Oof, fuzzybrained Sunday morning syndrome. You’ll have to forgive my slowness today, because this particular Sunday is for being slow. Fortunately that can easily be offset by the quick wits of the internet, some of which I have compiled below for your continued erudition.
- Link of the week is the New York Times on Dwarf Fortress, which I am not sure whether it’s worth me linking to since EVERYONE IN THE WORLD already sent me the link. But anyway, it’s a big deal and it says stuff like this: “Many simulation games offer players a bag of building blocks, but few dangle a bag as deep, or blocks as small and intricately interlocking, as Dwarf Fortress. Beneath the game’s rudimentary facade is a dizzying array of moving parts, algorithms that model everything from dwarves’ personalities (some are depressive; many appreciate art) to the climate and economic patterns of the simulated world. The story of a fortress’s rise and fall isn’t scripted beforehand — in most games narratives progress along an essentially set path — but, rather, generated on the fly by a multitude of variables. The brothers themselves are often startled by what their game spits out. “We didn’t know that carp were going to eat dwarves,” Zach says. “But we’d written them as carnivorous and roughly the same size as dwarves, so that just happened, and it was great.””
