Interpreting Dwarf Fortress: Finitude, Absurdity, and Narrative

[摘要] This article interprets the influential colony management simulator Dwarf Fortress existentially, in terms of finitude, absurdity, and narrative. It applies Aarseth/Moring's proposed method of game interpretation, adopting their definition of cybermedia as a generalized game ontology, then providing a specialized ontology of Dwarf Fortress which describes its genre and salient gameplay features, incorporating Ian Bogost's concept of procedural rhetoric. It then gives an existentialist interpretation of Dwarf Fortress which centers on finitude, absurdity, and narrative, showing that Dwarf Fortress is a game about the existential tensions involved in being human. We live knowing our lives and civilizations are finite, that there are radical limits on what we can know and do. There is no meaning inherent in the world, or in history, so it is up to us to create our own, and one of our most powerful ways of doing this is narrative.

[效力级别]  Early Access