick all of our beds in that room we carved out, make a door in the same workshop and put it down, and then make it into a Dormitory zone. We’re done! When our dwarves want to sleep, they’ll know that they need to go to this area and use these beds.
This loop of [gather materials] > [build a workshop to process materials] > [process materials to make something] is what runs most of the basic work in the game. You’ll do this same thing to make tables, chairs, cups, chests, coffins. You’re gonna need all of those, especially the coffins.
But, why would you spend time making tables and chairs and cups?
Isn’t this little dirt room with a door on it totally fine?
Well, no, it’s not fine. Your dwarves are cool with this temporarily, but eventually you’re going to want to dig down into stone and make each of these dwarves their own bedrooms. You would hate it too if you had to live in a little dirt room with 6 other people for longer than like, 2 days.
They’re also going to need food and drink, so you dig out an area to build a farm plot and tell them to plant things in it. You make a stockpile for them to store the seeds and food. You make a still, and tell the dwarves to take some of those finished crops, and make them into alcohol. You use the carpenter’s workshop to crank out barrels to brew that alcohol in, and you give them a stockpile area to store those barrels of alcohol.
Dwarves love alcohol, by the way. They actually get really upset if they don’t have access to it at all times. Otherwise, they’ll be forced to drink………… water. Having alcohol on hand all the time makes them happy.
But right now, your dwarves are just sticking their heads in the barrel and SLURPING whenever they want a drink, and this… Humiliates them. They don’t like it. They want CUPS. So, you build a crafts workshop, make cups, and give them a place to store those cups.
When they drink and eat things, it would be nice to sit at a table. So, you put down some chairs and tables. Once you have all of this, you basically have a tavern. So, let’s make it into an official Tavern zone. Now that it’s a tavern, your dwarves will just… Hang out and drink and have fun in this area. They will sing and tell stories and socialize, and they will get drunk out of their fucking minds. This makes them happy.
At some point, you might want to check in on how the dwarves are doing. You can click on one of them and the game will give you their character sheet. This sheet will tell you their personality, their strengths and weaknesses, their desires. It’ll tell you all of their family and friends, a lot of whom won’t even be at your fortress. They’re back at wherever that dwarf migrated from, which is a real place that the game keeps up with. Hopefully, if you make the fortress well enough, that family might come visit, or even stay. This makes that dwarf happy.
Maybe one of your dwarves is saying that they want to pray to a god. So, you make a temple zone where the dwarves can do that. If someone gets hurt, you’re going to need a hospital zone to take care of them, consisting of certain furniture and a dwarf to be assigned there as a doctor.
You can even assign a manager, who will give other dwarves jobs at your request. This makes a lot of things easier, allowing you to say “make 10 beds”, and the manager will take care of the rest, automatically assigning jobs to dwarves so that the beds get made. For that to work, you have to give that manager an office. If they get all high and mighty about it, you’ll need to give that manager a nice office, and a nice bedroom, and a nice…tomb.
This dwarf, that you’ve given an important position to, wants a nice tomb that they’ll be buried in when they die. They want the security of knowing that they will be memorialized properly, and remembered.
What starts out as simply trying to survive will very quickly become you doing everything you can to make your dwarves as happy as possible, going through complex steps with each thing you want to do or create in order to achieve it. These dwarves, and the fact that they have feelings, is what drives you to make interesting decisions in Dwarf Fortress.
And, this level of intricate detail is not only for the dwarf’s brain, but also for their body. Every creature in the game has a physical body that is mostly completely simulated and detailed. Creatures have fingers, hands, arms and legs. They have ankles AND feet, as separate things. They have heads and necks and ears and eyeballs and tongues, and every single one of these things is actually simulated. Major body parts have bones, fat, muscle, skin. A dwarf can be attacked by something, and lose the ability to use one of its legs because its nerves or its bone structure was damaged beyond repair. That injury will affect that dwarf’s life, it’s mental health, and so on. These are detailed simulations of creatures, not just NPCs.
You will eventually be attacked by things wandering through the woods, or even other nearby civilizations, and you’ll need to participate in combat. You can assign dwarves to a military, train them, equip them, and tell them to fight. It might not look like much is happening when fights are playing out, but the game is simulating and keeping track of every detail of that fight in a combat log. Strikes with fists or shields will create bruises, or if hit hard enough, will tear muscles and skin. If something gets stabbed with a spear or hacked into with an axe, that weapon might become lodged in place, requiring the dwarf to pull it back out in the middle of a fight in order to keep using it. If any major structural damage happens to a creature’s skull, their brain might take damage, and they’ll instantly die. Body parts can get lopped off wholesale. It’s a beautifully gory mess to read through these combat logs, and it’s genuinely hype as hell to read the details of a battle, and see that some HERO pulled off the impossible and spilled some monster’s guts all over the ground. In Dwarf Fortress, nothing has HP. They have a body that can take damage, and if they lose enough blood or damage major organs… They will naturally, as a product of those injuries, die.
Speaking of dangerous creatures, Dwarf Fortress generates a lot of them. Maybe you’ll encounter goblins or kobolds trying to steal things from your fortress. Or, maybe a WERE-BEAST NECROMANCER or something will roll up, crazed and looking for blood. A local goblin civilization might send out a siege to destroy you. And all of these creatures, although you may not be as invested in them, have the same level of mental psychology and simulated physicality as anything else in the world. They too have bones that you can break, teeth that you can bust out, and so on. If you’re particularly unlucky, you might encounter a FORGOTTEN BEAST, which is a randomly generated nightmare creature. Do NOT let that one wander into the fortress, or, you’re going to use those coffins up pretty quickly.
And when Dwarves kill things, or even just see things die, it… Upsets them. It’s understandably horrific to watch gore play out in front of you, and Dwarves can be traumatized by what they’ve seen, especially if they watch other dwarves die, and particularly if those dwarves are their friends or family. They will sit, think, and talk to others about the horrors that they’ve witnessed.
Of course, it’s not all doom and gloom and horrific events that are generated. You might settle into a biome that has diverse, interesting wildlife. My brother settled into an area and found that, strangely, a bunch of gorillas were just hanging out nearby. It was funny to us at the time, seeing as he wasn’t in a jungle, but thinking back on it… Imagine the delight of a dwarf coming out to do some work in the morning, and seeing a family of gorillas casually moving across the landscape. These NPC gorillas may as well be living things as far as the game is concerned, and there is a kind of… Beauty to seeing them in this habitat, as a consequence of how the world decided to generate itself.
Let’s talk about that world generation for a second.
When you start a game of Dwarf Fortress for the first time, a world will be generated for you. That world is randomly given some continents, mountains, and other geographic features. Civilizations are then placed down on that map with important people, kings and adventurers and villains, and then the game simulates one hundred years of history where those civilizations and people are just…. Doing stuff. Conquering other areas, engaging in wars, cities rising and falling. It lists all the major events that happen in your world, and the major people within that world, for you to look at. There’s even a thing called “Legends Mode” that lets you look through an encyclopedia of things that have happened in your game’s history.
It’s also important to remember that those civilizations STILL EXIST once you’ve settled somewhere. If you build a tavern, people from other places will come visit. They might even ask to stay there permanently. Caravans of traders will come by, and you can buy and sell things with them. Thieves might hear of important artifacts you own, and come to steal them from you. You can launch full scale raids and wars on other towns and other civilizations, or send dwarves on missions to steal things back if they’ve been stolen.
The dwarves you settle with, in this specific part of the world, are not the only things in the world. The world is alive. It has been for hundreds of years, and will continue to be alive long after your fortress has fallen to ruin, as long as you don’t delete it.
All of these different variables at play, individual feelings and desires of dwarves, the place you settle in, the other people you might be surrounded by… They all create this cornucopia of wild, emergent gameplay and storytelling, where things happen that nobody could have ever predicted.
There are countless jokes online about dwarves running outside in the middle of a dragon attack or goblin siege because they forgot a pair of socks outside.
I was watching my brother play, and he found that several of his dwarves were wearing… 5 or 6 crowns each, assumedly stacked on top of their heads. He had been producing a TON of crowns to sell when merchants arrived next, and it seemed like the dwarves had simply said, “Why not? We’re all kings here.”
Rarely, dwarves can go into what are known as “Strange Moods”, which means they’ve been inspired to create some expensive, important artifact. Dwarves are craftspeople by nature, and they may get a burning itch to create. If they don’t get the materials they need to make something, they will eventually go insane because of this itch. There’s a few different flavors of insanity, but probably worst of all, they might go into a blind fit of rage and begin attacking another dwarf until one or both of them dies. I had a dwarf do this one, and this dwarf was an archer. He began sniping other dwarves down a hallway until someone finally put him down.
Just yesterday, I was attacked by a Minotaur, who I was totally sure would kill a bunch of my dwarves. I shut them all up in a safe room, and sent my very untrained military out to fight, thinking that they would probably die. But the first dwarf that fought him immediately stabbed him in the head, killing him instantly and keeping us safe. That dwarf is a hero, and I’m going to make them a very nice bedroom for doing that.
This game is BURSTING with life and interesting scenarios and weird things that can happen, and there’s no telling what you might get yourself into when you begin. I’ve said so much about this game, and still, I haven’t even really scratched its surface.
And all of this mechanical complexity and detailed simulation and WILD storytelling potential is inside of…an indie game, made by two people over two decades, and given away completely free for that entire time, up until right now. Dwarf Fortress is currently one of the best selling games on Steam, and it deserves it. Tarn and Zach Adams deserve your money, and I hope that this will set them up for life. They deserve it for crafting an experience like this.
And at the end of the day, that’s what I think Dwarf Fortress is. An experience.
…
As I’ve been writing this script, the feeling I keep coming back to is… I want games to give me unique, special moments that touch me. And, I feel that AAA games are simply not designed in such a way that allows these moments of unfiltered magic to happen. They’re designed to present a broadly appealing product as consistently as possible. But we, as human beings, and the experiences we have, are not… Consistent. We are weird, variable, and janky. I want my video games to represent a piece of this uniqueness. I want them to feel human, in that special way that video games as a medium are good at doing.
I think Dwarf Fortress stands out to me as a game that naturally creates experiences that are… unbound, and undefined, and unexpected. It’s a game where playing it constantly makes you feel like anything can happen. The world is brimming with the strange, the inconsistent, the unique and special. These little moments of humor, or pain, or… emotion. They aren’t scripted to make me feel a certain way, in a specific moment. The game isn’t trying to be a defined thing. The tools that exist within the code of the video game to create these scenarios are defined and finite, but the scenarios themselves and the variables that create them are so varied and detailed and complex that nothing consistent can truly ever be made to happen.
There is no box forcing the game to play out a certain way.
You can’t force Dwarf Fortress to generate you a story of your liking.
You can not make your dwarves do anything.
But, play along with them, and see what they bring you. Make your dwarves as happy as you can. Give those little dudes the world, because they’re doing everything they can to make you happy. Make that tavern, accept those visitors inside, and fight the dragon that wandered onto your doorstep. Hell, let’s do it all over again! Let’s make mistakes, and cause cave-ins, and dig all the way down to the bottom of the world just to see what will happen. Let’s flood our entire base with water and ruin days worth of work, because every single time we settle somewhere new, there are boundless strange possibilities within that space.
No matter what happens, it will be interesting, and wild, and raw.
It will feel human.
And, I think that feeling, that games can do things that show off this level of raw humanity and intrigue... That's why I love video games.
