Dwarf Fortress Gathers At The Statue And Attends A Party by Joshua Lindsay Diaz B.A. Liberal Arts, St John's College, 2004 SUBMITTED TO THE PROGRAM IN COMPARATIVE MEDIA STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF SCIENCE IN COMPARATIVE MEDIA STUDIES AT THE MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY JUNE 2009 © Joshua Lindsay Diaz – All Rights Reserved The author hereby grants to MIT permission to reproduce and to distribute publicly paper and electronic copies of this thesis document in whole or in part in any medium now known or hereafter created. Signature of Author: ….............................................................................................................. Program in Comparative Media Studies 22 May 2009 Certified By:.................................................................................................................................. Doris C. Rusch Postdoctoral Associate Thesis Supervisor Accepted by:.................................................................................................................................. Henry Jenkins III Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities Professor of Comparative Media Studies and Literature Co-Director, Comparative Media Studies 1 2 Dwarf Fortress Gathers At The Statue And Attends A Party by Joshua Lindsay Diaz Submitted to the Program in Comparative Media Studies on May 22, 2009, in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Comparative Media Studies ABSTRACT In designing Dwarf Fortress as part roguelike and part simulation, Tarn and Zach Adams of Bay 12 Games drew on a tradition of game genres that used proceduralism and simulation to give players unique paths through the game. The specific choices in their design served their goal of “giv[ing] rise to some really awesome stories from the players themselves,” I argue, because it took advantage of what Henry Jenkins calls “narrative architecture.” Expanding on Jenkins' idea to examine narrative architectures of space, code, and player choice, the thesis shows how Bay 12 not only encouraged players to view the game as a world full of stories, but also gave players tools to craft their own kinds of tellable moments through the game. Tellable moments, as described by Marie-Laure Ryan and Lisbeth Klastrup, are events which, because they either create or break expected patterns, are well-suited to use in plots, and serve as resources for storytelling. As players became authors, they engaged in a sort of 'narrative play' through the game's affordances (and tools created in the community) in order to craft more elaborate and specific story arcs within the general confines of the game. This narrative play is a gameplay strategy in which players use the game's narrative architecture in order to goad the game's code into producing certain kinds of outcomes, outcomes which they aim to use for storytelling. Three different stories provide us with a set of tellable moments in which narrative play alternatively responds to gameplay challenge, creates an environment that embodied and staged story, and reconfigures code in order to create new types of tellable moments. 3 4 Table of Contents 1 Strike the Earth! An Introductory Overture...........................................................................................6 2 Defining our Object? ...........................................................................................................................11 2.1 Development ...............................................................................................................................13 2.2 Visual Appearance........................................................................................................................14 2.3 Genre ...........................................................................................................................................16 3 A Complex Taste : The Butcher's Tale.................................................................................................23 4 Narrative in from Games .....................................................................................................................31 4.2 Reading and Collaboration ..........................................................................................................36 4.3 Kinds of Writing...........................................................................................................................40 4.4 Summary .....................................................................................................................................42 5 Delving Deep: Narrative Architecture and its forms............................................................................44 5.1 Architecture of Space...................................................................................................................45 5.2 Architecture of Code....................................................................................................................62 5.3 Architecture of Choice..................................................................................................................79 6 Tellable Moments ...............................................................................................................................89 6.1 Defining Tellable Moments..........................................................................................................90 6.2 Pattern-Building and Breaking Expectations...............................................................................91 6.3 Where do moments come from?...................................................................................................94 6.4 Tellability and Social Stories......................................................................................................106 7 Case Studies.......................................................................................................................................110 7.1 Background on kinds of stories .................................................................................................110 8 Boatmurdered.....................................................................................................................................115 9 Pirates of the Fondled Waters ............................................................................................................154 10 Migrursut .........................................................................................................................................183 11 Conclusion........................................................................................................................................203 11.1 Recap........................................................................................................................................203 11.2 Coherence.................................................................................................................................204 11.3 Tellability, Spreadability and the Knowing Eye.......................................................................208 11.4 Storytellers versus Story Architects..........................................................................................210 12 Bibliography ....................................................................................................................................215 13 Thanks..............................................................................................................................................218 14 Appendix I : A List of Authors, Players, Stories..............................................................................219 14.1 Boatmurdered: .........................................................................................................................219 14.2 Pirates of the Fondled Waters...................................................................................................220 14.3 Migrursut..................................................................................................................................221 15 Appendix II: Dwarf Bed Making.....................................................................................................223 ? : How do the player narratives reflect medium-specific characteristics of the game Dwarf Fortress? 5 1 Strike the Earth! An Introductory Overture A few months on and it looks like we might actually survive. We've got a farm up, got some bedrooms which ain't much to look at, but at least they've got beds. Got a dining room with some decent thrones, and got a bunch of traps. God knows why but the lads love them. Stand around staring at them for hours. Nothing out of the river yet, and the elephants have been pretty quiet. Too quiet. I see them out there, staring at me with those beady eyes, those gleaming tusks. Looking over the river. Elephants can't swim, can they?1 This is a piece of a larger story called Boatmurdered, written by a group of players of a game called Dwarf Fortress, and that larger story is a remarkable example of players taking a game and re-defining it (again and again, actually!) through their social practices. These stories, and others like it, say more about games than we realize at first. This passage doesn't call attention to itself as a piece of writing about a game. But in fact, it is very much about the game, and its players. In this thesis, I will show how the game has contributed