Dwarf Fortress - Addiction in ASCII - Page 62

BAINBRIDGE ISLAND — Seated at his grandmother’s kitchen counter, Tarn Adams arranges his crayons and studies a written request from a fan.

“A penguin or penguins marveled at by dwarves,” he reads.

His brother Zach laughs and starts to sketch the scene on a sheet of white paper.

“That’s the kind of world we live in,” Tarn muses, and reaches for another request.

Nothing is weird anymore in the world of the Adams brothers of Central Kitsap. Outside their grandmother’s house, where they’re known simply as “the boys,” Tarn, 34, and Zach, 37 are known to fans as Toady One and Threetoe. They are the creators of Dwarf Fortress, a dark and addictive fantasy computer game renowned for its defiantly low-tech graphics and boundless detail.

At its heart, Dwarf Fortress is a simple colony-building game. Players start with a small group of dwarves and marshal resources to build a sustainable fortress, while warding off destruction by invaders. The fortresses always crumble in the end. “Losing is fun” is the game’s motto, and there are endless ways to lose.

What sets Dwarf Fortress apart from other strategy games is the complexity of the worlds it creates. Entire continents are generated, with distinct landscapes, weather systems, civilizations and histories, all rendered in simple text graphics. The elements of the game interact spontaneously, often with savage or humorous results. Released in 2006, Dwarf Fortress is widely considered the most complex computer game ever made.

Fans of the game are passionate, but to call Dwarf Fortress a cult phenomenon would disrespect the size of its following. The game is downloaded roughly 100,000 times a month and its online forum has 2,000 active users. Last year Dwarf Fortress became one of 14 video games showcased in a new collection at the New York Museum of Modern Art, alongside the likes of Pac-Man and Tetris.

If the Adams brothers had $1 for every Dwarf Fortress download, they might be millionaires. But the game is free and Zach and Tarn are not millionaires. The creators of the most complicated computer game on earth keep their own world pointedly simple.

The brothers spend their days programming and policing their fan forum (“I’m lucky if I can get eight hours of coding in a day,” Tarn says wistfully.) They earn a small income from the contributions of fans around the world, who can request a dwarf story or hand-drawn dwarf picture as a reward for their sponsorship. Twice a month Tarn and Zach drive from Silverdale to their grandmother’s house on Bainbridge Island to have dinner and draw art for their contributors.

The sun is setting when I arrive for a recent art session at Elinor Ringland’s Rolling Bay home overlooking Puget Sound. A river otter, fresh from a swim in Ringland’s koi pond, scuttles off the porch as I approach.

Inside, Tarn is at work on a jigsaw puzzle, a favorite family pastime. Zach is hunched at Ringland’s desktop computer, making the final moves in an online chess game he started nearly a year ago.

Ringland is frying salmon patties in the kitchen for “the boys” and mixing up a fruit salad. Over dinner she shares embarrassing family stories, ignoring quiet protests from Tarn and Zach.

After the plates are cleared, Tarn boots up Dwarf Fortress on Ringland’s PC, and that’s when the evening turns violent.

ENTER THE FORTRESS

Dwarf Fortress begins by creating a random world. The worlds of Dwarf Fortress are astonishingly massive. Landmasses, oceans and mountain ranges are depicted in a colorful tapestry of two-dimensional characters. Squiggly lines form seas. Spade and club symbols represent trees. A “d” denotes a dog.

Unlike most games, the Dwarf Fortress generator doesn’t stop with the scenery. The game builds a history for each new world, a history as bloody and convoluted as that of any old-world fiefdom. Thousands of characters are born, married, produce offspring and are killed off in ghoulish ways. Cities are built and abandoned, relics revered and lost. The randomly generated history gives each player a unique legacy to build on.

The characters of Dwarf Fortress are no mere avatars. Dwarves are generated with unique personalities. They have favorite foods (hedgehog anyone?) and phobias (sea sponges perhaps). The anatomy of each dwarf is described in clinical detail, right down to skull thickness and vascular structure, factors that become sickeningly relevant in combat.

“All of it matters in some way,” Tarn says. I nod as though I understand.

Tarn starts me off in quest mode, a simple role-playing version of Dwarf Fortress. With a few key strokes my character skitters off through the two-dimensional world in search of adventure. He’ll be assigned quests if he can stay alive long enough and meet the right people. We soon encounter a meat merchant offering coastal delicacies.

“We could buy some orca meat from this dude if we wanted to,” Tarn says.

We decline and move on. Minutes later we bump into a bandit and suddenly my character is engaged in pitched battle. A series of text boxes describe my fate in lurid detail. I’m killed quickly. More specifically, I am shot through the spine with a silver crossbow bolt and suffocate.

We pull up the game’s written account of my exploits and discover my character was the first victim of the otherwise peaceful bandit.

“And that’s because you went after him like a psychopath,” Zach offers cheerfully.

The brief adventure reveals the first lesson of the game. For all its complexities, Dwarf Fortress is ultimately an exercise in survival. It’s the stories created on the path to destruction that make losing oddly fun.

THE TANTRUM SPIRAL

To lose in earnest, players immerse themselves in fortress mode, the core of the game. In fortress mode players are allotted seven (yes, seven) dwarves to build a stable dwarf colony. Choosing a promising location is the first step.

Tarn surveys our randomly generated world and starts us off in a desert region teeming with strange life. The lungfish roaming near the rivers are harmless, he assures me. The tick people and the cave spiders might be a problem.

We set the dwarves to mining, fishing and building furniture for their new homes. It takes hours just to understand the symbols that define the Dwarf Fortress landscape. Only through repeated failure does a player master the skills of resource management, military strategy, diplomacy and mercantilism needed to build a strong fortress.

There isn’t a learning curve for new gamers, according to the official Dwarf Fortress guidebook. It’s more like a “learning cliff.”

In the beginning our goal is to keep the dwarves happy, and that means keeping them drunk. The dwarves pause frequently from their assigned tasks to chug down kegs of rum and beer.

“They can fully hydrate from rum and they need alcohol to make it through the working day,” Tarn explains. “They are dwarves after all.”

Sober dwarves become depressed and that can lead to what Tarn calls a “tantrum spiral,” one of the more disturbing aspects of a deeply disturbing game. Disillusioned dwarves tend to fall off cliffs or wander into lava fields. Tragedy begets tragedy.

“Their friends get depressed and they start dying, or go berserk and start attacking people with pickaxes,” Tarn says. One suicidal dwarf can bring a fortress to ruin.

They all fall to ruin in the end of course. Even the most carefully constructed outposts collapse, overrun by goblin hordes, flooded by burst dams or invaded by zombie gorillas. The catastrophes are usually spontaneous and entertaining. Impending doom aside, Dwarf Fortress is an engaging and lively experience.

The game succeeds, in part, because the Adamses are more interested in storytelling than graphics. All that detail poured into Dwarf Fortress allows the game to generate millions of unique stories, like an infinite library of fantasy books. And like a good fantasy novel, the game lets players use imagination to fill in the blanks. Dwarf Fortress doesn’t show a player what a tick person looks like, but the mental images are impossible to suppress.

The creativity sparked by Dwarf Fortress is evidenced in the homages by fans. After pre-emptively abandoning my fortress, Tarn punches in a Google search for Dwarf Fortress fan art. The results fill the screen with a gallery of dwarf-themed illustrations.

Most of the art is inspired by experiences players had in the game. Some are simple line drawings but others are skillfully rendered paintings that bring epic text battles to life with comic book detail.

“It’s amazing the things they think of,” Tarn says.

The gallery reminds Tarn and Zach they have drawing of their own to do.

THE WORLD THEY LIVE IN

We move back to the kitchen counter and Ringland breaks out a tray of cookies while Tarn and Zach arrange their pencils and crayons. They have about 20 drawings to make for contributors on this night. As usual, the fan requests are specific and obscure. One fan wants a picture of a metallic god he encountered in his game, another insists on the marvelous penguins.

The brothers have fielded much stranger requests in the past. A fan once asked the Adamses to draw his boss as an ogre whipping him with chains. He planned to hang it in his office.

“That was a great picture,” Ringland recalls with a smile.

Visits to Ringland’s kitchen have been a constant for the Adams. Their parents, who now live in Seabeck, were on the move when the brothers were growing up. Their father’s career as a corporate computer expert kept the family hopping around the country.

The Adamses’ father began teaching them basic coding when they were still in elementary school. Soon the brothers were programming increasingly elaborate games. In high school they created a spacecraft game that simulated sections of a rocket blowing off with remarkably accurate physics.

They kept collaborating on games as they moved on to college and jobs. Both brothers attended the University of Washington. Zach majored in history and later went to work at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard.

Tarn studied mathematics and attended graduate school at Stanford University, where he earned a doctorate in geometric measure theory. The degree landed him a research position at Texas A&M. He published his thesis but hated the pressure of research. He switched to teaching after a year, then quit entirely in 2007 and joined Zach in Kitsap to work on games full time.

Dwarf Fortress — officially “Slaves to Armok: God of Blood Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress” — evolved out of the brothers’ earlier games and drew inspiration from the “roguelike” role-playing genre. They decided early on to forgo fancy graphics and play to their strengths — Tarn’s mathematically-fueled programming wizardry and Zach’s interest in history and creative storytelling. While other games pushed immersive graphics to new heights, Dwarf Fortress cultivated a retro vibe and hooked hard-core gamers with its complexity.

The decision led to inevitable criticism and sometimes derision as Dwarf Fortress rose to indy fame. Other, less-detailed games, including the now-ubiquitous Minecraft, packaged elements of Dwarf Fortress with better graphics and went on to rake in millions. Why not polish the look of Dwarf Fortress and take the game mainstream?

It’s a familiar question, one Tarn shrugs off. They could always dumb down Dwarf Fortress, he says. They could hire a staff of developers and juice up the graphics. It might make them rich or it might destroy their life’s work.

“We could always stop and make a simple game,” Tarn says. “But we’re not into that.”

Instead, they’ve steadily improved Dwarf Fortress for a decade. Tarn is always working on an update to add fresh content and keep fans engaged. The brothers earn about $3,000 a month from player contributions, a figure that jumps to more than $10,000 after a major game update. It’s enough to make a living.

There’s a logic to the Adamses’ chosen path. Mainstream games can boom or bust in a matter of weeks. Dwarf Fortress is enshrined in a museum. Other game developers live from big release to big release, searching for the next hit. Tarn and Zach visit their grandmother.

“Not having to live that way is a big bonus,” Tarn says, looking up from a dwarf drawing.

It’s 9:30 p.m. by the time they fulfill the last fan request and spread the drawings out on the kitchen counter for inspection. Ringland has brewed a fresh pot of coffee. I decline a cup and say my goodbyes.

Tarn and Zach’s workday is just beginning. Toady One and Threetoe will be up until the early morning, coding new wrinkles into the Dwarf Fortress combat mechanics and patrolling for lewd pictures from the fan forum.

That’s the kind of world they live in.