#Dwarf fortress ascii list simulator#

Production of these goods may require the dwarves to intensify the exploitation of their environment in search of novel raw materials. Nobles might demand the production of certain goods and require larger well-appointed living quarters. Extraction spawns militarization.Ĭausality can flow the other way too: the accumulation of surplus attracts more settlers, a larger, wealthier fortress eventually attracts nobles. The danger this exposure creates may move a player to form a militia, a hard division of labor with large social consequences. Abstraction! However, this is not the case when Dwarves deforest their immediate surroundings then have to travel dangerously far or deeper into the earth to meet their immediate needs. That is, making stuff transforms ecologies, transformed ecologies transform social structures. Production changes the conditions of production and, in turn, the relations of production. Community is defined by its relations to the conditions of production. In Grundrisse, Marx posits a dialectical relationship between the conditions of production and the relations of production. Though Dwarf Fortress is thick with context, it still rests on the dangerous colonial fantasy that there is an unpopulated slice of the world left to settle.ĭwarf Fortress’ capacious accounting of stuff (rendered fat, damp shoes, memories, mushrooms) also creates dramas between nature and culture. Colonialism without context, the production of the desire for terra nullius. These games allow their players to enact Robinsonades, the fantasy of a single individual building a hermit civilization from scratch in an island of wilderness presented as a blank slate. A player might ignore much of this history-but it’s there.įor this reason, Dwarf Fortress is unlike other games that procedurally generate worlds ( No Man’s Sky, Minecraft). In generating and coordinating all this information, the game can still crash new CPUs. In this ocean of data, Dwarf Fortress proposes the intense relationality between people and things: everything carries its history and most events leave their mark. The game’s crude graphical display floats on an ocean of data. There is the stratigraphy of objects: maker, owner, condition, history. There is the stratigraphy of a dwarf’s body: skin, organ, bone, thought. There is a geology of the world upon which the dwarfs perform their own stratigraphy, burrowing beneath layers of dirt, mineral, aquifers, and strange subterranean ecologies. And it continues to try and account for vast arrays of things everything has its own condition and history of relations.

From its inception, the game has procedurally generated a world with things that relate, evolve, die, and reproduce. The game’s complicated (cluttered?) present is the product of a mind-boggling past. The mule is burning.” That mule was a mule someone saw, burning, and now it is in rock.

What text is this sock made of? Who does it belong to? What is the status of Nil Koludib’s organs? What words has Zaneg Racklocks the Speechless Wrath engraved into a wall? “Engraved on the wall is a finely designed image of a mule. The endless textual accounting gives Dwarf Fortress’ digital world a peculiar sort of materiality. For example, here’s the dwarf Nil Koludib: Where visual objects are empty balloons in most games, Dwarf Fortress’ Foucauldian eye vivisects simple surfaces into complex depths and translates this all into endless coils of text. The graphics are crude (not retro) ASCII but you can stop the game at any point to access text describing the dwarves and the world around them. Gorgeous, strange, grotesque, banal, and exhausting waves of textual description. Why does it inspire compelling exegesis?ĭescription. It’s the only one I’ll watch someone play, partly because it’s so difficult, partly because the game inspires compelling exegesis. Yet this impossible game has a cult following. Also, the graphics suck, the interface is garbage, and there is no narrative. Toggling around may result in the flourishing of your dwarven home or may lead to a downward spiral in which all your citizens kill each other or die of sadness. Its interface is a strange organ of levers, dials, and gauges. Playing Dwarf Fortress is like an English professor operating a nuclear reactor. But Dwarf Fortress’ dwarves don’t love following orders cause and effect are complex outcomes are often systemic and betray intentions. “Civilization simulator” may bring to mind a God-like player whose commands move mountains.

#Dwarf fortress ascii list simulator#

Dwarf Fortress is an open-ended civilization simulator designed by Tarn and Zach Adams and in continuous development since 2002.