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[Balin]

Just started reading the book. Main character is in the online game industry, sounds like MMO with Chinese gold farmers. He wanted gold creation in the economy to be more realistic. Read this:

What mattered very much to Richard was what an imaginary dwarf would encounter once he hefted a virtual pick and began to delve into the side of a mountain. In a conventional video game, the answer was literally nothing. The mountain was just a surface, thinner than papier-mâché, with no interior. But in Pluto’s world, the first bite of the shovel would reveal underlying soil, and the composition of that soil would reflect its provenance in the seasonal growth and decay of vegetation and the saecular erosion of whatever was uphill of it, and once the dwarf dug through the soil he would find bedrock, and the bedrock would be of a particular mineral composition, it would be sedimentary or igneous or metamorphic, and if the dwarf were lucky it might contain usable quantities of gold or silver or iron ore.

[Scarpa]

My friend read that recently and was telling me all about how that reminded him of DF. I should ask him if he's done and can give it to me...

Hey that just gave me an idea for a DF front-end to bitcoin

[ishmog]

I thought that after reading it, too. It's a shame, I actually went to a reading Stephenson did while promoting it and he had a Q&A afterwards... but I hadn't read the book yet and didn't know about the apparent reference. I would have loved to have asked him if he had ever heard of DF or if he had come up with that design ethic independently.

[Michael]

Excuse the necromancy -- I was waiting until I had acquired and read REAMDE to respond.

The book has an acknowledgements section at the back, which says nothing about Dwarf Fortress.  Although the use of the word "dwarf" in the passage the OP quoted might be a wink.

At any rate, Stephenson doesn't owe anything to Toady.  The DF genre was not created by Toady's genius -- it was created because its time had come.  The idea of a game where mountains aren't "papier-mâché" has been occurring to people for over half the history of personal computing -- it's just that everyone before Toady has had their dreams crushed by insufficient computing power.  Also, DF wasn't itself such a game until the 3-D update.

The time for a real-life T'Rain may come, or it might not.  If computing power continues to increase it would be a good bet, but Moore's Law is slowing down and Peak Oil is expected to crash the party.

T'Rain sounds more like a "Minecraft on steroids" than DF.  Minecraft at least supports multiplayer, while DF isn't even real time. Sure, Minecraft's underground structure is less diverse and more slapdash that post-3D DF, but that's a shallow detail.

Also, while reading "T'Rain Gazette" news section (on page 167) one candidate, outside the DF genre, for T'Rain's ancestry occurred to me in a flash: EVE Online.  The heroes could easily have paid off REAMDE's author and moved on (the ransom was only $73), but were utterly blocked by third parties camping the route to the in-game drop off points in order to steal the ransom payments.  That sounds very much like something EVE players would do.  I've never played the game, but the brutality of that community is legendary.

[RabblerouserGT]

What does REAMDE stand for?
I know it's an anagram for README, but this sounds like it's an abbreviation for something.

[Michael]

What does REAMDE stand for?
I know it's an anagram for README, but this sounds like it's an abbreviation for something.

It's the name of the file left by the cryptovirus containing the ransom demand, and thus the name people use to refer to the virus itself.  Probably just a failed attempt by the Chinese author of the virus to write README.  The text of the ransom demand itself does not have good grammar.

No other explanation (except maybe that someone thought the misspelling was cute and left it in on purpose) is ever given in the book.

REAMDE is also the name of the virus gang leader's own MMO character.

[TinyPirate]

I asked a friend who knows Neal about the book and he said it is highly unlikely that Neal is aware of DF. He is a pretty casual gamer, other than bouts of Halo and some time playing WOW and other bits and pieces


So there you go!

[Flying Dice]

At any rate, Stephenson doesn't owe anything to Toady.  The DF genre was not created by Toady's genius -- it was created because its time had come.  The idea of a game where mountains aren't "papier-mâché" has been occurring to people for over half the history of personal computing -- it's just that everyone before Toady has had their dreams crushed by insufficient computing power.  Also, DF wasn't itself such a game until the 3-D update.

Perhaps I'm blind, but where did anyone mention something about the author owing anything to the Adams brothers? I know we've been flooded with the 'omg this game ripped off df' threads, but that doesn't mean every discussion of something which might (and apparently didn't) reference DF needs to be preemptively bombed with a "Okay guys calm down, Toady didn't invent the idea of dwarves!!, etc." statement.

[Niyazov]

I asked a friend who knows Neal about the book and he said it is highly unlikely that Neal is aware of DF. He is a pretty casual gamer, other than bouts of Halo and some time playing WOW and other bits and pieces


So there you go!

Well there was that NYT article that came out a few months before the book was published. Not sure if that's enough leadtime for that to have been an influence; who knows how long it took to write/revise the book.

[Capntastic]

Look, he used the word dwarf, let's get him!

[Karlito]

Oh come now, there's no need to get him. I'm sure Mr. Stephenson will listen to reason.

[Michael]

Perhaps I'm blind, but where did anyone mention something about the author owing anything to the Adams brothers?

Heh. I guess I couldn't resist taking a shot at the Minecraft and Terraria haters.

Although I can throw them one bone -- there is one way in which those two games do copy DF which T'Rain does not.  Magma.

Zula, basically the star of REAMDE, is hired by the game company because she has experience modeling real-world magma flow.  This implies that T'Rain is trying to make magma work realistically.

DF magma is not remotely realistic.  I'm not talking about what TV Tropes calls "Convection Schmonvection"; DF is not the first offender there, and is arguably less egregious than most.  Rather, it's the fact that DF magma acts as if has infinite heat capacity -- it can heat other things, but is not itself cooled by the interaction.  The only thing that can cool magma is contact with water, converting it to obsidian.

And DF's specific model is cloned in Terraria and Minecraft, with some local adjustments. In both, the only way to cool magma is the mutual annihilation with water to produce obsidian.

On balance I still find it closest to the truth to say they are not ripoffs.  This is only as severe as the many games stealing the Goomba Stomp from Super Mario 1.

[Scarpa]

I just finished this book and while that passage does make it seem like he's inspired by DF, he's clearly riffing on World of Warcraft, given the game in the book is designed around legitimizing and monetizing gold farmers.

Was an odd book by Stephenson standards, IMO. I liked it but felt like I was reading Clancy.