Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Cobbler89]

I don't have a story to tell.

I do, however, have the answer to the question asked by many confused friends and family members: "How do you win?"

"The same way you win at Legos."

As for the attitude that graphics are the only thing that matter in a game and therefore everything but Call of Duty sucks, I'd say if you care more about graphics than gameplay you should just watch movies -- it's not like there aren't enough cheap action flicks and it's not like Hulu and Netflix are pricier than a subscription to whatever online multiplayer network CoD uses, and you get maximal graphics and minimal required gameplay effort in a movie and can just as easily pretend you're the main character or whoever.

I doubt people like that would even be able to follow the point (I think you'd lose them at introducing the concept of gameplay as a quality other than graphics), but oh well... I'm also the guy who, in the "pretend Dwarf Fortress is a generic adventure game! what would the final boss and ending be?" thread started referencing the Collosal Cave Text Adventure from days of yore (a pretty dwarfy game in terms of themes/aesthetics even if it lacked the sheer complexity of Dwarf Fortress, and -- being a mere text game -- graphically minimal like DF). And then again, most of my friends play Dungeons & Dragons, so I basically have no problem with of CoD addiction among them.

@WaffleEggnog, I feel for ya. There's something to be said for helping kids grow up into reasonable adults with critical thinking skills, good moral sense, etc.; there's nothing to be said for assuming that young people are devoid of the higher intelligence required precisely for growing up into that skillset.

[WaffleEggnog]

-eek massive-

We don't need to discuss this in this thread, really, so please don't continue, but I have made some observations:

Spoiler: Don't read if you dislike derails/aren't willing and polite enough to take the discussion to a thread in the lower boards. (click to show/hide)

The disdain for permitting children to play games that would expose them to violence stems largely from religious organizations and socio-political movements that (rightfully) discourage violence in the community, but also from psychology studies and the subsequent misinterpretation/misuse of this information by the media and public. Children exposed to violence will begin to incorporate it into their playtime and eventually adult lives, according to many studies, but it doesn't necessarily result in a psychopathic serial killer. I was also very violent as a child (and I personally blame my peers for being jackasses), and still am at tiLmes.
Not everyone has the parenting skills necessary to properly raise their kids in the first place, so a lot of kids that are exposed to excessive violence aren't taught proper self-control or how to determine what is appropriate for a given situation, and this coupled with abuse can lead to disfunctional individuals. There are a lot of complex occurances that can lead to violent behavior in adults, often with abuse or neglect involved, but for the most part the media and individuals who get 90% of their "knowledge" from it (avoiding becoming like these morons is a good reason to stay in school) have come to the conclusion that exposing a child to any violence or disturbing imagery will permanently traumatize them or convert them into a tiny serial killer.

It is of course never that simple, and if you talk to most people considered normal and sane, they were exposed to "disturbing" situations slowly over the course of their childhood, rather than waiting to turn 18 before suddenly being exposed to everything all at once and killing themselves. Psychologists usually don't have a damn clue what's going on anyway, and any scientist that opens their mouth on camera ends up regretting it, but that hasn't stopped the flow of information from unconcluded studies and old, outdated theories into the media that inflates it into a panic-inducing horror story.

Disclaimer: Don't take it too seriously as I didn't suddenly do a research project on it and I might not be 100% correct on everything, these are just my own observations.

Ok, getting back on topic and resisting my urge to reply to avoid the derail I fooleshly created, the other day when I was playing DF, me and a friend of mine were doing a project for school. He says to me "please tell me your not playing Dwarf Fortress". (I had told him about DF but never showed him gameplay btw) He comes over, looks over my shoulder and says "good, your finally getting some work done" me: "yeah.....". I swear I was grinning for like 3 hours after that. This is actually one of the reasons I play DF, aside from just being awesome in general, people can't tell game from work.

[Arbinire]

I haven't posted much in these forums but I often lurk here because just about anything about this game is pure entertainment.  I can watch let's plays of it for hours on end too, while watching people play any other game bores me to tears.

So far I've only had two real reactions about DF.  The first is with a friend who grew up pretty computer savvy back in the 90's (we're both in our late 20's), but didn't really have a computer for the past 10-15 years so kinda fell behind a bit.  I finally sold him my old laptop, and he'd been catching up with 10 years of computer gaming.  Well one day he asked me if I could find him any more games cause he'd beaten Warcraft 3 a total of 4 times now, done everything there is to do in Morrowind, Oblivion, and Fallout 3, ate through Diablo 2, Torchlight, and all of the Fate games.

I chuckled and jokingly said "Well there's Dwarf Fortress, it's a game that can't be beat." He seemed interested as he'd seen me play it a little bit before, but didn't really understand the ramifications.  I told him if he was really interested I'd get it for him, as well as some tutorials and some vids, cause the game has a STEEP learning curve...at which point he responded with "Oh, don't worry about that, I'm sure I can just run it and wing it.  Learn everything as I go."  A few days later I show up with the game, tutorials, and videos on a thumb drive and said "Here you go, I put the tutorials on there anyways, just in case."  Now he refuses to play the game because he can't pick it up on the fly, and whenever it comes up in convo he always says "I just can't get into the game." and plays it off like it's a graphical issue, even though he still owns and plays an NES with 100's of games we've all given to him over the years.  I still think it's hilarious.

My other story is pretty short in comparison, I have another friend who's not videogame inclined at all.  They tend to give him raging headaches.  When I was first learning to play myself, he'd actually sit there and watch me play on my laptop for hours almost like he was hypnotized, and this was WAY before I was getting to the !FUN!...Like just figuring out how to set up farms, quantum stockpiles, etc...

[Eric Blank]

My brother has been successfully entertained by stories of hilarity within dwarf fortress ad the community. Unfortunately he still thinks like a Halo player and complains that he can't make heads or tails of it...

I also intend to expose him to the most horrifying !!fun!! available immediately, just to spite him.

[WaffleEggnog]

My brother has been successfully entertained by stories of hilarity within dwarf fortress ad the community. Unfortunately he still thinks like a Halo player and complains that he can't make heads or tails of it...

I also intend to expose him to the most horrifying !!fun!! available immediately, just to spite him.

I can just imagine a fps player being like "pfft, this game looks easy ", "orly?", !!fun!! happens, ie the circus, then just act like its nothing.

[Dunamisdeos]

I like this thread. Bump.

Also, skip the circus, they'd get eaten by wolves in the first 10 minutes.

[Vodrilus]

"The same way you win at Legos."

Oh happyjoy! You nailed it!

[bukitodinos]

My brother sees me air pumping.

Him: What happened?
Me: Just caught my first dragon in a copper cage trap!
Him: ...copper?
Me: Oh, wait, let me check.
Him: Of course it's not copper, there's noway a fire breathing giant monster could get trapped in...
Me: It's nickel!
Him: Oh for the love of

did you tell him its a 7x7x7 foot cage?

[bukitodinos]

Get Terraria. I have it and i have nearly 200 hours playtime, its amazing. Its a steal for 10$.

dude i have over 700 hours

[Corai]

Friend got dwarf fortress, I watched.


"Dont dig that stuff man, its bad news."

"I do whatever I want."

...

"OH MY GOD WHATS HAPPENING."

"Clown car."

[Dorfimedes]

A librarian seriously thought I was hacking the school network when I played DF one day on the school computers.

Something similar happened to a friend of mine when he was using the MS-DOS prompt. What is it about big, blocky, fixed-width fonts that are so frightening to people who don't understand computers?

Unrelated, but the second result for "asciiphobia" when entered in google is a bay12 thread. I thought that was amusing.

[Callista]

"Wait. You mean 'pitting the cats' wasn't a typo?!"

Was chatting about my catsplosion problem with a few friends, remarking on how I solved it by sticking the females into my goblin arena.

Even more amusingly, they know I am an absolute crazy cat lady in real life, complete with two cats sharing my tiny apartment. I had to explain that no, I really don't believe that throwing unwanted feral cats into a pit is a good alternative to a decent trap-neuter-release program; and that in my daily life I am much more prone to petting cats. Really. They're ascii characters, guys; chill. 

[Hanslanda]

Exactly. Otherwise your & key would be trying to buy your soul. Or eat it. I'm not sure.

[crazysheep]

A librarian seriously thought I was hacking the school network when I played DF one day on the school computers.

Something similar happened to a friend of mine when he was using the MS-DOS prompt. What is it about big, blocky, fixed-width fonts that are so frightening to people who don't understand computers?

Unrelated, but the second result for "asciiphobia" when entered in google is a bay12 thread. I thought that was amusing.

Because hackers are always portrayed as using the command prompt to hack secure networks in movies. Always.

[runlvlzero]

A librarian seriously thought I was hacking the school network when I played DF one day on the school computers.

Something similar happened to a friend of mine when he was using the MS-DOS prompt. What is it about big, blocky, fixed-width fonts that are so frightening to people who don't understand computers?

Unrelated, but the second result for "asciiphobia" when entered in google is a bay12 thread. I thought that was amusing.

Because hackers are always portrayed as using the command prompt to hack secure networks in movies. Always.

OMG OMGO OMG OMOMMMOG what about the movie with Angelina Jolie called, guess, what HACKERS, they used APPLEs and some kind of CREEPY 3D tube interface system with flashing lights to hack the cities traffic lights and the fire system!

The only two movies I've seen that made a faithful attempt to even half assidly portray "hacking" is The Matrix Trinity were the shut down the power plant and anti-trust were the guy dicked with the inode command in sh. Not once, did they ever show phising, installing trojans, or writing code to target and disrupt specific processes. Not to mention dealing with encryption or man in the middle attacks. Or false certs, or credentials.

There's allot more movies, Independence Day included that show worse then command line abuse of a shell. Or escalated account permissions.

I totally see were ignorant people think running #tail randomlogfile and watching the output is hacking though... lol

But DF is sooo much more graphically organized even in full on ASCII mode it should have been obvious. Hell you met a librarian that didn't know what Nethack is, that should be required in any field were you have too much time and easy access to computers.