“It’s a game about doing what?”

If you had asked me even 6 or 7 months ago, I would have wholeheartedly denied that I have any love for micro-management or micro-anything. For my entire life I’ve both been labeled and labeled myself as a Big Picture Guy, which when you’re young makes you think you’re more valuable than you are, and when you’re older makes you think you’re less valuable than you are. At least in my experience.

I started to suspect that I’d been wrong about myself in a pretty big way when I decided last summer, for maybe the 15th or 16th time in my life, to try to learn coding. I don’t think I can explain exactly why this time was different other than that it was the first time I’d tried to do it after quitting drinking, but soon enough I was getting up at 6 or 7 every morning and hitting the tutorial grind for a few hours before work. And I was (and am) loving it in a visceral way. Turns out, I like making things on very granular levels, and getting some code to compile and run correctly, regardless of how inane the task is, is a fucking awesome feeling.

Fast forward to a month or two ago and Dwarf Fortress, widely regarded as basically the Michelangelo of Tedious Games, was released on Steam with a massive graphical update. In case you’re not familiar (I don’t know why you would be), it went from looking like this:

to looking like this:

mirroring in many ways the graphical update I went through between the ages of 33 and 34.

There may not be anything I love to do more than buy things that a version of myself I wish existed would love, so given my history of never sticking with a game like this, I jumped in with both feet expecting to get through the tutorial and never think about it again. Instead, I ended up obsessed with a game in a way that I haven’t been since I discovered the original Civilization as a 2nd grader, only this time I don’t have to stand in line at the homeroom computer for 15 minutes to get my turn to make a move, and a girl named Rachel doesn’t report me to the Principal for tricking a classmate into saying the word shit.

Dwarf Fortress is way, way too intricate to talk about in any meaningful detail in something short form, and since these are meant to be dispatches and not treatises, I’m never going to subject you to some infinite effort on What Does It All Mean: Dwarf Fortress Edition. But I will say this: this is a game about things going badly, or perhaps I should say strangely. What Tarn Adams (pictured above in a photo and caption I stole from a linked NYT article) has created over the last 20+ years truly is something close to capital g Gaming’s Colossus of Rhodes or Great Pyramid of Giza. A masterpiece at a scale so large it ought to come with a conspiracy theory.

Quick Character Example

Here’s 1 of 11 pages of info on 1 of the 184 dwarves who now live in my city. All of this information updates constantly as they all interact with each other and the outside world (which is huge, with tons of other civilizations), and I can go and read through every tab of every citizen whenever I want an update on them.

The procedurally generated history, characters, and world (created from scratch each time you start a new playthrough) all feel so real that it becomes almost impossible not to emotionally attach to all of them. It’s a self-manufactured degree of lived-in-ness that makes my brain stutter occasionally because it’s having trouble understanding if these are real people I’m hovering over or not. Not because of their appearance (the new version is basically on par with what GameBoy Color would be able to do if it were made today), but from their emotions, behavior, and, as strange as it might be to say, their humanity. I almost got up in the middle of the night the other night because I finally figured out how to fix my colony’s wine shortage.

I don’t think life needs to constantly crescendo to some didactic revelation, but I do have a closing thought here:

I’ve spent my entire life searing myself with a directive to be successful in order to live up to some level of expectation or family birthright that I could not even describe or identify to you in any meaningful way if you asked me to. And it’s been miserable. And for the last 3 or 4 weeks, it’s been incredibly healing for me to just let myself be a guy who loves a game about managing dwarves who happen to also feel more real than most of the shit I’ve spent my adulthood chasing. I don’t share that because I think it means that you need to get into this game or even care about gaming at all, but because I do know that if you’ve been feeling completely directionless lately, a good chunk of healing can come from abandoning yourself to something you love, or have wanted to love, and practicing letting the rest of it go.