“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 But in the mainstream, it’s as dead as buggywhips, and been replaced by bazooka-ladled action games and incomprehensible JRPGs and various other historical flavors of ultra-violence, and Farmville.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.
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.
The folks at PCAuthority discovered something we already knew: Dwarf Fortress is for serious performance testing. Apparently, they used the WorldGen feature of everyone’s favorite roguelike fantasy world simulator to turn the i7 MacBook Pro into a really attractive griddle.
This iPhone 4G menaces with spikes of lawsuit.
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.
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.
Just finished watching Will Wright’s presentation for the Games for Learning Institute. It’s cleansing, I think, to move from some of the raw intuition that open source types present as social commentary and listen to someone like Will Wright, who’s actually considering the difference between “the social landscape and the material landscape” and has been doing so for years. The talk itself focused on the concept of games and stories as schema, fostering understanding of our world through lessons and cause-effect chains.
Wright obviously has been engrossed in story for his entire career, and during the unplanned delay before the talk engaged with an audience and pointed out that games do not supplant the linear narratives of books, but rather modify and complement them. This comes up at the end of the talk, where he discusses Fractal Entertainment– How modern “properties” or “worlds” are not a single piece of media, but rather multiple expressions (some cinematic, some interactive, some linear, some board game, some RPG). This includes not only top-down licensed expressions but also crowd-driven epiphenomena such as machinima and graphic novels based on Sims gameplay.
Also interesting is the concept of emergence not only within a game but also around a game, where the activity that surrounds, say, Wii Bowling, is as important to the enjoyment and definition of the game as the hardware and software. As Wright puts it, the absurd gesticulations one makes while trying to bowl with a plastic stick. But emergence plays a role outside the story proper, and becomes part of the meta-story, where the story is dissected and used as lesson (Wright notes that Blade Runner is the inspiration for city planners for The Dystopian Future to Avoid) and also as Story deconstructed into components to create what the designer calls “possibility space”. And once that space is created, story emerges from it, to start the dialectical chain all over again.
Of course, story is too narrow, and Wright deals with this by settling on describing movies and books as linear narratives, which is broad enough not only to cover romance novels but also monographs and encyclopedias. The convergence presented by Wright is mirrored by the convergence of high end research, focusing on model building and schema pattern strategies. And while these schemas and models are arbitrary, they allow, as Wright points out, the ability to map the patterns that emerge within possibility space.
So many years of so many toys has left the theorists of the world in flux. That’s why we have so many would-be philosophers with no background in the matter and so many academics struggling to understand their place in society cut loose from the linear narrative. It’s good to see someone like Will Wright, who is knowledgeable and systematic in his understanding of how the digital world and the social world mesh and the new subtleties available as a result of that meshing. And on top of all that, there’s a great story about the Soviet space program accidentally crash-landing in China.
“Dinner for wolves”
Against all intuition and spurred by willful nostalgia, I went out and bought the 4th (5th? 18th?) Edition Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide. I remember the halcyon days of yore, when I would spend hours of nerdy bliss reading about spheres of annihilation or various bits of Vecna–and even occasionally playing the games with others (which, in my experience, invariably proved that CRPGs didn’t turn gaming into a manic-obsessive tactical combat and resource gathering exercises, it simply did it with incredible graphics). Of course, if you done what I done, then you know what I’m about to say.
It’s horrible. It’s indescribably bad. I had to go pick up an old MERPS scenario just to get the Pepsi flavor out of my mouth. Apparently, despite the sublime comedy of Order of the Stick, AD&D can officially now stand for Attention Deficit and Disorder. So I did what any right-thinking modern individual would, and I checked to see how the copyright works on good ol’ 1st Edition and it turns out you can’t copyright rules (I don’t know how WotC managed to trademark or patent or otherwise legally absorb tapping, maybe that was all just a dream…) and, sure enough, a bunch of good folks (who probably hold Richard Stallman in higher esteem than I) have already produced OSRIC, the Old School Reference and Index Compilation or, to put it another way, all of 1st Edition minus the Mind Flayers, blurry cats and balls o’ eyes.
Imagine a world where anyone can discover a +5 scimitar, regardless of whether or not they want to have dragonpeople come along for the ride (don’t get me wrong, I thought Dragonlance, while kinda drawn out and cheesy, way okay, and anyway, it’s Samson Agonistes compared to 4th Edition).
There’s such an insidious breakdown in the quality of a story after you write it down. It’s not even the writing, it’s that people read it and they just accept. Like they’re listening to old-time mystics, like these things happen because they were meant to happen, no matter how terrible the fight or touching the makeup. In reality, they’re so much more emotional. You lose that in writing because you can’t express to the reader the uncertainty. To them, we make up because it says, on page thirty-three, ‘They make up’.
But there are forms of storytelling that have been able to avoid that.
There was this old computer game, Zork. You run around solving puzzles and fighting, but you could mix something up, do the wrong thing at the wrong time, and it didn’t let you know. You keep playing, oblivious to the fact that you can’t win.
It’s simple, really. You run around collecting treasure—platinum and jewels and… stuff. Well, one of the treasures is this Faberge egg, all covered with jewels and gilt. But the egg isn’t the treasure, it’s what’s inside: this little bird, made of gold. No matter what you do to open it, the bird always gets broken and ruined. Like in life, there’s no warning and, just like in life, there’s nothing you could do to fix it. Video games nowadays, they’re determinist, derivative or just plain porn. But those old games, they were like life.
Life, not random but not determinist, not like a book. Why does every linear work need conflict, suffering and pain, why can’t it just be a happy story about love? Because it follows a pattern, it has to: because linear narratives can only do so much.
In Zork, there’s this thief, he prowls around while you’re playing, and if you’ve got something valuable he takes it, that’s why when you find the treasure, you have to lock it up. If you let him have the egg, he’ll open it. Turns out you can get the egg back, later, and next to it is this beautiful clockwork canary.
But I don’t know if it sang, because I always broke it.
Not the kind you’re expecting, but rather watercolor interpretations of AGDI’s remake of the classic Sierra On-Line 16-color sequel to the only briefly named Hero’s Quest: So You Want to Be a Hero. Now, before you scoff, I know the artist and she’s eminently capable of producing more detailed work, but the goal here was to recreate the sense of 320×200 resolution with limited colors in the style of Persian miniatures.
Having Tea with the Enchantress Aziza
The ending scene with the sultan
The marketplace around the fountain in Shapeir