But this is a game for people who love frustration, and for people who want to talk about losing. It gives you lots of information you don’t need, and you kind of have to find your own hook to keep you from giving up from frustration. You may be embarrassed, but you learned something about how you messed up, and you’ll be prepared for it next time.ĭwarf Fortress isn’t a welcoming or friendly game. The thing you do in Dwarf Fortress when you lose all your dwarves is start a new fortress. In a way, playing this game has helped me adjust to failure in my own life. My adventures haven’t been as funny, but Dwarf Fortress has made me laugh more than most games. When I read Boatmurdered, a very old Let’s Play of the game written by several members of the SomethingAwful forums, I desperately needed to see the kind of mess that could produce a story of dwarves being endlessly attacked by raging elephants until finally the entire map was flooded in magma.
The reason I got into Dwarf Fortress was from hearing these stories. One of these ways to lose is more fun than the other - try to say were-horse out loud without laughing - but what they have in common is failure, and telling the stories of your failure to others. Sometimes you lose because you didn’t know the keyboard commands to get your military to the right place at the right time. Sometimes you lose because of something you couldn’t have prepared for, like a were-horse attack. On another, I used the wrong stairs and had half my dwarves trapped underground. On another, I forgot to get my farms up and running in any meaningful way and ran out of food. On one fortress, I dug into an aquifer and everyone drowned.
This is less a game about making systems that work and more a game about the funny stories you’ll eventually tell. That “fun” might be something as simple as having too many cats in your fortress and watching the game’s framerate slow to the single digits, a goblin siege murdering all your dwarves, or accidentally tunnelling into hell. As Dwarf Fortress fans often say, in this game losing is fun.
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