Haven't read any other replies (first one excepting, which may have a point - but I'm not sure), save to see that people
have done... Hopefully I'm not
just repeating.
1. How often do you play? Is Dwarf Fortress a fairly consistent activity or do you go in spurts?I think 'spurts' covers it. When I do, often obsessively, and then I may appreciate this (or have something else to obsess over, or even stop procrastinating about something else) and cut it back a whole lot. Currently I'm in a low-activity period, but still do an hours or two of gameplay per session (probably between a month and a season's-worth of in-game time, given my micromanagement).
2. Given that this is a strictly single-player game (succession games notwithstanding), how do you interact with other players?Purely via this forum, in matters DF-related and otherwise. No sharing of forts. I have so far uploaded one
map to the usual resource, and consider that this as far too low a "paying it back" contribution to the community.
3. Do you ever play/discuss the game with friends in real life?Rarely. Friends, relatives and colleagues have been talked to about aspects of the games. One friend complains that searches for Warhammer-style Dwarves' fortress designs is hard to Google and considers me mad to play this. Colleagues tend to ask "Are you killing dwarves again?" whenever I've got
anything (could be Kingdom of Loathing, various other web-games, a MUD that I play) on my screen, in a way they intend to be annoying (as a comparison, they also ask "Have you done it yet?", of anybody and everybody, without specifying what "it" is... or caring... you've got to have a duck's back around here...
). I may mention DF-style geology to family, but then we've got a bit of an armchair-geology vibe going on in my family (among other things).
I may have persuaded a couple of people to start up DF (although one of these was already heavily into Minecraft, so I suspect he's not stuck with it).
4.Do you feel a sense of narrative—a "story unfolding" if you will—while playing or is that something to actively seek out?I'm going to say "no", here. I've too much of a designer-mentality. There is an aim and a plan, and unexpected events are an impediment to this, while events that are anticipated (though uncertain) are catered for by said plans. OTOH, occasionally I've had a tale I can tell. Even if it's only speculation about "Ninja Hippos!" as what's happening for a given bug. (Search for it.
)
5. Do you augment your own playing experience in any way (graphic tilesets, outside music, etc.)?Raw, native DF, only. Minor configuration changes only (water-depths as numbers is the most relevant to this question, plus expanding from 80x25 to 120x50 tiles on the window).
6. Do you create and share your own DF stories/art?Apart from the aforementioned
map and the occasional long-winded and not necessarily on-topic anecdote, not really. I find myself rather asocial, in this regard, despite the general volume of my contributions to the forum.
7. How do you respond to stories/narratives/illustrations that other people have posted?I laugh, I cry, I... Well, maybe I laugh. I quite enjoy tales told with the intention of providing Schadenfreude (sp?). I also appreciate screenshots (though can struggle a bit to understand parts of some non-default tileset versions).
8. Besides the fact that multiple fortresses can exist in the same generated world, do you feel a kind of historical cohesiveness between multiple games?Well.. they
can't, not at the same time. Insofar as active player-structures, anyway.
But, aside from that, I generate new worlds for new versions of the game, there's quite a few abandoned (or, rather, discontinued, but still playable) worlds in my own playing history. I appreciate each
individual history, but apart from per fortress-instance (while ever it's played) or Adventurer career (as long as I play him), I really don't consider it anything other than "worlds with (roughly!) the same physical laws and societal norms". I
may copy a worldgen so that I can Adventure
and Fortress-build in the same land, but not in any way that interactions occur between the two. I rarely abandon (as opposed to leave going mouldy, on my hard drive) a fortress embark, and so it's been a long time since I've (even accidentally) Adventurered onto a self-shaped area of landscape.
9. What other interests do you have? Books/movies/games/fields of expertise?I'm probably a geek-of-all-seasons in both leisure and work.
In literature I lean towards Terry Pratchett, but appreciate Tolkien. Tom Clancy seems to have figured highly, though not much else that's military-nerd-like. SF: Clarke, Asimov, naturally; but really anyone 'golden era' or of similar prestige (we're talking Simak, Bear, Vonnegut, (Alan Dean) Foster, (Kim Stanley) Robinson, I suppose), oh and definitely Neal Stephenson, but that list starts to look a bit US-centric, and how could I have forgetten H.G. Wells?
My radio channel (and primary daily entertainment fix) of preference is BBC Radio 7 4 Extra, which is self-styled as home for "Comedy, Drama and Sci-Fi" rebroadcasts and originals, and I range at least between Beyond Our Ken ('60s comedy-ensemble half-hour thing) and anything actually current.
I'm not one for TV at the moment (hard to watch TV while programming/game-playing/etc) but I suppose I'd put myself down as a passive fan of the current Doctor Who and the likes of comedy-topical-quiz-show-too-many-hyphens "Have I Got News For You" (which I see is back on the screens, but I haven't had chance to see it on iPlayer, yet), generally also with a similar preference to radio, given the chance.
Films you can ditto, biased towards the SF-front (and obviously without any 'current affairs' available).
In games, I tend to go for management games, with or without action. Sim[City,etc], [The] Sims, XCOM-like's (e.g. UFO:AI). But I also like flight-sims, from old-school Elite (including Oolite) that also have that "management" element, through to X-Plane where it's just pure flight and physics. Not too fond of driving games (save for Carmageddon-likes), surprisingly. I've wandered away from FPSs (consoles have spoiled these, IMO), although I do like the first-person Minecraft. MUDs and other text-style adventures have an active place in my heart.
Expertise? Well, I'm very much rounded across all aspects of IT, and padded out across a number of scientific disciplines, though I do not consider myself an expert in any particular subset. The most I'd hope for is "competent professional" or "educated amateur" in the more prominent areas of my knowledge-base, such as computer security, programming, data processing, geographical sciences, microbiology, network installations, robotics (albeit the theory/simulation of dominates, here), and I'm definitely no more than an 'armchair' space-physicist. Really, I'm probably spread far too thin, and rarely need to know the DNA/RNA base-pairs when I'm crimping RJ45 plugs onto Cat5/6/whatever cables, anyway, or the fracture modes of quartz when I'm trying to exclude regressions-towards-the-mean from a huge mound of collated data.