Hello all,
I wasn’t in class this past week so I’m a little out of the loop, and I apologize in advance if any of these observations are redundant to what you guys discussed last week.
As I’ve continued with Dwarf Fortress, I have done my best to understand how people enjoy this game. The horrific user interface is certainly part of it; after 12 hours, I’m still shaky at the basic mechanics of managing my fortress. But I’m convinced that there’s something deeper to DF’s repellency: a challenge that prettier graphics and simpler controls wouldn’t be able to rectify. I’m not 100% confident what that is yet, but I think the answer lies in DF’s procedural rhetoric. What is this game’s argument? Surely something less banal than ‘death comes for us all’, right?
To solve this puzzle, I think it’s useful to consider how DF engages in Bakhtinian dialogues with its context. There are, of course, many layers of intertextuality here: the ASCII graphics allude to early videogames and position DF as ‘retro’. It parodies fantasy narratives, historical chronicles (per the Boluk and LeMieux reading two weeks ago), and even virtual pets*. It subverts the expectations that players have developed from playing other, ostensibly similar, world-building games like SimCity and Civilization. We could even go so far as to say that it dialogues with the wiki and the fan community, given that everyone seems to rely on the wiki to interpret and navigate the game.
Perhaps the really challenging aspect of DF is its hyperconnectivity with other texts and media. To get meaning out of the game, you not only have to know how to use a computer and be familiar with basic UI conventions; you also have to be fluent in nerd/gaming culture to spot the references and catch on to the game’s playful aesthetic. You must be familiar enough with the conventions of mainstream sim games to appreciate how DF subverts them, and unless you’re an incomparable genius, you probably need to access the wiki, navigate it, and internalize its wisdom. This is a high barrier to entry for would-be players; perhaps there’s a comparison to be made with big fat ‘difficult’ postmodern novels by Gaddis, Pynchon, DeLillo, Wallace, &c., which also tend to be hyper-referential. If you want to have an easy time with Infinite Jest, at the very least you’ll need a dictionary, a working knowledge of Hamlet, and a semester of French. In fact, the novel has inspired a fan community that has a lot in common with DF’s. Perhaps the true challenge of DF is that it demands networked thinking, as opposed to the immersive, solitary experience that we usually expect from sim games.
What do you guys think? Does intertextuality necessarily equate to difficulty? If not, is there a particular kind of intertextuality that makes texts difficult/repellent? Am I totally off base here? To what extent is it necessary to catch DF’s references in order to enjoy it? Could a Martian play it? Would the Martian be better at it than a human?
OK, enough questions for one day. See you all Thursday–
* Did anyone else who played with Tamagotchis as a kid get a kick of déjà vu as your dwarves starved? And am I the only one who always loses from starvation, and never any of the more colorful endings?
It certainly is interesting to think about the intertextuality that DF seems to require, especially when viewing it as something that might hurt more than it helps. It definitely draws on ideas of retro-ness and a throwback to the impossibly difficult adventure games of several decades ago, but I’m not certain that knowing about those things necessarily helps with the actual play. Like you said, the only thing that seems to really help is looking at the DFwiki (praise be to Urist!), but that experience isn’t always seamless, and it certainly involves way too much pausing and looking things up. So I guess my response would be that I don’t think the references are required to enjoy DF so much as the tenacity and mindset to keep figuring out the game’s processes when you know you could be doing other things with your time. This is where DF links up with the computer games of old and why people who enjoyed those games enjoy this one: they understand the mode of interaction required by a game like DF. If anything, I think the Martian would ABSOLUTELY be better at the game than us poor humans…as long as it still had the wiki…