people who only read Dwarf Fortress stories

[bvanevery]

In another thread, the subject of people who only read Dwarf Fortress stories came up.  That is, they don't know how to play the game and never actually play it.  Apparently such people lurk around Dwarf Fortress communities reading their After Action Reports forever.  I'm incredulous at this phenomenon as reported, as I have a strong "participant, anti-lurker" bias for gaming communities I've checked out.  Nevertheless it could be true, and I've started to learn a little about the DF community.

One thing I notice off the bat is its ecology is large, by say, the standards of this here current website.  DF clearly has enjoyed, and continues to enjoy, a much larger community than SMAC ever did.  Writeups about this bizarre game did things like land on the front page of Gamasutra, the major game industry developer watering hole.  Of course many of us scratched our heads and said, "WTF, why are they allergic to graphics?" and didn't get much farther than that.  Yes I'm intellectually aware of this complex simulation model they've written, but I have no firsthand experience with it.  DF seems to be a game inherently designed to weed out people who aren't looking for a diet of steep learning curves.  SMAC and Civ games in general are steep enough, it's not like I haven't put learning curves into games, but c'mon.

So I observe about DF, at least as far as its player base is concerned, that it exerts a strong "pass/fail filter" on what kind of person is willing to play it.  The "hazing" of the game seems to create a bonding experience within the community.  At least as they're inclined to tell each other on Reddit, this results in less nastiness in the community than internet norms.  Although on Reddit it is also pointed out that their forum is moderated, and the moderator considers it a lot of work to do so.  Maybe there are "drive bys" he has to contend with at times?  I wouldn't say I've observed all DF communities for all time, so I can't sign off on them being "drama free" or "drama lite", but they might indeed lean that way.

A lesson in all of this, may be the degree to which a game itself can shape a community, especially if a game is an odd duck that eschews conventional game design taste.  A more famous exemplar would be the early Minecraft Alpha, which in many respects is what DF could have been, if only they had been a little more interested in graphics.  "Steep learning curves" definitely drove early adherents of the cult.

[Buster's Uncle]

I can only speak to SMACX/Civ on the game shaping community, and it's currently got a range from The Troll Pit (a struggling ghost, partly because the frogs got sick of it and founded their own pond) at one end, to the Civcentration Camp (strong, but populated by a hard-butt staff and impossible members, subtlely in decline) at the other, with in-between The Frog Pond (owned by Old King log and not really run by anyone, but quiet, but also in a coma w/ about ten regulars not impressively regular) and Dung Mountain, of which I am king (buddy-moderator, and growing for years, but showing early symptoms of the owner burnout that seems inevitable).  There are several others in the middle no longer with us, and also CivPlayers, which stopped being interested in being a forum years ago, and I hear the official 2K forums relevant are pretty Troll Pit jr.  I'm a member at all places mentioned but the last, and have participated at all, at least a teeny bit, and am currently active at the Pit and the Camp, I kid you not -  seems to me like the leadership at each place has taken Our Kind of People and shaped a pretty broad range of community atmospheres that draw members with a taste for whichever.

I can go into what I think that CIVilian personality is, if you don't think it's too far off your road and want to just talk about DF people...

[bvanevery]

Sure, Civ personas are of interest to me, long as DF personas aren't completely forgotten.

One thing I wonder about Civ personas, is I'm clearly one who plays these games, but the vast majority of my life has been fundamentally anti-social about it.  Such that I'm only discovering a community about SMAC now, long after the fact.  So I wonder how I might be different from other Civ players, and I might lack knowledge about how I'm different, due to my history.  Although in other respects I'm sure I'm thoroughly identical to something about Civ/SMAC players, despite doing it solo all this time.

For me, soloing was an inevitable consequence of Civ/SMAC games taking way too long to play with other people.  And I do have old board game experience, like Avalon Hill's Civilization and Diplomacy, so I know what committing an entire day to playing a game is like.  Of course, other people clearly did play SMAC multiplayer, which I think is a bit nutty but they managed it somehow.  And I have managed to play some Freeciv multiplayer, but deliberately stripped down to the bare minimum to make it manageable, plus goofy "simultaneous turns" pseudo-RTS feature.

[Buster's Uncle]

(Aside about something you ought to  find lovely - this is my place, yes, but that was your call as OP.  Community tradition grants considerable -if variable according to whether the managers like to either make the calls themselves or decline to enforce topic discipline- discretion to the original poster's original post purpose, up to sometimes letting him choose what's on or off topic for the thread within reason, and here you can tell me what to do somewhat, when I post as just another member, and I'll even enforce for you with others, though this crowd is too cool for that to have ever come up.  Be tactful, please, with statements like "Let's get back on topic, please".  I have been slowly working on trying to get you edumacated about the rituals and whatnot of the tribe where openings surfaced - that's a moderating looking like I'm not function, which I just blew by telling you...  You're definitely ok to express diplomatic opinions about how much the conversation wandering abroad, provided it not get over-strict, the owner being the opposite of a topic Nazi and all.)

[bvanevery]

I'm no Topic Nazi.  In fact, on a forum for artists called WetCanvas, I very much resent it when moderators squelch the social conversations we were having fun with, in the name of "topicality".  At times I've pushed back on that.  They're a bit looser in the "social" and "debate" forums but sometimes they've been "too orderly" even there.  I think in a community of artists, who are a free wheeling folk on average more than not, it has the effect of driving various people away.  On the other hand it ain't no cesspool of hostility, so the moderation does have benefits.  Just sometimes they err on the side of c'mon, seriously?

[Buster's Uncle]

[Buster's Uncle]

A central thing about the archetypical CIVilian is that he's playing Civ and not AOE.  Age of Empires is great, but the little d00dz are running around ALL the time, and it can get stressful, and frustrating when you want to arrange something JUST so.  We're puzzle-doers, sometimes literally.  A lot of personality aspects that lend themselves to an inclination to read, SMACers pretty much all love SF and usually RW science; the straight CIVilian might prefer his Tolkien to his Herbert, and likes history, but has a distressing tendency to only be good at the wargamer history, not so good at making and getting jokes from Shakespeare, or knowing who Sir Richard Burton was and what he did.  A lot of engineers, a lot of desk jobs -although that might be self-selecting not-by-game 'cause even CFC would roll up and stop by the end of the year if nobody browsed/posted from work, but personalities that would tend to lend themselves to desk jobs anyway- and a preponderance of middle-aged, with many having been around forever and grew up at CFC or 'poly, and thus don't know how badly they're being treated.  Rather detail-oriented.  A surprising percentage seem to have mainstream-ish love lives, many married -to women and everything- and have spawned.  -Surprising, because there's no denying for a second that we're talking about, straight-up, a nerd -OCD/Aspergers tendencies being extremely common, when not outright sufferers- maybe more than a bit tending to the 'old school' nerd clichés, rather than the comicbook guy thing that seems to be the default in recent decades.

SMACers seem to be substantially more notorious for drama - I cannot account for this, nor explain how I stepped on it here.

The sort of people I describe ought to prefer Star Trek to Star Wars, but it turns out not to be the statistical case; perhaps that's cultural, instead, the latter being simply more popular ever since IRL, and at the right time for the mode age demographic.

Is this of help?

[Green1]

Thing is though, some of the people that read the stories and watch the LPs donate. The AARs and YT vids were a major contributing factor in DF being put in the Museum of Modern Art and marketing the game.

The engineering nature of the game attracts more educated, older,  and more likely to have money people where having a few dollars a month taken out of your account to support a favorite dev who makes possible wild stories is no big deal.

Looking at Patreon and the monthly reports, Bay 12 Games averages around 5 K on bad months to 10 K (US Dollars) on great months in donations. Divided by the 2 "employees" of Bay 12, the two brothers Zach and Tarn Adams take home probably 2.5 K to 5 K a month each if they divide equally. That's not enough to be rich, but there are places where you can live fairly comfortable for 2.5 K a month.

[bvanevery]

Age of Empires is great, but the little d00dz are running around ALL the time, and it can get stressful, and frustrating when you want to arrange something JUST so.

Yeah I hate RTS as a genre.  I also hate speed chess.  Drives me nuts, very stressful, even though strictly speaking I can do it.  Not enjoyable for me.  I want to take all this time to make perfect decisions.  If I'm going to play a fast game I want it to be a body reflexes game, like a FPS or sparring someone in real life.  I don't want my brain strained with "fast, fast, fast!"  The only RTS games I've liked, deliberately stripped down all the crap you had to do in them.  Like Ground Control only gave each team 4 units to manage.  Technically a Real Time Tactics game, not Strategy.

[Buster's Uncle]

Yah - as fine a game as anything in the AOE series is, it's still a little bit chocolate in your peanut butter in an unfortunate way. -Neither fish nor fowl.

It's not at all that uncommon for people in our community to like twitch games, but that's scratching a different itch than the one that brings us together.

[bvanevery]

Considering DF, I can understand being interested in the details of a simulation.  I've had that regard for most games I've played, i.e. Dungeon Keeper.  What I don't get, is being interested in painful, picky details of a simulation.  There's a point at which I feel, for that same level of mental energy expended, I could be writing a game, poring over the US tax code, or fixing the innards of a difficult car repair problem.  All of those things are work.  I may be adept at it, but there's a point at which it's just work.  It has no aesthetic elegance; as a mathematician, I like simple closed form results.  Eternal resonances of the spheres, as it were.  Not grungy crap of "this happened, then this happened, then this happened...."  For the same reason, I've never been interested in hacking, as it's all just piles of trivia.  I could see myself being interested in cryptography because that would be a purely mathematics + optimization problem.

[Buster's Uncle]

[shrugs] I'm a puzzle-doer from a family of puzzle aficionados - but I play solitaire on easy settings and cheat at SMACX, because I like finishing the puzzle.  A little challenge does a long way at that, to a certain mindset.

[bvanevery]

Doability and non-doability definitely attract different people.

I got frustrated with adventure games in their heydey, ending with Grim Fandango.  Always they'd devolve into games of "guess the author's mind", which would be inscrutable.  In time I just didn't apologize for it anymore, I'd reach for a walkthrough.  When the adventure game segment of the industry tanked, it sucked the life out of developers ever making any progress with the core problems of the genre.  New generations of developers would come along, and for lack of reposited wisdom and effort, would repeat the same basic mistakes over and over again, resulting in frustrating games.  I lost confidence in that kind of game, what anyone would aspire to, and haven't tried to play one in a long time.  A few years ago I poked my head up and made a slight effort, but the few titles I tried, didn't grab me and seemed to have the usual "brick wall" things in them.

Some people revel in the non-doable, either by temperament, or because they haven't challenged themselves in enough games for it to have gotten old.  Witness the runaway success of Flappy Bird, for instance.  In previous generations it would have been regarded as basically a crap game.  I figure what happened with that fad, is the casual gaming audience had gotten exponentially large, and those players hadn't really challenged themselves the way "old school" gamers did.

[Green1]

I think one of the things about DF is there is really no way to win. But it is a feature, not a bug. I could see it not wanting to be for the crowd that is all about "win,win,win". It's more a very detailed and simulated story.

Your fortress is more than likely going to perish one way or another.
Eiher some fire breathing iron colossus that's touch causes flesh to rot off moves through, one of your dwarves butchers an emu in an evil biome and the emu skin reanimates and kills everyone, you run out of booze and the dwarves go  homicidal, or the fortress eventually gets so large even a 16 core gamer computer grinds down to 4 frames per second trying to keep up with all the calculations.

DF is not even a true RTS, either. It has a pause button where you designate tasks (which may or may not be done depending...) then set them loose. Pause buttons are blasphemous to 4x. Unlike a 4x, it is very hard to control a single dwarf. The dwarves have personalities with psychological profile and AI. It is more like you "suggest" they do something and they may do it. How well or if at all depends on their mood, ability, and other things.

In Boatmurdered, the most famous AAR on the internet, the fortress died because the engraver got mad because a section of wall with one of his epic (and morbid) engravings was accidentally destroyed. He jumped in some fire, survived, then started murdering the other dwarves while on fire catching the rest of the dwarves on fire.

The point though of why the topic came up in the first place is this:

The AAR people did not make money on it though. Boatmurdered was originally hosted on the Something Awful forums that you have to pay 10 USD to post in (nowadays to even view, too. Don't worry, though LParchive has Boatmurdered mirrored as well as other places if you want to read a long LP). None of the goons got paid (Boatmurdered was a succession game). The only ones making money off DF stuff are Tarn and Zach Adams and a few of the modders. 

[Buster's Uncle]

Somehow, I've got DF and Minecraft lumped together in my head as similar - set me straight or whatever...