Caltrops - Gamerasutra





	[quote name="Fullofkittens"]...is what Dwarf Fortress turned into by accident. Are the stories interesting? <i>Yup!</i> People often remark that hearing about Dwarf Fortress is more fun than playing it. Is the game fun and replayable? <i>You betcha.</i> What could be more fun than carving a thriving city out of bare rock, with an underground farm complete with a waterfall-driven irrigation system, only to have it all cataclysmically brought down by some lady-turned-mass-murderer that went crazy because her baby died? Or whatever happened the next time I played it. Who knows? Is it the right way for a guy like Ken Levine to spend his time? <i>Fuck no.</i> Dwarf Fortress is in many ways the opposite of Bioshock. Levine brings up the example of board games, how they are comprised of systems, how they're appealing for that reason. True, but board games are more importantly comprised of <i>models</i>. The drama of Dwarf Fortress is generated procedurally with lots and lots of help from the imagination of the player. There are no voice actors in Dwarf Fortress. It doesn't have any specific sense of place or design. It's a bunch of fucking dots. The drama and the sense of place all comes from the player. The player is the auteur. Bioshock - for its faults - is a great game because it creates a new, specific, imaginary place in our cultural imagination. Dwarf Fortress is a toy that helps us make up sad stories about fantasy SimCities. Rapture is new real estate that you and I have both visited. It's as real as Castle Rock or the Nostromo. I guess what I'm saying is that I'm skeptical that Ken Levine isn't going to waste his time trying to offload storytelling onto players; he shouldn't have laid off 200 people in service of that. In the end he's going to try to find ways to insert his story into the players' stories. He should be spending his energies refining what he was able to accomplish with his good game instead.[/quote]