It’s the masochistic procedure of learning to play, of learning the character and aims of the online community, learning to judge yourself against them, rate yourself by their impossible standards. The game of Dwarf Fortress isn’t just Dwarf Fortress the executable, Dwarf Fortress the little black ASCII window that runs behind my browser, plunking out its sad MIDI soundtrack: it’s Dwarf Fortress the process. A good forty hours, over maybe three weeks. I consider that the end of my first game. That was a week and a half ago, and I haven’t played a moment of it since. Instead, I played it just long enough that I could sit back and say to myself, Laura, you know how to play this game-then I stopped playing it. Let’s metaphor nerdier: I spent my thousand years in the sarlaac of Dwarf Fortress and emerged stronger, if a bit corroded.

It sucks you up and breaks you down and spits you out.

See, Dwarf Fortress is a kind of crazy quicksand. I read an entire sixty-page forum thread about endgame scenarios I’m unlikely to ever play myself. I started six or seven different fortresses in different locations. I played the game every moment of my free time. I peeled back the idiotic user interface, the absurd ASCII graphics, the nonsensical input-output scheme that drives the game’s guts. I felt out the slope of the learning curve. I saw what others have done with this crazy machine: I became intimate with the game’s systems, and with the possibilities those systems create. I learned that this game has a tighter, more-entrenched community language than many MMOs do, and a body of foundational folk– history comparable in breadth to that of a minor US state. I read about the importance of digging wells before the winter hits. In DF lingo, this is known as a 'tantrum spiral'. The leftover ones went mad, ripped off all their clothes, and died of thirst. Two of them killed themselves, or were killed by their tantruming friends-I couldn’t tell which. The announcement bar at the bottom of the screen explained that, in their despair, they were throwing tantrums. The river froze solid, and my dwarves, apparently too stupid to melt ice, got thirsty. I told my dwarves to dig, to chop down trees, and to build doors and beds. I generated another world, fixed my keymapping, sorted out my starting dwarf party, and embarked. I made myself more comfortable with the pause button. I studied up on two different tutorial series, video and written. In fifteen minutes I was sitting back at the main menu screen, fuming, listening to the solitary audio track loop endlessly and thinking this is a fundamentally flawed gaming experience. I managed to survive for about eight minutes before discovering that half my dwarves had been killed by fire imps while I was busy mistaking my camel for a carpenter.

Dwarf fortress pc