I do not know the old language.

Do you know the language of the old belief?

—

As usual, I am interested in what it feels like to dip into a text like Dwarf Fortress and experience it in a raw way that doesn’t seek out context or a sense of comprehensive understanding of everything that is happening. But I’m definitely in over my head. After figuring out installation, and learning that it is possible to easily run .exe files on a Mac (I think my Mac knowledge is frozen ~2008), I was feeling confident. If I had made it over what seemed like the first weird hurdle, the game itself couldn’t be so bad, right??? The discourse around this game is just all exaggeration and as an ex-hardcore gamer I would be able to figure it out, right???
…

…

what does it all mean?!

I’m interested in the esotericism of the DF community, and what dipping into it might tell us about gamer or programmer discourse generally. When I read about DF, I feel like I am attempting to join a cult, and not doing a very good job of assimilating (my first year of grad school, heavy in critical theory shorthands without citation, felt similar). And I don’t feel like I am trying to join a vulgar sect of Satanism run by teenagers or something, either — this feels more like Scientology, if Scientology had a user interface that did things in the lobby of the Scientology recruiting center and the promise of Scientology was to learn how to read that interface and make it do things.

Some text from the DF Wiki, on the page about “Dwarf Fortress Mode”:

Fortress mode is the more popular of two modes of gameplay in Dwarf Fortress, with the other mode being Adventurer mode. It is often the mode implied when one talks about Dwarf Fortress. In fortress mode, you pick an embark location, and then assign your seven initial dwarves some starting skills, equipment, provisions, and animals to bring along. After preparations are complete and your hardy explorers embark, they’ll be faced with the fortress site you picked down to every little detail, from geologically appropriate stone types to roaring waterfalls to ornery hippopotami. Rather than control individual dwarves, you design everything and your dwarves will go about implementing your designs on their own.
[emphasis mine]

There is a definitely a strong sense of an in-group here that is so in- that they might not be able to even articulate things in a language I can understand. In my DF gameplay, I think I have stalled at the early mining phase (though I’m not sure how I could really tell). Here is what the Wiki Tutorial tells me:

Dwarves will automatically have some labors enabled if they start out with skill in those labors, and some labors (such as hauling and cleaning) are enabled for all dwarves by default. This is why you didn’t need to enable any labors on dwarves to get them to haul and mine, but later you may need a labor that no dwarf is currently capable of.

Look over your dwarves’ assigned labors. Press v (View Units) then place the cursor on a dwarf. Now, press p–l for “preferences: labors”. You will see a list of labor categories that you can navigate using – and +. You can enter each category with Enter (except for mining, which is a single labor), toggle each labor off and on with Enter, and get back out with Esc.

After exiting the View Units menu, you can use u (the units screen) to help you locate dwarves. Hit u, select a dwarf, hit z for “zoom to creature” and you’ll automatically be placed in view mode on that dwarf. (Then use p–l to get to the labor configuration menu if necessary.)

Oh.

While I’m pretty sure I have correctly followed all of these instructions and set all my dwarves to mine-only (which feels like it will quickly lead to Carpal Tunnel Syndrome on my Macbook keyboard), and I have mapped out a mining space, my dwarves are all idle. Though I think they are moving around. This is about as far as I’ve gotten. What’s been funny for me is just how close this experience feels to the procedurality associated with coding that we have already explored, at length, in our discussions of learning how to use Python. Just as I struggled to understand what each bit of code was doing in order to enact the Pig Latin exercise, I’m struggling to read both the in-game UI of DF and also some of the text associated with it. Along with this, I’m a bit worried that it would be a bad thing to fully understand DF, or that if I ever did come to fully understand it, it would be at the expense of being able to, say, successfully complete a dissertation on anything else. What can we say for the depth of discourse and the proliferation of specialized signs that circulate around the game? When does the point of a game become its discourse community, rather than something one goes to to “have fun”?