Reading her thoughts, a story began accumulating in my head: the master craftswoman who feels nothing for her work. She didn’t feel anything discussing her problems with an acquaintance.She didn’t feel anything due to inebriation.I know this because you can look at a list of her thoughts, which have included: Despite her skill, she finds work unsatisfying. An odd quirk of her characteristics made it so that she seemed to produce almost exclusively masterwork items. She’s furnished the entire fortress with beds, tables, chairs - you name it. Image: Bay 12 Games/Kitfox Games via Polygon But once I had a vaguely functioning miniature society (forgetting, for a moment, all my dying animals), I wasn’t quite sure what I should focus on next. Sure, there was the basic video game satisfaction of making order out of chaos, which in this case meant making berries into booze and watching my dwarves’ happiness levels shoot up. I struggled at first to feel grounded in what I was doing. It asks you not so much to play the game but to participate in it. Dwarf Fortress has demanded more of me than I’m accustomed to when playing games. “It’s really sort of a collaboration with the player to produce a bunch of stories.” “Your own mind is a story-building engine, and we can help that,” he said. In a more recent conversation with Noclip, Tarn spoke about the game as a sort of writing prompt. In an interview with The Guardian, Zach Adams, who created the game with his brother Tarn, said that development of Dwarf Fortress began with the two writing short stories. My comparison to the writing process is not accidental. The Steam release has a helpful and welcome tutorial, guiding you through the basics of surviving the winter, but in a game where you can open up entire submenus dedicated to diplomacy between civilizations before you’ve had a chance to build so much as a trade depot, my initial hours felt like someone had taught me to spell, only to then immediately ask me to write a novel. To call the game complex is to do it a disservice. To play Dwarf Fortress is to Google its complexities. If you want curated lists of our favorite media, check out What to Play and What to Watch. When we award the Polygon Recommends badge, it’s because we believe the recipient is uniquely thought-provoking, entertaining, inventive, or fun - and worth fitting into your schedule. Polygon Recommends is our way of endorsing our favorite games, movies, TV shows, comics, tabletop books, and entertainment experiences.
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