unplanned cheer

Shockingly, astonishingly, unforgivably, I have never mentioned Dwarf Fortress on this blog.

Dwarf Fortress is...how do I put this?....Dwarf Fortress is, at first impression, a computer game.  You might call it such because it is a program that runs on a computer, is designed to accept interaction from a user, and is not a productivity tool.  "Game" gets harder to define every year.

Dwarf Fortress shares much in common with some computer games.  You can find dragons, minotaurs, dwarves, elves, necromancers, and the undead running around in the worlds Dwarf Fortress presents.  The world presented is low-technology; fighting is generally conduct with swords, axes, and bows.  It's easy to look at all the computer games that involve these subjects, then look at Dwarf Fortress, and call it a computer game.  It isn't.

Dwarf Fortress is a world simulator program.  When you turn it on, it creates History.  It builds a tapestry of thousands of years of events involving the clash of civilizations, but also takes into account the personalities of individuals in shaping history.  A king may declare war on an enemy empire despite being horribly outmatched, simply because his beloved wife was slain in a raid conducted by the forces of that enemy.  None of this was written by the game creator.  All is created history.  Every world is unique.

When you start interacting with the simulation, even more wonderful things can happen.  You can watch as people develop relationships, pursue their hobbies, achieve their dreams and plan for their futures.  You can peek into their minds and see the little annoyances and pleasures they meet through each day.  Let me show you a completely random example of what can happen:

A dwarf is born.  A few years later, his mother is devoured by a giant spider, and he develops a lifelong fear of giant spiders from having seen it.  Several years after that, he witnesses an eagle killing a giant spider, and becomes very fond of eagles.  He becomes a stonecarver by trade, and is given the task of building a stone coffin for a great king.  Because he loves eagles, he portrays the king as riding a giant eagle.

Meanwhile, another dwarf, who has hated eagles ever since he was viciously beaten by a goblin carrying a mace decorated with leather images of eagles, visits the first dwarf's home village on a trading mission.  He spots the coffin on its way to be placed within a great tomb, and the sight of eagles carved all over it sours his mood.  As a result, he is much stingier than normal in trading, and the village must pay higher prices than ever before for any of his desperately-needed rare goods.

This all occurs dynamically in the course of the simulation, and I haven't even really scratched the surface of explaining its depth to you!  Of course, I've presented it to you narratively above, for ease of understanding; you would have to do some research to figure out that the story above is going on.  If you weren't paying attention at all, all you would know is that prices had suddenly become higher for whatever reason.  But if you dig a little deeper, there is no end to the chain of cause and effect.

Now imagine an entire world simulated to this degree of detail and complexity.  That's the beauty of Dwarf Fortress.

I play a lot of games, but I prefer these types of simulations over any of them.  I like to see stories unfold dynamically through interactions of complex systems -- much like the real world.  There are two major terms used in game design that combine to create this type of effect.  The first is procedural generation, where the content of the worlds is created through a series of random processes, as opposed to being statically created by a human designer and then delivered to the end user.  The second is emergent gameplay, where interesting, but undesigned, interactions between simulation elements occur as a result of the overall design of the program.  The truly valuable thing about these types of experiences is the capacity they have for telling you entirely unique stories, over and over again, so long as you have the imagination to engage with them.