Strike the Earth!
Dwarf Fortress has grown to become one of the greatest games I've played in my life, and this is not something that I would think at first. I'm used to high end graphics and even went deep into the subject while in College and even after it as I've given classes on the subject for undergraduate courses. I also enjoy gaming, digital, tabletop or athletic, games are my jam, and is funny how an indie game with non-existing graphics and a cumbersome UI has become one of my favorite games.
I've got into the game for nothing more than a couple years and since day one I've got really into the game, and had a quite successful first fort, abandoning it due to the high population causing performance issues. It's important to clarify that the game, even though has gaming elements to it, has no clear goal for the player, or achievable victory condition. You as the player is left in a rich and detailed world with very little information on what you could even want to do. It's up to the player to decide how he wants to run his game, as in a tabletop or live RPG session, your small story is set in much bigger world with a rich and long history that you may or may not impact. This can be seen as an advantage but also a disadvantage as the flexibility doesn't come with any guidance and that may push some new players away from trying it. One thing that kept bringing me back was the way it portraits individual personalities of each dwarf and the stories that would come out of that, it was the fact that in a way it was a simulation of a society with individual and collective needs that had to be organized by you, the player.
I tend to see Dwarf Fortress more of a History Simulator than a game, as it's how I mostly play it, creating brand new worlds, navigating their geography and history and then striking the earth and looking for ways of leaving my mark. For a player to start it's first game, a world must first be created, and not only the geography of this world will be created, procedurally by the game, or some random events will be sprinkled around, in this game, all history is simulated and generated according to individual events and some notable historical figures and places. This encompasses also many cultural aspects of a society as language, music, art and religion. The world that you embark is there not for you and may not even care about you, it's what the interactions of what happened to be there at the beginning lead it to be. The fact that Dwarf Fortress is unfinished makes the distinction stronger, as it would be the case for a nice "research-like" simulation rather than a game, that people would expect to be done when it's launched. It's strange for a game to be "in development" while it has a consistent fanbase, rich game tutorial and documentation and a very diverse list of mods. It's more usual for PC games but it's still very unusual to have this success and not being an online game where your bread and butter is to keep players in even while the game is being developed. Dwarf Fortress is a single player game and even if you wanted to play in the same world with friends, it's not suited for that, couldn't run simultaneously or it would involve huge data transfers. Now, if you think of it as a simulation than all starts to make sense, it doesn't have the same commercial framework as a game, it's more flexible and in touch with the community, it doesn't have a victory condition and it can run for as long as you are willing to keep it running.
When we think of it as a simulation, it opens space for a type of scientific inquiry of the aspects it tries to simulate, and here is where I think many people got really into the game, Dwarf Fortress has an incredibly well though social and psychological simulation in it, and this allows players to experiment on a very rich and interesting set of fields that we tend to lack exposition in formal education and in other games. Well, it also counts with incredible fluid mechanics and geological fidelity, where geological formations happen in the game in similar ways as it would in real life and the diversity of stones and ores is enormous, allowing for players to get to know how many of the day-to-day metals we deal with come to be (and sometimes how hard it is to get some of them). So, in offering players the ability to simulate, with high level of fidelity, conditions that are hard to do in the real world, the game ends up offering a laboratory in which players can experiment and observe the consequences of such experiments.
The first time I've played the game I was quickly to assume that a hierarchical approach with well defined jobs and tight control on spare time was the key to success, as idle dwarves are a waste. But then I was faced with an ever growing wealth that had no fulfilling purpose, yes I could buy whatever I wanted from trade caravans coming to my town, but what would I want to buy and for what purpose? Why was I getting wealthier in the first place? So this was close to the end of my first fort, destroyed by boredom and lack of purpose, where dwarves were unhappy in their many riches. Even after many other forts that had the same fate, I still tend to be driven by the urgency and temptation of economic growth, but now I am more and more seeing the fortress not as mine to do as I wish but as the home of the dwarves to be what they want it to be and to be a source of fulfilled needs rather than a labor camp.
As very nicely observed in the video below, you as the player represent the collective decision of the group, their voted upon decision (but in a more magical sense, since they never assemble for decision making). The game is set with a non-capitalistic economy, where no common currency exists and bater is the only way of trading (and is never done in-group, only with caravans). The non-capitalistic comes from the notion that there are no markets in this economy, in none of the fortresses you will find notions of private property or of the bourgeois (owners of such property). In Dwarf Fortress, no dwarf can own the workshops, which are in turn the only way of producing goods in the game (you can still extract wood, stone and raw ores without them), and also, even though dwarves can have a bedroom assigned to them, that can change without any saying of the dwarf, which is not how one would conceptualize private property, so any property in the game is mostly limited to the dwarf's holdings and any assigned rooms. Also, except for artifacts, or items designated for a dwarf or location, anything is up for grabs, so whenever dwarves likes how a pair of pants look on them, they will take it and make it theirs.
Images (from the top, listing only those not generated from in-game):
https://www.deviantart.com/jonik9i/art/Dwarf-fortress-98919552
https://tr.pinterest.com/pin/532972937128646404/
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