I hate to be this person: I have NOT yet been able to play Dwarf Fortress for more than an hour. I really just got it running.

His was a tale of woe. 

I downloaded the game on Monday – not too early, but not too late by the grad student clock, either – plenty of time to get in my 4 hours.

But ahh, fate: My otherwise trusty Macbook crashed while opening the file, and has been out of commission since.

* * *

I spent the hours I’d initially allotted to the Dwarf Fortress project with the blue polo shirt-wearing folks at our Pitt bookstore Brilliance Counter (they aren’t the Apple Store).

I watched these undergrad student workers try to restart my machine, getting the same interminable spinning wheel I’d tried all morning to abjure. They had a job I’d assigned them, but I lacked the knowledge to direct them. (Sound a bit familiar?)

One of them, Kevin, restarted the machine while holding down keys that I didn’t know would have any effect. Secrets! He was able to get into windows I’d never seen before, and he opted to run something called “disk verify.”

Bad move, son. The disk utility froze as well. Hah hah.

(Wait, that’s mine.)

* * *

Since leaving one’s machine is frowned upon, I loitered about the Brilliance Counter for quite some time, making small talk, answering the increasingly rare query about the machine, and doing lots of reading on my phone.

Kevin called over other blue shirts, and they looked at me with pitying eyes for about half a second and lost interest.

I finally had to the sense to ask, “Have you heard of dwarf fortress? I was supposed to play it for a class.”

The first two hadn’t heard of it.

But another employee, one with whom they’d seemed to confer when stuck, blinked my way and announced, “I let it run for 10,000 years. It’s a procedural world builder.”

Procedural! They speak my language!

 “What does that mean?” I asked him.

He twitched as if the question revealed the slim chances he could frame an answer I’d grasp. He thought for a moment. “What class did you say you are playing it for?”

“Its’ a grad seminar in the English department.”

He paused, considering.

“It writes poetry.”

* **

“You mean after you set your dwarves up in their fortress?”

“Yes.”

“The dwarves write poetry?”

He nodded.

“But I have a friend who can’t get his fortress going. It sounds pretty hard.”

I was starting to strain his patience.

“Use the wiki, then let it run for a few thousand years.”

“So it’s fun just to watch it play out?”

He looked up one more time: “It invents religions.”

***

Now, with a laptop on loan from the University, I am finally playing Dwarf Fortress.

Which is to say, I enjoy reading the wiki, looking at the screen, and fondly recollect playing Spacewar! as a kid.

Based on what I’ve seen so far, I think I will need 10,000 years, rather than the few hours I have.

But, even in the opening screens, I’m fond of the language. There is sea to the north the peninsular land formation where my dwarves are being created:

“The Waters of Circumstance.”

***

“It’s a procedural world-builder,” he’d said.

Procedural! They speak my language!

 “Procedural” … one of *their* words.