Editing RPPR Transcript

Tarn Adams: Ideally I'd like to say Dwarf Fortress is a fantasy world simulator, you know, kind of along the lines of other sim games you might be familiar with. But right now it's more of a Dwarf Fortress simulator, which is why it's got that native.

But the thing about this that makes is nice is that the whole entire world is saved. I mean I do have my eyes on this being a larger project with the entire world always being active. So your fortress will be saved in the world wherever you chose to place it. And you can come back with more dwarves later to try and revitalize it, or bring it back from nothing. Or you can come in with a more standard kind of RPG adventure, and see what's going on there, read old engravings that your dwarves made a hundred years ago, see if the Dragon is still living there, that kind of thing.

And yet at the same time you've also been very critical of narratives in video games today. What is the role of narrative in Dwarf Fortress and what's your critique of video game narratives?

Dwarf Fortress sort of thrives partially on the same thing, except you don't have the same kind of background. But, the idea was to kind of create that background randomly so that it's not something that would be easy to get burned out on at least when the project gets far enough along and right now we've just got this Human Dwarf Goblin Elf Kobold type thing that's been done a million times. But the fact that the back story is different every time, and with the next release there's going to be a lot of additions to that, to the history of the world, because I'm putting the world generation wars in. It gives you an interesting starting point and the main thing though now that doesn't matter so much right now the main thing is just that there's lots of little moving parts and one of the difference between computer games and other types of games is that you can track an awful lot of stuff and provided you don't have a lot of bugs it's all going to be internally consistent so you don't have to worry about forgetting something or having to cover for yourself later on when you're telling the story because it will just keep track of it for you.

So when you've got all of these things going on, when you're a player playing the game, you kind of focus on the things that you're interested, and there's an awful lot to do. You can see one of the favorite little dwarves that you've been working with, something will go terribly wrong, his cat will die or something, and he'll start going crazy and pick someone to beat up and that guy will go nuts and go pull a level or something he probably shouldn't have pulled, and bathe the entire lower level of the fortress and flood it from something you have for your sewer system or something like that. And those kind of things assuming that you're really invested in that then you'd have a story to tell and the things that you'd be watching about it are the things that you're interested in. As long as there's enough floating around for you to look at then it's a different kind of way of getting a narrative out of the game and then when you start again, assuming you aren't jaded on the whole process, then you can do it again, share what happens with your friends and so on, where as the whole thing of having a plot or a track that you need to walk down or a whole branching path that you need to explore that's really common in computer games, doesn't really come up. I mean there are a lot of people that like that kind of thing.

TA: Yeah, yeah, I mean it will have more/less branches and people will try and say it has more branches than it actually does sometimes. In the end, as the designer/developer here, it's really hard to write that sort of game then stick with it for a while. I mean you can kind of become invested in your world or whatever; a lot of people sort of like to build up a fixed world and add all kinds of interesting details. But, like I said we kind of wanted to play the game too. And so, I mean do get to mess around with that a little bit when I change the properties of the stock creatures that come with the game. You can modify anything almost, as to do with the creatures anyway. But I still have to ship some out, when I say ship I mean include in the little zip file that you can download from the website. But the Dwarves are a certain way, and Elves are a certain way, and Goblins are a certain way. And although the reasons that I make them different is not so much to liven up the universe as it is to introduce new mechanics to fiddle with, that can be used by other people, mixed and matched, that sort of thing. It's still fun to work with that; I've got my Goblins right now, for example, sort of have this Labyrinth the movie type of pathology, where they kidnap babies from other races then raise them. And it's led now in the world generation to some very strange scenarios where a Goblin would kidnap an Elf and then raise the Elf. But then the Elf would decide to become a Kidnapper themselves and kidnap another Elf or kidnap some Dwarves and then that Dwarf would lead an army and so on for the Goblins and all that kind of thing. And all that just came up; I didn't have to do anything once I got them doing the kidnapping everything else just happened automatically.

TA: Yeah, that was the reason I did it, I want some cool stuff to happen! No no, I don't anticipate everything certainly. But you can kind of tell what's going to happen, right? I mean the second you put in Goblins are going to kidnap and raise these babies, you know what's going to happen, you can tell they're going to be leading armies and being kidnappers and so on, but it's so funny to see it. And it's not something where I feel like you know, well I'm heading, when I fire up the game myself and look at the world generation, I don't feel like I'm heading to the kingdom of Agrotha for the thirty-seventh time to rescue the kidnapped prince or whatever I mean I'm seeing something interesting each time that's different. And the way that the pieces fit together you really start to kind of lose track and it gets really interesting to look at the files. It records almost everything that happens, certainly anything important, but even things like someone moving to a different house or something. So you can pick a character when you're looking at the legends and look at all the things that happened in their life, and go look at another one and kind of build up this narrative yourself. It's difficult as a computer game project to get the narrative produced by the game so you can just read it like a book. We're hoping to do more and more with that but it is a difficult process to have it pick out what's important and to focus on those characters and so on. And string on all the events together and then do all that in standard English without being repetitive.

It's a very difficult project but even having the players just able to see the information and reconstruct the narrative themselves it's sort of a tool for them to tell those stories. And everything you do in the game, at least our goal is, it does this to a good extent now but we'd like to do more so,  get the events while you play recorded right along with the histories. That's already happening in a sort of half assed way right now. Then you can kind of weave your fortress, look at the history back before you were allowed to start playing, and just see this picture come into being.

What do you do in Dwarf Fortress to try and keep players interested in the game or involved with it? Are there any techniques or anything that you use to keep them involved with the game or the narrative?

And you just need to put in more stuff, more stuff, more stuff and that's more elements for people to see in their stories. And it's all really generic, so I none of the worlds that it randomly generates are going to be a masterpiece of fantasy, with all this really subtle symbolisms and stuff going on they're always going to be kind of this cheap Beastmaster kind of knock off Tolkien crap, right? But it's fine, because if you're into that kind of thing, you're not going to get jaded on the game for that reason, right? It's not like “Oh I'm just sick and tired of dwarves” or whatever.  It's not something that happens very often. I mean people do get tired of that crap, but they'll  come back or they'll go on and find something else to do.

In general you just need to put in a lot of effort in putting in details into the game and so on. And people get tired of games, I'm surprised some people have been with the game since I've put it out on August 8th, and they're still there, August 8th 2006, and they're still there. I've never stuck with a game like that, so I'm not the first person you'd want to ask about how to stop people from getting jaded or whatever, because it's certainly beyond me to stay interested in anything that long. So it's cool for those people in that kind of limited group that can actually get into the game, something's going right. So I'll just keep doing things the way I'm doing it I guess.

RPPR: Well again if you look at Boatmurdered you can see how each player decided to take on their own projects, and they sort of interpreted like, I mean you call it a very generic sort of reporting of events in the game, but people interpreted them to turn this Saga of these sociopathic Dwarves setting the countryside on fire with lava channels and things like that. And I think there's a lot of interest in, you know, reinterpreting the works for your own amusement. But, one thing that always struck me that was real interesting was the emotional state of each character.

TA: More, and more. As it started it was just really basic. You've got a Dwarf and you can set their jobs, what they do, and they'll go off and try and do those things. That's the very beginning before I released it, and I'm like “OK, I'm happy if they're actually working and not walking around in circles or jumping off cliffs or anything” right? So, if you want to create a character you don't just want them to be another unit in a war game or whatever you want to give them some more information. And so we gave them names, and it recorded their thoughts. Now the thoughts are when they see things they like, so we needed to give them likes and dislikes, have relationships with other characters and so on. It records all these things, their pets, and the types of animals they would keep as a pet, or at least the one they like the most. And, once you've got all that information, whether or not the dwarf is happy or sad, or that kind of thing, we don't really have a lot of emotional states right now, just sort of a linear spectrum from 0 to a very high number if they're really ecstatic. We'd like to do more with that basically because you have them in their thoughts they can see another dwarf with more stuff than they have and they can become jealous especially if that dwarf is in a sort of lower social station, meaning that the players kind of allowed them to have more things or given them a bigger room when the other dwarf things they shouldn't have it or so on. And you could say you're modeling jealousy at that point, but it's kind of weak, I mean it's certainly more than you see in a lot of other places, but it's still if that just makes their happiness number go down by 20 or something and they start pitching a fit or whatever. It's not a specific fit though, they aren't going after that particular dwarf and doing spiteful things to them or something, which is where we'd like to start pointing that stuff to get the specific emotions and having short term and long term relationships with people, emotional state that can flare up but still be different in the long term. There's lots of things that could be done, but it's a start. It's like every other system in the game you kind of work on it in stages and add things to it. But recently I've started looking at more things for instance for their personalities. Before a Dwarf meets other dwarves or things happen, now they've got a personality which is one of these partially implemented things I went with a, I don't remember the names of these things really well because I just find them on Wikipedia then look up supporting articles basically. So I think it's the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revised_NEO_Personality_Inventory Neo Pi-R]. It's a 30 facet personality model, they're grouped into five, five.. I guess the Big Five or something, things your sort of neurotic traits, like how paranoid you are or how angry you get or how much you can't control yourself, that kind of thing. And how open you are to new experiences, and how empathetic you are. And there's five  categories there and each one has say six, I don't remember the exact set up, I know there are thirty total. But six different little traits like how cheerful you are or how artistic, that kind of thing. And those are the ones I'm using for now. There's some weaknesses, you kind of run into the weaknesses of the system pretty quickly when you already have the world in place. Certain things, certain facets don't exist that you'd like to have and so on. But I've got those and I've just been going back through the game and making dwarves start to change their decisions based on their personalities, so now they won't throw tantrums so much if they're supposed to be a calm Dwarf they'll handle the situation; they'll be able to more grief in their life anyway. But if they're really susceptible to it then they can become depressed, rather than throwing tantrums, and eventually just stop or whatever and jump into a chasm or something. Or, if they're really unable to control their anger then as their happiness goes down they'll start wrecking buildings and starting fist fights and throwing items and so on. And a dwarf that doesn't like to keep their situation organized wont clean up their room as often and so on. There's just little things put in like that. And as long as you don't start trying to hammer things into, you know like making all the dwarves suddenly, I don't know what a good example is. I mean something totally extreme would be like getting rid of pregnancy in female dwarves or something and have them jump out of the rock walls or something. I mean people would be unhappy with that. And if you made all the dwarves devoutly religious, and you had to build alters, or something; The dwarves have beliefs now, I recently added, but they're not strident about them, they don't do anything with them. If it were only the more feverishly devout dwarves doing those kind of things, so then that's good, but just having alters for everybody would be kind of bad. As long as you keep kind of everything open, and just add more details, but not sort of pigeon hole the experience for anybody, then people can continue building their stories. Continue to imagine the mechanics that don't exist, while making use of the mechanics that do exist. This is sort of how things like Boatmurdered and so on work, I mean a lot of the things that were described in that story Boatmurdered were game mechanics and did do exactly what they say. But there are other things in the story where they kind of ... about Boatmurdered was that the story, I mean there were a lot of things that came from the game itself, a lot of the mechanics and so on. But then there a lot of things where they embellished themselves, right? If they get into a dwarf's head and start doing dialog and all that kind of stuff they were doing, that's all made up, right? But as long as it isn't at odds with what I've set up for them then I think it works out better. But if I made all of the dwarves a certain way, or did something like that to them where they wouldn't have that freedom of narrative. And I mean it's already true to some extent, right? Because the dwarves all live in mountains, if they want to write a story that isn't about that, then they'd have to have their dwarves live outside, which kind of changes the game a little bit. But you just kind of go with people, so I don't anticipate ever hamstringing anyone like that. But it's just something to be careful of. Because sometimes when you get into your sort of stock universe ideas, you're set properties of the creatures and so on. Like I've been doing a bit, for instance with the goblins when I was talking about that kidnapping thing, they've always been doing that, but now it's really a more ingrained part of world generation. If that wasn't someones notion of a goblin, thats going to affect their ability not just to get into the game but to tell stories, and so on. And fortunately they can just go in and mod that out, there's just a thing in the goblin definition that says they do that kind of stuff and you can delete that line. But you don't want to force people to mod the game to get into it or whatever. In the end I'd like to move away from the stock universes more and have randomly generated creatures and more randomly generated items and situations and so on. You can go so far with that before it starts to look like gray goop or whatever, but I'd like to start moving in that direction, it's something I've always been saying. But anyway I'm rambling at this point so.