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[Zangi]

Interesting... and yea, it is fairly easy to mod it to be more realistic.

You can also create emergent stone-age civilizations each with different ethics and technology level.  Even different sources of food and weapon types they'd use.

Just need to base this information off of something and some modding know-how.

Even go as far as making different types of humans, fatter/stouter geneology and thinner geneology.  Different personality inclines, bigger/smaller.
(They won't cross breed though.)

[TheDeadlyShoe]

Oh there we go. Dwarven Civil Engineer is perfect.  God knows we spend enough time designing efficient layouts and worrying whether or not our water systems will fit.  And god help you if you don't build in failsafes

[Cardinal]

What is more interesting about DF is the kind of cultural development (monkey see, monkey do) that goes on amongst DF players.  We start barely being able to feed seven dwarves through a winter to eyeing each others megaprojects, populating our videogaming tool boxes with new ideas of how to go about things and how to establish our greatness, although this is perhaps inevitable given a sandbox of epic magnitude and the nature of humanity.

You're right, it's very fascinating, and there are more and more researchers who look at communities that develop alongside these games.

As interesting as it is, the main problem I see with modeling the evolution of anything is the same as how some psychologists go about doing experiments - they "know" the answer already and then design an experiment that can ONLY prove that answer.  In our case, whatever evolutionary path we model will only look legitimate if it winds up at the present.

I think this is best accomplished by providing space for competing theories.  What's most interesting about social modeling is that we've barely scratched the surface of defining and mapping out processes, which is why you can have fundamentally different explanations of why societies change, why historical events occur or even what they are.  An interesting example, to me at least, is the Boserup/Malthus debate over carrying capacity and agricultural development.  You could look at both systems of describing demographic pressures on a population (Easily conceived in a DF world), map out the functions, and then run the thing to see which better tracks to known historical realities.  The same could be done with testing Marxist, World Historical, socio-environmental or other theoretical approaches.

I'm kind of rambling at this point, but a couple more things I wanted to mention.  First, this game with an, eg, bronze age mod could be great for getting people interested in anthropology.  I remember playing sim life (anyone remember that?), and that encouraging me in my biological interests.

DF has already increased my understanding of materials and alloys and reinforced the importance of administrative cost in the creation of structures, items, et cetera.  Imagine if instead of Dwarves you had a host of different cultures, all early Bronze Age (with a little iron thrown in there), with different trade goods and available resources...  Heck, with a game like that, I might finally, actually be able to tell the difference between the Myceneaens, Achaeans, Ionians, Dorians, Minoans, et cetera.

I think, rather than building a set "Cultural Pattern" it would be more interesting to see culture as emergent, too.  Obviously, if your humans are dropped on a steppe with low rainfall, they're not going to be farmers.  And, after growing up riding horses all their lives and hunting animals, they'll make pretty good light cavalry.  By the same vein, they'll be terribly poorly equipped to maintain and create large waterworks, even if they manage to capture some irrigated farmland from their southern neighbors.  Maybe they're just better off trading their horses for silk.  That's the history of China and Central Asia in a nutshell (And grossly oversimplified and only focusing on one aspect).

[zecro]

Dwarven Civil Engineer is perfect.  God knows we spend enough time designing efficient layouts and worrying whether or not our water systems will fit.  And god help you if you don't build in failsafes

There's some stuff that's not modeled properly for a full-on world simulation. Farm plots are always fertile and don't depend on weather. Digging in any one place is like digging in any other place. Wars are sometimes started because "the world generator has decided this world is too peaceful." Rivers don't flood. There are no earthquakes. Yes, you're limited by trees, but

Next release should include hereditary traits, and somewhere down the line Toady plans to implement better diplomatic relationships. A lot of times players "fill in the blanks" of what actually happened, giving reasons to the emergent behavior they can't figure out.

Cardinal, listen to the Dwarf Fortress Talk podcasts wherein Toady talks about where the project is heading. It's still a FANTASY world simulator, but I suppose it would be fairly easy to mod out the FANTASY aspects of it.

[3]

Yes, if the current system persists it would be very easy to mod out said aspects once the game reaches the desired level of complexity - and I'm sure it will, with time. Seasonal/yearly fertility in farming, floods, earthquakes et al. strike me as exactly the sort of features the game would include by the end of the development phase (I'm just going on hunch here, I haven't bothered to read all of the dev goals), which as we all know, will probably be a very, very long time away.

Until then, the game'll have to make the most of its effectiveness at portraying a world.

[Cardinal]

Looking at this another way, I think there are definite real-world processes from which fun gameplay can be developed.  Two examples of "dry" historical events that may prove to be Dwarftacular:

The Reforms of Ghazan Khan and the formation of the ilKhanate.  After conquering Persia, the Mongols had a great time enjoying the accumulated wealth of the Persians.  But they let the administrative and bureaucratic structure fall to pieces.  There are great stories of Mongol "tax collectors" (Basically thugs with government mandates) taking over mansions, burning beautiful carved doors, letting their livestock eat the orchards, et cetera.  Eventually, the Persian citizenry spent its time avoiding the government agents (Even going so far as to dig secret entrances into their houses, very dwarflike) and not creating wealth.  When the Mongols went bankrupt, they realized they needed to stop being horse nomads and start being administrators.  While conquest is still a long way away, when it happens it would be interesting to see just such an effect.  Of course, in Dwarf Fortress we'd need to have more emphasis on the fermented mare's milk...

Course changes in the Yellow River.  This is actually in my own realm of research.  The Yellow River in China carries a huge amount of sediment, which promotes flooding unless you build levies.  The problem is, these levies get higher and higher because of all the sediment, so you end up with a "hanging river" that flows above the heads of the people who live nearby.  When it finally does burst its dike, it causes regional chaos (and the ecological damage oftentimes leads to real-life tantrum hell--such as The Red Eyebrow rebellion and the restoration of the Han Dynasty).  I think a decent sedimentation system, and in general a more regional sense of river control (Do you think the people living downriver from you appreciate your damming the river or using up all the water?  Maybe that's why those goblins are sieging you, you hydrological imperialist) would add hydrological management to all the other behavior we spend so much time with.

There's more, of course, but what's interesting to me about Dwarf Fortress is that these 'dry' subjects fit right into the gameplay model.

[Rowanas]

It's true. both of those sound like they would be amazing to play in DF.

[Shima]

Considering the direction of the game, those might be reached one day.  The keywords being "might" and "one day".  DF has a LOOOOOOONG way to go before it's finished.  Indeed, I would place money on the idea that it will NEVER be completely finished.  Playable?  Hell yes.  Fun?  Hell yes.  Complex?  You better believe it.  But 100% complete?  Now that's unlikely, because of just how much can go into something like this.

I mean, hell, next update, we're getting tissue layers and we'll be seeing things like compound fractures shifting into organs and causing slow, painful deaths!  What other games can you see something like that happen?  And that's barely scratching the surface, Toady still considers this a low-level Alpha build.  When or if it reaches 1.00.00.00, it'll probably have developed complete sentience and have enslaved mankind to make us dig for magma.

[Foa]

Heh, by the time we get to 1.00, it'd be crazy fucking fun, heh, world domination, setting ethical standards, setting up the various attack styles, and army maneuvers, shit is going to be deep and broad, it'd be enough for even the largest of suns to chill out in.

Machinery, tactics, strategies, in-depth astral systems, planets at war, dimensional gates, or windows, if this were to happen, the DSDC would be booming with researchers!

[Sabre_Justice]

I really think Dwarf Fortress deserves to be called a work of art. It's being made by a lone man who's determined to make exactly what he wants to make without outside interference (though accepting suggestions), it has subject matter and detail unlike any other game in the world (there's some similar but nothing truly close), and isn't made with any consideration for profit or widespread appeal, it's something that the player has to make an effort to understand, and what they get out of it depends on what they put into it. (not necessarily a good or bad thing)

At the very least, there's nothing else like it. That alone makes it worth study.

[MrFake]

From a scholarly viewpoint, I think it's wiser to study the players and not the game.

Dwarf Fortress creates a world and tracks the progress of civilizations, but at the moment that's mostly out of the hands of the players.  You'd have to ask Toady One about what assumptions he made to create an engine that could develop a random world to a desired spec.  But desired specs aren't really appropriate for anthropological or sociological study.  Even as parts of world gen and civilization growth are shifted into gameplay in coming versions, they would still revolve tightly around player controlled abstractions.

The fortress may at least serve as a microcosm in the current version, but that's highly directed by player design, and it has a more important problem.  The dwarfs are avatars themselves: multiple avatars of the player.  The AARs and other player accounts are just flourishes on watching little smileys move from one place to another to complete required tasks.  What tasks aren't assigned by us, the players, are assigned via Toady One's assumptions.  Urist didn't really murder her boss due to workplace stress, she did it because she's programmed to act in some random manner when miserable.*  We're impressing upon the dwarfs stories and motivations, and that extends all the way back to how we desire the world itself to be created.

And that's a sandbox really, isn't it?  A formless medium in which to construct our own representations of reality or fantasy.  Doesn't that make the player the focus of Dwarf Fortress?  We to a small extent, and Toady One more than all of us, are creating it ourselves as we go along.  It's less of a world or civilization simulator and more a way to put us into various places and situations and give us a chance to react and create as we desire.  Maybe an analogue situation crops up now and then, but how much of that is due to player influence or interpretation?  That's an awesome question.

So, a social simulator?  I wouldn't classify Dwarf Fortress as a social simulator.  Not when we form the society from our whims--sometimes destroy it--ourselves.  Not that that isn't witnessed in our own history from time to time, but again, that's not so much a matter of the society itself but the players' (historical figures') impression of themselves on that society.

A note on money.  I think Toady implied he was wary of funding.  He doesn't want to be bound to another's idea of what direction to take Dwarf Fortress.  Don't take my word for it, as I'm more than likely putting words in his mouth.  If there is any talk of funding outside of charitable donations, even just as a motivator for discussion, I think that needs to be taken to Toady directly.


* Yada yada emergent life forms.  That's another philosophical discussion altogether and not what I'm getting at.

[Zironic]

I had a thought experiment once involving using pressure plates to control the flow of dwarfs. Such that: To reduce pathing, when you only have maybe 2 dwarfs entering a hall, only 1 hall is open, so they go through it. But as you have more dwarfs, who are slowed by each other, you can have more halls open up. You'd balance this so that, the lower fps caused by more pathing is overtaken by dwarfs needing to stop less. Then I applied it to real world logic and found, just in my own mind: Groups of people are equivalent to one dwarf ( as people will walk at an average pace to each other mostly) and Who the fuck in the real world will let you tell them which hallway to use?

[Cardinal]

Who the fuck in the real world will let you tell them which hallway to use?

Traffic flow analysis is all about this.

Regarding MrFake's thoughts, I tend to agree that the synthetic world that exists between designer intent and player expression is incredibly interesting, and there's a wealth of research on this element of gameplay (And by wealth I mean not much, but of the few people out there doing research on games, many of them are giving thought to this).  I'm more interested in models and expressing social dynamics, though, and currently I use databases and GIS and environmental modeling to take care of the political geography, the physical geography and the environmental systems.  But I do think that small, running expressions of assumptions regarding social interaction (If you've listened to Tarn in the interviews, you'll notice he mentioned that his own assumptions were being expressed in the way dwarves acted and evaluated their world) will prove useful to scholars not only for communication of complex systems but also for analysis of the theory underlying those complex systems.

Imagine, for example, that you wanted to express an argument regarding climate change and early state formation.  Today, you'd do that with narratives (text) and a few diagrams and maps.  But you could just as easily express that argument with a bunch of dwarves, running around farming and building things, who respond to the growing desert by packing their bags and moving south.  Okay, maybe not just as easily, but rather convincingly and, more importantly, expression of such an argument would have a mathematical nature that would allow other scholars to analyze your claims, build on them, critique them, and so on, to create a more dynamic, more accurate expression of some historical reality.

On a side note, if anyone is going to be in Irvine in December, there's a conference called Digital Arts and Culture 09, where scholars will be dealing with all these issues.  I'll be there, playing DF in between paper sessions.

[3]

It's also somewhat up in the air as to whether the game will really be all that "sandbox" by the end of the development phase anyway - we might not be seeing some kind of overarching game objective, but I can imagine players being given (to a more or less extent) situational objectives based on the status(es) of their current fortress(es)... for example, the "growing desert" scenario above.

My point is that by the point in time that DF may be considered a full-blown social simulator - a world simulator, rather - it might be a game wherein the player is less the focus of the game (as the player is no longer necessarily making the objectives, and rather more responding to the environment - the player interaction being the means of response, etc.) and rather the "player".

[MrFake]

True enough, Cardinal.

I like to think of it philosophically, where the assumptions themselves modify perception.  Do you train the model, or does the model train you?  I guess that too is beyond the point.  Modeling itself is dependent on perception, and no true analysis can be performed without creating some kind of model.

Dwarf Fortress as an expressive tool.  Now that's an idea.  When I first visited these forums, I remember something about a schoolteacher wanting to use Dwarf Fortress to teach important concepts, I guess, about colonization and hardship.