![]() ![]() In these games I either lose, or win with a 10:1 killed/lost ratio. When I win in Starcraft, it’s through one single overwhelming attack with extremely careful micromanagement (I don’t win in Starcraft very often against very good players). I’m often beaten in RTSs due to my obsession with losing the smallest number of units possible. I am also incredibly conservative in strategy games. I’m sure a therapist could make much of this trait. I like always knowing what I’m supposed to be doing. For this reason, I’ve never hated linear games - the much-reviled corridor shooter doesn’t inherently bother me. I have never been able to play Minecraft for more than ten minutes. Give me a large sandbox to play in without any direction and I become paralyzed and self-conscious. I am terrible at setting my own goals in games. I do keep it fully updated, just in case, but haven’t started a fortress in years. I do not regret having played it – I expect you have to play it at least a little in order to understand what other people are talking about – but I do not imagine I will ever play it again. I do not, however, love actually playing the game. I love the weird AI, the patently absurd level of detail, the bizarre glitches which render trout incredibly dangerous. ![]() I love reading Let’s Plays and listening to stories generated by that magical point where the player’s choices and self-selected objectives meet the uncompromising nature of the game’s rules. While there are other games which might be more obviously comprehensible in a museum setting, there are very few games which are quite as geared towards being enjoyed from a position outside the player’s chair.ĭwarf Fortress is one of my favorite games. Yet the more I think of the game’s selection, the more I approve of it. To convey their experience, we will work with players and designers to create guided tours of these alternate worlds, so the visitor can begin to appreciate the extent and possibilities of the complex gameplay.”īut difficulty remains. “Finally, some of the games we have acquired (for instance Dwarf Fortress and EVE Online) take years and millions of people to manifest fully. They are, of course, aware of the difficulty: MoMA is going to have a rough time making Dwarf Fortress comprehensible to spectators in the museum. It is the world’s most elaborate set of tinkertoys. Any goals are self-set - the game has no end condition other than failure. The game requires you to embrace a sort of foolhardy philosophy of play (Losing is fun!), as conservative play is dreadfully safe and, therefore, dull. The game creates an entire world for you to play in, modeled all the way down to the level of the hearts and livers of the vicious wildlife, with procedurally generated history and politics, most of which you will never need or want to interact with. The interface is deliberately obtuse – without a guide handy it is very hard to know how to issue even the simplest orders. Hardcore purists will probably scoff at this, but the game is hard enough to understand even with this crutch.ĭwarf Fortress is a very weird game. When I do play the game, I use a graphics tileset, a mod which replaces the ASCII characters with rudimentary sprites. I’ve been paying attention to Dwarf Fortress for about three years now, and I still have to squint to read this screen. Its mechanics are impossibly complex, games take hours upon hours to play, and even trying to correctly read the screen of Dwarf Fortress is a bit like trying to read the source code of the Matrix: to the untrained eye, it looks like gibberish, garbage characters thrown together apparently at random. While exhibiting any kind of videogame in a museum will likely pose a challenge (one I’m sure the professionals at MoMA will be equal to), Dwarf Fortress might be the least museum-friendly game I can think of. After some thought, I realized that while I don’t know exactly how they are going to exhibit it, exhibition seems to be a very appropriate place for Dwarf Fortress, as my relationship with the game consists almost entirely of watching it from the outside. This is not because I don’t like Dwarf Fortress, or think it’s not worthy of cultural preservation, but rather because I have no idea how a museum could ever go about exhibiting Dwarf Fortress to the public. ![]() When the Museum of Modern Art announced it was going to be adding 14 videogames to its collection, I was startled to find Dwarf Fortress on that list. ![]()
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