This is my Dwarf Fortress area. I have made some zones, and I made a burrow and had my people meet there. They have yet to do any of their jobs, but at least they are in a burrow.

I downloaded Dwarf Fortress fine and it ran immediately. I chose the version with music, and I’m glad I did. It is lovely music. It is just about the only thing that is calming with this whole process. Here’s a recreated dialogue between my beau and I, he-who-used-to-be-a-programmer-and-plays-Dwarf-Fortress:

Me: “I understand that each of these symbols means something in terms of the terrain and what is underground.”

Tim: “Mmm hmm.”

Me: “I understand that I cannot ask my dwarves to do anything, I have to designate jobs for them and then they’ll do things in their own time. I understand that I have a wagon and a cat.”

Tim: “These seem like good things to understand.”

This is going to be difficult. Conceptually I think I get it — you set up some tasks and you let it run. I like city-building sandbox games, and parts of this are like that. You need people to do certain jobs and places for them to do them. There are unpredictable events that are outside of your control. My issue is that it’s just overwhelming — there seems to be an options menu for everything and those menus are not intuitive. Sometimes I use the arrow keys and sometimes I use the + or – and these are the keys on my number pad not the same ones above my qwerty keys. Sometimes I have to use shift to get to the capitalized version of a letter. Red letters tell me I need a manager, but when I assign a manager I still cannot assign jobs. Three hours in and my people still aren’t doing the jobs they’re capable of doing. I’ve zoned some things, and I’ve made a burrow (see above… my dwarves are hanging out in the burrow because I assigned it as a meeting place… at least, I think that’s why they’re all there). I can’t remember what I marked the other zones for.

My favorite part of the game so far, apart from the music, is the complex biographies for each character. Under some menu (view unit?) I found an option for “Thoughts and Preferences” and there is the individual story that read somewhat like a terrible online dating profile. Uzol Bertorad, coined “Uzol Earthbodies” is 88 and “always tense and jittery” but he “doesn’t mind wearing something special now and again” and, sadly, “needs alcohol to get through the working day” (I’m not sure I’m even gathering berries let alone making ale). When reading the “Dwarven Epitaphs” piece by Boluk and LeMieux I was struck by the narrative complexity of the program that is just simply invisible from first glance. I “played” for about two hours  and then went to the readings, hoping they’d give me the inspiration to return and try out some other options. The game they are describing sounds amazing! Based on the fantasy short stories of Zach Adams and moved into game mechanics, the way the game writes a history is absolutely fascinating, and the failed narratives by players are told as dramatic encapsulations of the inevitably epic and odd deaths of their dwarves sounds like an ideal form of potential literature. But for the moment I’m overwhelmed by the attention to detail (is that what it is?) of the mechanics accounting for geographical details and world situations. It’s exceptional, but near un-game-able. Because I know Tim enjoys the update notes, I found them in the Release Notes file in the download folder.  “Stopped random creature proboscis from sometimes messing up poison attacks” and “Made removal of trees check building/bridge/machine stability” are a couple of my favorites.

Boluk and LeMieux describe Dwarf Fortress as the game version of future historical models recreating our lives, “dwarves live within us, around us, and without us–in vaccines and antibiotics, in mechanical and computational systems, and in the geological and cosmological happenings of the universe. The role of the human, then, is not to play videogames but to produce metagames” (150). I’m excited to find out what history my game will tell… if I can ever get my dwarves to do anything in the first place. Maybe not doing anything is what is keeping my six dwarves alive (I have no idea what happened to the 7th… I missed that plot point, or can’t recover it because I’m not sure what menu it lives under…). Is Dwarf Fortress the game an impenetrable fortress itself? To be determined.

p.s. This post ended up longer than intended… I had been thinking this was my week for a substantive post but we’re all blogging this week — so I guess I’ve just been thinking about it too much for a quick update!