A long time ago I was a writer for a games magazine called Edge.
If you want an audio versionthere is one on my never-updated website.
Last week I played the Steam version ofDwarf Fortress.
It’s everything it needs to be.Tarn is a good man.
INT #1: The Queen
I glance at the clock.
It is a little after midnight.
When will it happen?
Tonight or tomorrow morning, perhaps the day after that, but she knows it will come.
“I’m sorry to disturb you, ma’am, but…
He’s…”
In that trailing sentence her world will collapse.
There is just here, just this.
Just darkness, loneliness, forever.
That’s the future.
For now she sits and she waits for the knock.
All I can do is watch.
Dwarf Fortress is a treacherous game, a videogame like no other.
Dwarf Fortress is also a lonely game.
Isolated by design: You do not have direct control over the Dwarves.
Dwarves can be pretty whimsical.
Isolated by interface: The manner in which you direct the dwarves is arcane.
“It is so… a journalist might wail at an unfortunately placed jump button.
And finally, crucially, isolated by the aesthetic.
A smiley face is a Dwarf.
A blue tilde sign is a section of a river.
Each of those three points means Dwarf Fortress is all but inaccessible to the vast majority of people.
They are the grass, the blood, the rain: my dwarf, my Queen.
She bites her lip, she wants to say I know, I know…
These demands, constantly changing, will stretch your resources to the limit.
But you will obey because that is the game.
It is part of your story.
By chance the invasion caught the King drunk and fishing just outside the castle walls.
Noting that my thriving fortress had lost its ruler, the game had gifted me a new monarch.
At first I was delighted.
The trouble with vengeance is that it always comes too late.
Could things have been different?
Tempers flared, sparks started to fly and I could see my story coming to a close.
Except…
you might’t remove citizens from Dwarf Fortress.
There’s no, simple, clinical delete unit button, no way to vanish the ones into zeros.
You cannot tell your Dwarves to kill themselves.
But you’re able to kill them.
Not directly, not easily, but there are ways.
So it was I resolved to build a drowning chamber.
I designed a room.
A small, simple room, three tiles by three, close to my cemetery .
The second button filled the room with water, tight to the ceiling.
The third button opened a grate at the bottom to drain my makeshift cistern.
That would allow me to remove the body.
The drowning room could not be constructed overnight.
Sometimes she’d wander past the construction site.
It was three months into construction that I realised this wasn’t how the story could end.
So I wrote a new ending.
I’d been saving it to craft into something special and this was that thing.
I moved the second switch, the button that would fill the room with water, inside the room.
I placed the switch on the statue’s hand.
And here is what was going to happen.
She would remember the plans they had made for this place, their home.
She wouldn’t hear the door lock behind her.
She wouldn’t care.
She’d close her eyes, she’d embrace the statue, she’d place her hand on his.
And then…
Construction is finished and the morning arrives.
The statue is hauled into place and the Queen heads from the graveyard to the chamber.
She walks into the room and I tell another dwarf to lock the door.
He runs away immediately afterwards.
It is as if he knows.
She doesn’t push the button.
She’s still thinking.
Why is she still thinking?
Suddenly I see it: there are two people in the room.
She’s not alone.
Something’s gone wrong.
And this is what I read:
“The Queen has given birth to a Baby Girl.”
Impossible, I think.
She’s been alone since the King died.
And he died nine months ago…
Holy shit.
She can’t do it.
I can’t do it.
I bring up the door.
Everyone inside dies: The New Queen, the Old Queen, her three-month old daughter.
