I always feel a bit odd because I don’t really have a proper attention span for playing games. I care about narratives, but I seem to have no desire to be a participant in the narrative. Whenever I pick up a game, I lose interest in it extremely fast. Probably my favorite game franchise is Pokemon, which is very linear, and I’ve only managed to finish one of the titles. I just stop caring, even when there are guides and obvious goals dictating my path. Even with the Sims, I mostly just make characters and build their houses. The actual gameplay is never as fun.

That brings me to sandbox games like Dwarf Fortress. I can’t stand them. Being plopped in the middle of a world with no directions is both dull and daunting. However, I did my best to engage with it. I watched two Youtube videos about how to get started with the game and how to work basic, basic controls. I had my boyfriend play with me for an hour while we tried to figure out where a good spot for our dwarves would be and begin to dig out a cave. I built beds for my dwarves and made a dormitory room. Now, it’s summer. I’m sure my dwarves will go hungry soon.

In an attempt to care more about my little critters, I tried to enter legends mode. Unfortunately, that does not seem to be an option once you’ve started playing with your dwarves. So, I decided to create a new world with a “Very Long” history. It took 50 minutes to generate, so here are some unedited screen shots from that process. (I shudder to think of the person JUMP mentioned who let their world creation run for 10,000 years.)

About every 100 years, the region would change. I did my best to not formulate any stories based on the names of the regions because I wanted to be able to judge the story generation ability of this nonsensically alpha game.

Once finally created, I hopped into legends mode. Did anyone else try and explore the lore of their worlds? Apparently, you can play in a world you’ve explored in legends mode, but not the other way around.

When I explored the lore of the regions, a lot were like this. Lots of people moved through or settled in them.

However, one of the regions that appeared twice during world generation, the Spike of Constructs, was huge.

There were multiple events entered for each of the 1050 years of world generation. It was crazy! Lots of people were struck down or defeated. Lots of people challenged various beasts in the area. When I went and explored the historical figures, I found a roc that had featured prominently in the tales of murder of the region and read his biography. In it, several of the battles I read about were mentioned again. He had a long and bloody history, since he existed before the region even began and was one of the first rocs in my generated world.

The generated stories reminded me a lot of the excerpts from Tale Spin’s stories we read. It made me wonder what exactly was happening behind the scenes and how Dwarf Fortress was generating these stories. One thing that made me pause was that in looking at the various historical people (lots of humans, dwarves, goblins, etc.), all the ones I looked at were of unknown parentage. Even those born in 1036 were of unknown parentage. That seemed like such a shame. I wish that Dwarf Fortress’s systems incorporated a sort of Universe aspect that made relationships between the characters more mandatory.

I did find a dead female goblin who rose to power in a religious group who had a husband and an only son, but that seemed too-little-too-late. In my exploration of regions, there were no records of births or marriages. It seems as though the systems privilege new figure-place encounters and antagonistic figure-figure encounters and their results. I found one story of a region being razed, but then that did not seem to impact the actors settling back in it immediately after. I found no stories of allegiances being made. Even the female goblin did not have “stories” about her marriage and her son. They were listed at the end of her biography as “related,” just like her religious society.

The exploration of the legends was really interesting, but since it was all centered on a world in which my dwarves don’t actually live, I’m still left with the issue that there’s just nowhere I want them to go. There’s too much black sand and silty clay in their environment and too much sand in my sandbox. I guess I’ll try and settle my very old world for next week and see if I can get the new dwarves to set up a cult around the Lionshell roc in the Spike of Constructs.