I’m glad that Amiga pointed out the statement on the wiki about DF’s worlds being generated randomly and procedurally. It seems like a simple idea, but in fact, DF’s approach to generating worlds raises a lot of complicated questions about authorship.

Before going further, I’d like to compare DF to the Civilization series, a country simulator that is very similar in many respects, except that it’s winnable and much more polished, graphically and structurally. In Civ, you role-play a real civilization from history (e.g., the Maya or the French), and try to guide it to scientific/military dominance. In Civ as in DF, “the world that your game takes place in will always be procedurally randomly generated by you or someone else.” However, unlike DF, Civ also comes with a set of premade worlds and scenarios that are based on real geography and historical situations (e.g., Alexander the Great’s conquests or the settlement of North America). Scenario play is considered an ancillary way to play Civ, and most casual players don’t seem to mess around much with the scenarios. That said, each scenario comes with a clear author—usually the developer, Firaxis, but sometimes a fan who has modded the game and sold their mod to Firaxis, who ships it as part of an update or expansion pack. In a Civ scenario, you always start out in the same world. If I play as Churchill, my cities will always be in the same places, my NPC opponent will always use the same strategies, and I’ll always have 3 fewer submarines than I need to beat Hitler. A Civ scenario has a clear stamp of authorship, in that it reflects one developer’s approach to representing a historical narrative within a playable simulation.

On the other hand, DF’s user-made challenges (which I haven’t gotten around to trying yet) seem to defy the conventional understanding of authorship. A creator might define some parameters for her challenge, but the actual world the user plays in is different each time, thanks to DF’s insistence on always generating the world randomly and procedurally. (Civ’s default mode also uses random world generation, but the user has the option to override it. DF has no such option.) Who, then, is the author of the world the user is given to play in? The developer? The game? The user who sets the parameters? Some combination thereof? This is a great case study for some of the thorny authorship problems in Brown and Maher’s articles from two weeks ago.

This fuzziness around authorship seems to manifest in DF fan culture. In the most comprehensive list of challenges that I’ve found, none of the challenges are associated with authors. On the other hand, people who make good Civ mods become celebrities within this very niche subculture. Modders develop distinctive styles and become auteurs, to borrow a term from film studies. However, I have a lot of trouble applying auteur theory to DF, because it seems impossible for a developer to have a distinct style or identity when the gameplay’s rhetoric is so aggressively procedural. What do you guys think – who is the auteur of the aquifier-infested world that I’m grappling with in DF?