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The Brilliance of Dwarf Fortress
- pohl 15y agoMy teenage son - who, raised right, grew up on Nethack - absolutely loves this game, and will occasionally stay up all night and be found still feverishly working on some elaborate construction in the morning. From what I have seen, it is ASCII crack. edit: I guess it's modified code-page-437 crack: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437 edit again: This article really is a very interesting story behind the development. Even if you don't play, it's worth reading.
- joshu 15y agofreakishly, the game actually uses opengl to display the grid of character sprites...
- efnx 15y agohaha! that's awesome.
- idonthack 15y agothere's an ncurses mode in the linux version. i use it to play over ssh, as my laptop is weak. the opengl is mainly for tileset support.
- Freaky 15y agoIt has half a dozen rendering modes too, due to various driver bugs and GPU performance profiles. There are massive threads on the forum of people trying different settings to squeeze out a few more FPS, especially on lower end hw.
- LakatosI 15y agoNice to see such a great game receiving some well deserved exposure.
- bcl 15y agoHere's the game's homepage - http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/ http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/ This looks very cool, and there are versions for Linux/OSX/Win
- exratione 15y agoYou're better off with your first experience being the mayday set that uses tiled graphics: http://mayday.w.staszic.waw.pl/df.php http://mayday.w.staszic.waw.pl/df.php Here's the wiki, which has some quickstart guides: http://df.magmawiki.com/ http://df.magmawiki.com/
- flatline 15y agoIf you're going about it for the first time, I'd recommend the Lazy Newb Pack: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=59026.0 http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=59026.0 Because of the somewhat eccentric nature of the DF menus, this contains a number of utilities like Dwarf Therapist that are, IMO, indispensable for running a fortress of more than about twenty dwarves. It also has a custom tileset built in and an isometric visualization tool.
- mvzink 15y agoHaving never been really involved with the Dwarf Fortress community/cult, but having played the game quite a bit, this exposé on the creator is extremely interesting. I always thought it must have taken a certain level of cleverness to build such an impressive simulation, but I honestly didn't think he'd be a Stanford Ph.D. Also, I'm honestly surprised they get that much in donations. It's very well deserved indeed and I'm happy to hear that they do.
- MisterMerkin 15y agoI don't play it, but Tarn really deserves more support as it sounds like he and his brother skate by on very little.
- Natsu 15y agoHe makes all of the donation information public, so you can see for yourself: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=87996.0 http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=87996.0 June: $2374.03 May: $3010.58 April: $3018.42 March: $4220.20 February: $2113.11 January: $2158.91 I added January from the previous post, just to get the whole year in there.
- vessenes 15y agoWhat's interesting is that they could likely be making notch-like levels of money if they went the minecraft route; some public server code and subscriptions would yield a huge amount of revenue. Honestly, I don't think they want it. If they were interested in doing that, they'd have found a publisher, and started segmenting up the game for sale.
- klbarry 15y agoDwarf Fortress is an outstanding game with features not available anywhere else, and I would highly recommend it. The background music, which the creator also composed and performed, is very soothing, as well.
- cjzhang 15y agoMostly I play it because I like chaining tame hydras in front of the bridge that leads into my trading post.
- joshklein 15y agoFor those of you who are seeing this for the first time and have any love for games like Minecraft, Civilization, etc... please take the time to break through the very steep learning curve to give this game a fair shake. It is truly a work of art. Please note that the Wiki helps make the game playable: http://df.magmawiki.com/ http://df.magmawiki.com/
- eru 15y agoYou might benefit from having played Nethack first. At least the culture shock will be a smaller.
- pavel_lishin 15y agoI still can't get a grip on Nethack. I think I need to print out the list of key bindings in order to actually play.
- johnswamps 15y agoI would try playing Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup instead. It's another roguelike that is heavily inspired by nethack but is more modern and more beginner friendly. I love nethack (I've ascended twice) but it's definitely showing it's age (not to mention that the game is pretty broken in some regards). Crawl has a better interface and tries to remove all the tedious parts of roguelikes, though there's still a learning curve.
- pavel_lishin 15y agoWhat's broken in it?
- thricedotted 15y agoNot sure if this is what johnswamps was referring to, but the two big things that come to mind are the Sokoban levels (there are only two fixed variants which can only guarantee you one of two things, and a lot of the time if people don't get the thing they want (usually the bag of holding), they end up restarting since the odds of getting it anywhere else in the game are pretty low after that) and the fact that you can do things like pudding farming to obtain items/corpses easily. A lot of actions in Nethack are formulaic and based on tricks, whereas DC:SS encourages things like unknown item use more. In the end, I love Nethack and it was my first roguelike, but DC:SS is just a lot more fun. Also, here's a post comparing Dungeon Crawl and Nethack that I just remembered: http://nethack.wikia.com/wiki/Linleys_Dungeon_Crawl http://nethack.wikia.com/wiki/Linleys_Dungeon_Crawl
- MrFoof 15y agoA few things. First, as mentioned in the article, the Museum of Modern Art in NYC will be featuring Dwarf Fortress as part of its "Talk to Me" exhibit. The exhibit will be open from July 24th through November 7th. http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/1080 http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/1080 Second, for those looking to get into the game, the two recommended video tutorials are SippyCup's (humorous) http://www.youtube.com/51ppycup http://www.youtube.com/51ppycup, and Captain Duck's (down to business) http://www.youtube.com/user/captnduck#p/a/u/1/yn1iW1QN7_s http://www.youtube.com/user/captnduck#p/a/u/1/yn1iW1QN7_s. ----- Tarn has The Fisherman Parable philosophy and I have a tremendous amount of respect for that. Doing what you love, no matter the "sacrifice", above everything else. He's probably the biggest reason why I've been working on the side to try to create my own games, so I can get the heck out of finance and do what I wanted to since I was 6 years old. Until that works out for me, I send a monthly donation to ensure that at least someone can fulfill their dream.
- danso 15y agoI tried DF awhile ago and liked it, but realized it would take more time than I was willing to put in it. Reading this article makes me want to try it again, just out of respect for Tarn's humble devotion and his pursuit of the joy of "just building things". I'll definitely check out the MoMA exhibit next week.
- cjzhang 15y agoIt's actually not that hard to get the basics if you're used to ASCII graphics or using a tileset. I was able to figure out how to play it (with the help of the wiki for laptop-friendly controsl) in only half an hour of poking around, mostly.
- NathanKP 15y agoI used to play a lot of Dwarf Fortress but like you I realized that it takes a lot time. I ended up quitting the addiction because I needed to get some real work done. One thing about DF: there is never a lack of things to do with your world. In my last game I built an engraved obsidian cast tower. In Dwarf Fortress terms this means I built a powered pump system to extract magma from the earth and water from a nearby river and used the water and magma to cast obsidian for a stone tower which I then hollowed out with rooms and storage areas as a dwelling place for my dwarves. Around the tower I built a magma moat for defense from the marauding goblins and zombies. The fortress has survived more than 15 years of attacks so far. I just don't open it up for fear of getting hooked on DF again. ;)
- jgfoot 15y agoVery interesting: "Tarn sees his work in stridently ethical terms. He calls games like Angry Birds or Bejeweled, which ensnare players in addictive loops of frustration and gratification under the pretense that skill is required to win, 'abusive' -- a common diagnosis among those who get hooked on the games, but a surprising one from a game designer, ostensibly charged with doing the hooking. 'Many popular games tap into something in a person that is compulsive, like hoarding,' he said, 'the need to make progress with points or collect things. You sit there saying yeah-yeah-yeah and then you wake up and say, What the hell was I doing? You can call that kind of game fun, but only if you call compulsive gambling fun.' He added: 'I used to value the ability to turn the user into your slave. I don’t anymore.'"
- pbhjpbhj 15y agoFWIW Bejeweled [Blitz] requires skill. I'm moderately good, second in my circle of friends and I go off the boil if I've not played it for a while, it takes time to get back into the groove. That said they do manipulate the scoring a lot and there is a lot of pressure to buy, buy, buy to get a higher score (that I've resisted, that's not my thing). Bejeweled is a very well constructed Skinner Box that has been effectively optimised over time. TBH it should be part of a course on addiction psychology, it probably is. Interesting comments nonetheless. Thanks for sharing.
- Produce 15y agoTo put it another way, the makers of Angry Birds are crack dealers while Tarn prefers to expand minds by selling LSD.
- mechanical_fish 15y agoI was going to say: I admire Tarn's exquisitely esoteric sense of taste, which informs his art and makes both him and others happy, but I try not to shame other people for being addicted to achievement. We are all addicted to achievement. Some of us are just much, much kinkier about it than others. ;) I have yet to definitively locate the bright shining line between a great game and an evilly addictive game. I certainly believe the people who say that WoW, Minecraft, and now Dwarf Fortress are excellent games, yet I don't play them because I don't want to be addicted. And the fact that, say, bridge and chess are socially approved addictions, requiring much more practice to attain skill, doesn't make them harmless. People get addicted to Scrabble, ice hockey, knitting, model making, composing tiny essays on Hacker News, mathematics, and of course programming just as they get addicted to Angry Birds. Is it the fact that these hobbies are less accessible that makes them less "evil"?
- dpritchett 15y agoDon't miss the chance to read through the "Boatmurdered" Dwarf Fortress succession campaign: Perhaps most fascinating are the stories that fans share online, recounting their dwarven travails in detailed and sometimes illustrated narratives. In a 2006 saga, called Boatmurdered, fans passed around a single fortress — one player would save a game, send the file to another player and so on, relay-race style — while documenting its colorful descent into oblivion. (After a vicious elephant attack: “A single untrained marksdwarf stands ready to defend the crossing, but I doubt he’ll be enough.”) Boatmurdered spread across gaming sites and made the front page of MetaFilter, a popular blog. “That did a lot to make people aware we existed,” Tarn says. http://lparchive.org/Dwarf-Fortress-Boatmurdered/ http://lparchive.org/Dwarf-Fortress-Boatmurdered/
- MrFoof 15y agoIn addition, might I also suggest the illustrations done by Tim Denee. * Bronzemurder: http://www.timdenee.com/bronzemurder.html http://www.timdenee.com/bronzemurder.html * Oilfurnace: http://www.timdenee.com/oilfurnace.html http://www.timdenee.com/oilfurnace.html
- jergason 15y agoBravemule (http://www.bravemule.com/matulremrit/ http://www.bravemule.com/matulremrit/) is the best Dwarf Fortress-related writeup I have ever read. It is fantastically illustrated, and captures the black humor and horror of Dwarf Fortress better than anything else I have read. Check it out.
- aeontech 15y agoSeconded. Even if you don't know anything about DF, Bravemule is a wonderful read.
- jmelloy 15y agoI haven't played it much, but I've always felt it would make an interesting iPad game. Seems like it wouldn't be too complex to put an objective-c wrapper around the code.
- cydonian_monk 15y agoThe problem is simple: The iPad lacks the horsepower to run the game at approaching a playable rate. Now if you were running it on another machine and playing by remote desktop.... Maybe. But to me this game simply demands a keyboard.
- cpeterso 15y agoI have not played Dwarf Fortress, but is the game really so processor intensive that a 1 GHz dual-core iPad 2 (with GPU) could not keep up?
- cydonian_monk 15y agoMy 3.2 GhZ Dual Core system chokes at times with it, so yes. The biggest catch is that the core of the game is not multi-threaded (though graphics may be depending on config). The throughput of a single processor core is the most important factor in the simulation's performance. The iPad, while nice for the rather passive computations it's expected to perform, just doesn't have the muscle. Now assuming the game could be ported to iOS (wrapper/emulator or whatnot), 1 GHz would allow you to generate a small world, and maybe play for a year or two at a low FPS. (I used to play the older version on my 1.2 GHz AMD "netbook," so it's certainly possible.) But in fortress mode, when you've got a great many dwarfs doing pathfinding (say, 80+) and a whole bunch of other stuff being tracked by the game, the simulation can be extremely taxing on system resources. Ultimately, most forts die from what is called "FPS Death," when the simulation frames completed per second reaches an unplayable level.
- shabble 15y agoI wonder how much of the simulation code could be appropriately ported to some sort of GPGPU (CUDA,OpenCL, etc) code. There'd be something nicely ironic about running an ascii-frontend game which required a serious GPU to play :)
- cydonian_monk 15y agoIf I had to choose a single game to play for the rest of my life, Dwarf Fortress would be an easy choice. The ability to build massively complex systems in a massively complex world appeals to the part of my brain that made me an engineer. There is so much potential in this game. So many things... hidden. So many stories to share. Just watch out for the Elephants. Or Carp. Or Badgers. Or the random, world-swallowing bugs.
- brianobush 15y agothat is a pretty strong recommendation. Must find time to try it out.
- aycangulez 15y agoI have always had an inkling that video games should be considered as applied math. According to Tarn, the author of Dwarf Fortress, who also has a Ph.D in math, making games "scratches all the same itches" as math. That sounds just right to me.
- bh42222 15y agohttp://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Edsger_W._Dijkstra http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Edsger_W._Dijkstra Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics;
- Natsu 15y agoI've never heard of other games spawning threads like these: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=77736.0 http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=77736.0 http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=82309.0 http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=82309.0 http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=76007.0 http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=76007.0 http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=80022.0 http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=80022.0 I've never seen other games where people use that as a reason to study geology, farming, beekeeping or whatnot. One person, not satisfied with the material properties of Saguaro wood and unable to find good data online went so far as to track down a sample and measure them. One person even mentioned that they neglected to study for their geology test and played Dwarf Fortress instead. They got an extremely high score because so many of the questions were relevant to DF, such as asking for the names of common iron ores. Any good DF player can list at least magnetite, limonite and hematite without any trouble.
- m_myers 15y agoI know of several people who have gotten history degrees because of an interest sparked by the Europa Universalis series (usually either EU2 or EU3), and of course some people have become fighter pilots after playing flight sims. But the sheer breadth of DF is different from anything I've seen.
- gnosis 15y agoDF does have very impressive depth and game mechanics. Unfortunately, its interface is one of the worst of any game I've ever played. It's a pity that DF isn't open source either, as then its interface problems would have long since been fixed. But, as it is, its lead (and only) developer doesn't seem to care enough to fix it himself.
- NathanKP 15y agoThe interface for DF is actually not bad at all. Once you learn the keystrokes the interface disappears, and you don't even need to have the side menu open at all except on context menus where you need to scroll up or down. I find it to be vert fast and efficient and would hate the game it I had to use point and click or some other slower method of manipulating the world.
- gnosis 15y agoI have learned the keystrokes, and have spent countless hours playing it. The interface is still absolutely awful. It's so inconsistent and needlessly convoluted. Just to be clear, I'm not wishing that DF had a point-and-click interface. I'm happy that DF is keyboard-controlled. It's just that this keyboard control could have been made a lot less painful with a tiny bit of consideration for consistency and efficiency. As far as roguelikes go, nethack has a pretty nice interface (except for the stupid # commands), though even there there's some room for improvement. DF should have been modeled on that, or at least with some input from players on how the interface could have been improved. At the absolute least, the author could have let the same actions on different screens of the game be activated with the same keystrokes, rather than requiring completely different keystrokes for some perverse and unfathomable reason. Another quite workable solution would be to let the keystrokes be user-configurable. That would go a long way towards lessening the pain.
- smarmius 15y agoThe keystrokes are user-configurable. Both in-game and in a human-readable text format.
- praptak 15y agoBeing a Nethack fan who has also lost countless hours managing civilizations, space fleets, cities, insect colonies, zombie apocalypse survivors' camps, I have three words to say: Must... not... play...
- rhdoenges 15y agoDwarf Fortress sounds to me like nethack in its difficulty but unlike nethack in its endlessness. You can play all you want, but there will be no end!
- rcxdude 15y agoa fusion between nethack and minecraft (and the sims) is a good description I feel.
- vessenes 15y agoDwarf Fortress is, in many ways, the anti-nethack. In Nethack, you can parse the source code to figure out nearly any situation, that is, it's a closed, nearly solvable system. (See http://sporkhack.com/design_concept.html http://sporkhack.com/design_concept.html for some commentary on nethack being 'solved'.) Dwarf Fortress, on the other hand, is totally emergent. Toady logs in and plays to check if his coding worked well, that is he goes looking for the situations he is referring to in his code and observes them. I love them both, but I'm enjoying dwarf fortress more right now.
- ghotli 15y agoI have long assumed that it will eventually be unethical to turn off dwarf fortress.
- onemoreact 15y agoBased on the type of world being built, it might eventually be equally unethical to turn it on.
- JabavuAdams 15y agoSeriously, though, bits don't rot. If we could pause the world, would it be unethical to do so? It's not the same as destroying the world. I'm just responding to the implicit reference to pausing-ai-being-unethical. pause != destroy.
- jokermatt999 15y agoIf you're ever worried that a feature will be too complex to implement, take a look at the ridiculous number of things Dwarf Fortress keeps track of and simulates some time. The article briefly touches on it, but like any look at Dwarf Fortress, it bared dips its toes in the water. Just a quick list off the top of my head... In world gen, it simulates geology and erosion, climate/biomes, growing civilizations, politics, war, trade, attacks by various "megabeast" creatures and their battles (in which injuries down to losing a tooth will be kept track of), migration and refuges as a result of war, (I believe) deforestation as a result of logging, and probably a lot more that I'm forgetting. That's just in world generation, before you're actually playing it. Remember, what one person can program when they're truly dedicated is a pretty incredible feat.
- jonnathanson 15y agoDwarf Fortress has a level of micro-complexity that I wish Civilization had. I think there is a niche -- albeit probably a very small one -- for more super-hardcore strategy games in a variety of settings and genres. Folks like me would love to play a game like Civilization and have incredibly rich, complicated diplomacy and trade and other issues that simulate, as closely as possible, real-world geopolitical issues. (In some ways, for instance, I'd love to be able to fight a cold war with an AI opponent, rather than an actual war).
- martey 15y agoWhile I have never played it, I have heard good things about the complexity of the Europa Universalis series. IF author Adam Cadre wrote a mini-review of it a few years ago: http://adamcadre.ac/calendar/10898.html http://adamcadre.ac/calendar/10898.html
- jonnathanson 15y agoHave also heard good things. Given that I keep hearing them, I think it's time I got off my butt and checked it out!
- GHFigs 15y ago
- ErikRogneby 15y agoWow. I thought Realm of the Mad god (http://www.realmofthemadgod.com/ http://www.realmofthemadgod.com/) had low-fi appeal...
- petegrif 15y agoCool piece.
- DanielBMarkham 15y agoSome notes: First, these guys are the real hackers. Not Carmack, Woz, Bill, or Zuck, or all the super-cool guys that made the bucks and then coasted (technically). These guys are living the life just because they love it. They're a much better representation of the inner hacker in all of us than those stories of riches and fame. I got the impression they would continue doing this no matter what their financial circumstances. Second, they've done their time. Somebody should set them up with an annuity so they can a) continue, b) learn to live without worrying about money, and c) tell stories to kids 40 years from now about how it all came together Third, this article left me gobsmacked. I'm left with one conclusion: this is art. If you're collecting these crayon receipts? Save them. They're going to be worth something one day. Of course, just like the game plays out, it might all amount to nothing. If I had to bet about the value of their work, I'd say it drops off short-term (next 20 years) then becomes super valuable around 2030 or so. This seems to be the pattern with semi-famous labors of love with cult followings. Seriously. Save whatever you can get from these guys. Very cool story.
- angrycoder 15y agoI don't know where you are coming from saying Carmack 'coasted (technically)' after he made his bucks. He is about a hard core coder as they come. Its not like he took some CEO desk job after Doom came out. From the first commander keen all the way through probably Quake 3, the stuff he wrote was all cutting edge.
- DanielBMarkham 15y agoMy point was, from a "how well-known are they" standpoint, these other guys earn a lot more points for just being rich and famous than they do for being great hackers. No doubt many of them continue to do great technical work that constitutes "great hacking" in anybody's book. But that's not why (by and large) people buy the books and become fans. If you are focusing on the technical skill of hackery then you are going down the wrong trail. I'm talking about living the life of hacking, as most hackers understand and would actually practice it, as opposed to being a famous hacker. Let's face it, odds are you'll never be a billionaire with your own rocket company. But you just might spend 20 years of your life working on a pet project. These guys are our guys. They're us.
- devindotcom 15y agoGreat article. Funnily enough, the Metafilter post referenced is actually the one I put up in 2007: http://www.metafilter.com/63759/All-go-no-show http://www.metafilter.com/63759/All-go-no-show
- cageface 15y agoJust as an aside, a game like this with deep algorithmic complexity but trivial graphics seems like a natural fit for a functional language like Scala or Haskell. I wonder why Tarn chose C++ instead. Was it just out of familiarity? With his background in math I'd imagine he'd be very comfortable in an FP language.
- mattmanser 15y agoDwarf fortress was started in 2002. Scala didn't even exist then did it?
- cageface 15y agoI didn't realize DF had been around so long. Scala wasn't introduced until 2003 and Haskell certainly wasn't nearly as mature then.
- ShardPhoenix 15y agoApart from age, there's performance - even written in c++ and running on a modern CPU, the framerate can get pretty slow.
- anactofgod 15y ago"Dwarf Fortress unfolds as a series of staggeringly elaborate challenges and devastating setbacks that lead, no matter how well one plays, to eventual ruin." Soooo.... One can play this game, or one can be in charge of a real country's economic policies. Same outcome. ;)
- hootmon 15y ago1st Carmack has shipped nothing of merit since DOOM. periodomissimo. I could give a crap about some esoteric C programmer utility, that stuff is boring and outdated. People who worship him are pathetic fanboy wannabees. He talks the walk, but he is no longer hungry and all he is good for is advanced BS. 2nd Dwarf Fortress is so deep and complex, I would guess that the hit rate of people who manage to survive the huge vertical cliff wall learning curve is around 1 percent, mere mortals quit. It is a major undertaking just figuring out which version to download and which plug-ins/extras to install also. I have a personal goal to get a fortress going someday. The problem with DF is you cannot see the forest for the trees. Its just detail heaped on detail, The span between an overview and the detail is so vast that no human effort to date has done it justice, such that only the most determined ever get as far as completing an install and establishing a fortress. At the beginning one is faced with hundreds of detailed options to set, searching related documentation only turns up a hundred more options related to each choice. Such that trying to make sense of it just becomes an exercise in futility. Asking one question, only brings to for 100 more instead of an answer. It is this mind numbing grognardism that appeals to a certain sector of gamers. People who relish detail and micromanagement. Trust me, setting up a starting fortress is no less daunting than any NASA prelaunch procedure.
- jl6 15y agoFor those of you worried about losing your life to another simulation game, I present: How Dwarf Fortress cured me of my Dwarf Fortress addiction once and for all - even though I've never played it: http://james.lab6.com/2010/05/25/withdrawal/ http://james.lab6.com/2010/05/25/withdrawal/
- Swannie 15y agoNice article. Reminds me a little of the two lead characters of "Makers", the Cory Doctorow book. But this is real, and mildly depressing. You want guys like this to be successful, and to have the choice to live the spartan lifestyle if they choose, or one with a better choice of food, beverage, sleeping, etc. options. Sad to read that relationships are not important though :-(
- LaGrange 15y agoWhy? There is some sort of an assumption that a romantic relationship is something desirable by default, and someone's lack of interest is somehow "sad". I agree that sometimes the reasons for staying out of the relationships business may be sad - or, more precisely, constitute sad stories. But assuming that someone can't achieve happiness in life without pursuing a relationship seems presumptuous, especially when faced with someone who clearly defines their objectives and needs differently.
- Swannie 15y agoWell you are making the assumption I am referring to a romantic relationship. The article presents (and this may be the reporters bias) the picture of someone with minimal social contact. Whilst I accept different people have a different level of need for social contact, this certainly feels more than a little unbalanced. I realise whilst writing this reply that "sad" can be construed by some people in a derogatory sense. I didn't mean it in that way. I genuinely feel upset that, for whatever reasons, the lead developer feels that almost anything would be a distraction from his life's work, especially a partner and children. Intimate human relations - romantic or not - offer things no personal achievement can.
- LaGrange 15y agoOK, right, I did, though that doesn't really change that much. Well, let's start by saying that intimate human relations are achievements as well. Also, computer programming, climbing and drinking soft drinks offer things no intimate human relations can. It sounds like sarcasm, but it is, actually, true. I was, too, upset at first. I just noticed my upset has no real reason. It was about someone choosing a radically different way of life than mine, based on their own needs — that are radically different from mine. He's not even telling "no intimate human relationships." It's more as if he's satisfied by the relatively small group of close humans — his relationship with his brother seems quite close. To sum up: I don't think his choice is sad. It's actually our limited view of possible life choices what's sad.
- VirInvictus_ 15y agoI was terribly happy to see this article all over my Twitter feed. This game is an inspiration for budding programmers, even if the game is terribly difficult to get into comfortably. I've been playing it for quite some time now. Very happy to see it.
- shin_lao 15y agoI seriously discourage you from checking out this game if you're on a deadline, building a startup or have any project you'd like to take on. On the other hand it's a must have if you have a nuclear shelter in your backyard.