“Dwarf Fortress is really the kind of game that benefits third party viewers most when it’s transcribed and narrated and illustrated, rather than just watched.”
You’d imagine that, at some point, when all things approach infinity, we’ll be able to link Utah Phillips with Zork. The former, a storyteller and a wobbly, seems at least categorically dissimilar enough from the latter, the ur-Interactive Fiction, to avoid easy, triples-formatted, linking.* But I’ve stumbled on evidence to the contrary, in my constant attempts to keep up with the development of what the French refer to as le jeu incroyable: Dwarf Fortress. I’m not sure if it can be explained, or merely described:
On one of the forum threads at DF is a game of interactive fiction being played between a host and his interlocutors. Apparently the eighth installment of a series that, if I remember a-right, may have involved a surrealist examination of death and the afterlife. If you don’t know what interactive fiction is, or the adventure games that came out of it, then there’s not much I can do for you. You’re probably an actuary, or a lawyer, and you may have been the president of your frat*** which pretty much limited your early gaming time to Mario Bros and Zaxxon. Interactive fiction was some of the earliest computer games, like Zork and Adventure. Using text to describe a scene, the game allowed the user to type commands such as “tell Cyclops about Odysseus”, which were interpreted by primitive parsers with spotty results, and were just about the greatest things ever invented. The medium still exists, with IF writers creating strange and ambitious projects like Bad Machine or adventure game writers failing with yet-another-failed remake of Space Quest. But in the mainstream, it’s as dead as buggywhips, and been replaced by bazooka-ladled action games and incomprehensible JRPGs and various other historical flavors of ultra-violence, and Farmville.
All that’s old news, but what’s happening in this forum thread is something I’ve never seen before.**** Instead of coding the game, whether raw or with the various IF utilities available now, the story is being told by a single individual acting as both graphics and parser. Rooms and items are drawn up in advance, posted on the thread, and then a mob of forum-ites argue about what the next step should be (invariably with some rather awful suggestions followed by chastising and community self-policing that labels the originators of such suggestions as trolls) and then the storyteller “parses the commands” (with a few silly results) and posts the new graphics that result from the “player” actions. It’s the re-absorption of a method of digital storytelling back into a very analog and humane medium^ while maintaining the structure and memes of the original (bad suggestions can be disarmed by using the idea of the parser to respond “I don’t understand what you mean by X”). The storyteller as parser is not so alien as one would think–the parsers of many IF games were known and expected to have a personality, often mocking you for your foolish ideas or for your mistakes (and, in many cases, the way that your foolish mistakes lead to your demise). To see it come back and be adopted by an individual outside of the code and embraced by an audience is, well, a sign of something.
*Utah Phillips played Zork! Utah Phillips is the same as Zork! I wonder if exclamation points belong in triples and if they’re handled or if the nerds just see “bang” and don’t even understand that punctuation is useful for more than rogue-like games and procedural code.
**Procedurally developed agrarian landscapes!
***With one notable exception. Hey Riley! Did you hear that AGDI released a version of Quest for Glory II with updated graphics and a pizza elemental???
****Though it may be quite common in the wild, I’m not much of a forum-guy.
^If you’re going to call photoshop and forums “The Digital Humanities” then you might as well call it the Breathing Humanities or the Human-Operated Humanities.
I grew up with Frazetta’s vision of John Carter and Barsoom. As a child, I associated Frazetta’s work with photography and it was a real shock for me to realize that some human being had painted those works.
Craig Adams put up an excellent essay on the man.
My interview with Dwarf Fortress developer Tarn Adams is up on HASTAC. I tried to craft a series of questions that would allow Tarn to discuss issues important to various Digital Humanities scholars, and not just a maps-and-games kind of guy like me. He obliged:
Whether or not a narrative’s representation is effective really depends on what sort of graphics an individual player prefers more than anything, and the time and care put into the narrative are going to matter a lot more than the particular methods used. Even “@…D” can be evocative if you’ve been stoked with the proper context–it’s the most terrifying D you can imagine. At the same time, your imagination on the spot in situations like that is limited to what information you’ve been given coupled with the existing archetypes etc. in your head, and an artist’s dragon could be something you wouldn’t normally imagine, and that’s great too. To some extent, it depends on how much and in what way you want your escapism influenced by the artist, which is a matter of taste. In Dwarf Fortress, I think the lack of a strict, fixed narrative lends itself a bit more to ASCII to me personally, but that can’t be the basis for any kind of absolute judgment.
A headfoot I noticed:
I think he has too many eyes, don't you?
Playpen allows you to draw some extremely pixelated Harkonnens, but it does have Dwarf Fortress. Don’t try to rescue the beard mite, though, it’s a lost cause.
Saw this over at Know Your Meme:
It’s absolutely incredible. The timing necessary to pull this off, and the mastery of the gameplay elements… I can’t believe it’s been around for three years and I’ve never heard of it.
There’s a great interview with Tarn Adams up on Negative Gamer. Tarn and his brother are creating Dwarf Fortress, as inexplicable as it is marvelous. How marvelous and inexplicable and crazy? Well, if Baudrillard was writing Simulacra and Simulation today, he’d use Dwarf Fortress as his example, not Crash. Dwarf Fortress makes Crash look like Parcheesi.
Some days, when you’re working with spatial analytical software, looking for a way to shoehorn techniques used to study bighorn sheep into studying the historic gravities of power, you forget that you’re dealing with some of the most beautiful imagery to have graced the retina. There’s something about radar topography and electron microscopy that reveal shapes and patterns both foreign and familiar. Here’s Canada and the northern United States, round about the Rockies.
North America - 250m Resolution - Albers Equal Area Contiguous
Boing Boing has an excellent essay by the Superbrothers about the strength and promise of gaming as a form of communication. They even take on the alphabet.
Remember when Miyamoto made that videogame about those plumbers? The real revolution with that videogame was in the style of communication. It was a tremendous leap forward in how articulate synesthetic audiovisual could be. Coins looked like they sounded and they sounded the way they behaved in the context of the mechanics. Each element — the brick, the turtle, the pipe — was a well-formed, understandable audiovisual videogame unit.
That’s the genius of this thing. It didn’t need to talk much at all, it was pure rock. This was the native language of videogames: synesthetic audiovisual expressing a meaning, where sound and image and logic come together and feel right, where the communication is nonverbal but nonetheless articulate, where you understand what’s going on the same way you ‘get’ the communication of a song, the same way you can be blown away by a painting or a piece of sculpture.
And here’s a link to the Gama Sutra interview with Jordan Mechner referenced in the beginning.