![]() ![]() First, the richness of underlying simulations (and the stories that emerge from them) are often not made apparent to the player. Looking to completed experiences, namely simulation games like Dwarf Fortress and The Sims, we describe a series of shortcomings that yield interesting design challenges at the level of interaction. Prior work in this area has largely concerned the development and tuning of the simulations themselves from which interesting stories may reliably emerge, but this approach will not necessarily improve system performance at its most crucial level-the actual interactive experience. We introduce a research framework for the design of interactive experiences in the domain of emergent narrative, an application area of computational narrative in which stories emerge bottom-up from the behavior of autonomous characters in a simulated storyworld. The players, however, have the satisfaction of taking away the battle stories surrounding their experiences. Nothing is permanent as the inhospitable wilderness of the digital landscape will always destroy the player’s fleeting successes. ![]() By creating unwinnable conditions and a merciless virtual environment of geological transformation, Dwarf Fortress builds a game around failure. In Dwarf Fortress, as well as other examples of procedurally-generated worlds such as Eskil Steenberg’s Love and Markus Persson’s Minecraft, play manifests as storytelling. The ASCII interface mediates the feedback between human player and computational processes. In this book chapter, we explore the relationship between the graphically-minimal textual architecture and the computational processes that define the game. Dwarf Fortress transforms from a world generator into a story generator. The textual artifacts produced in response to the game could be called dwarven epitaphs, ludic obituaries created to memorialize the death of play. Given that failure is the rule, not the exception and that such a minimal graphical output belies complex algorithmic operations, the players have turned towards narration as a means of sharing their experience with other players. Dwarf Fortress, a freeware computer game in constant development since 2006 by Tarn and Zach Adams of Bay 12 Games, has become the progenitor of a new genre of videogames which employ the enhanced processing power of home computers to push not pixels, but processes. ![]()
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