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[Sukasa]

I just love the depth, the constant "hey look what I found" that is STILL going on in the game as evidenced by the forum, the Good Bad Bugs, the constant and fun dev updates, the mods like Kobold Camp, seeing my fortress as shown by the visualizers, what you can make, etc.

I like the little details too, like how a Goblin outpost liason talks with purple text instead of white, etc.

[eerr]

because, uh, it's awesome?

I love building a fortress for the same reason I love sim city.
Urban improvements to improve stuff, making it better.


I love training up an era of legendaries at a silly speed.

I love the excitement and ability to start anew the fortress due to a tantrum spiral.

I love the reuseability of goblins, and their tendency to blindly charge traps that obviously just went off in front of their eyes.

I love magma for it's all-encompassing passion.

I love skeletal creatures for the fear they instill.

I love zombies for their narmyness.

I love carp for their excellent use of home-terrain advantage.

I love elephants for their massive size.

I love unicorns for their intensly valuble bones and guts. Dwarves killed the last unicorn, don't cha know.

Surprisingly I don't really care about metal that much. It's not really as useful I thought it would be.
Though I horde it anyway.

I love the pathing algorithm for it's simplification, and yet still loath it for it's speed.

I love pumps for their pressurization.

[ungulateman]

...I love the whole world

except for the elves!

boom de yada boom de yada boom de yada

On a serious note, "Your game is not a sandbox until you can build a tower out of soap and sacrifice hippies by throwing them off it."

[Grimlocke]

Endless sandbox possiblities* combined with a great potential story making potential**.

* Awesome fluid dynamics, massive choice of materials, mechanics, crazy magma spewing self powering world flooding noble skewering machines, above and underground construction, many many industries and crafts, trading system, tree farms and not to forget: buggering around with adventurers.

** Great customisability. Custom tilesets, custom worldgeneration, custom creatures, races, weapons, materials, etc. Plus legends, personalities for all your dwarves, silly random names and of course all the nonsense you come up with yourself.

And theres probably plenty of stuff I forgot to mention.

And more to come!

[Roxorius]

because, uh, it's awesome?

I love building a fortress for the same reason I love sim city.
Urban improvements to improve stuff, making it better.


I love training up an era of legendaries at a silly speed.

I love the excitement and ability to start anew the fortress due to a tantrum spiral.

I love the reuseability of goblins, and their tendency to blindly charge traps that obviously just went off in front of their eyes.

I love magma for it's all-encompassing passion.

I love skeletal creatures for the fear they instill.

I love zombies for their narmyness.

I love carp for their excellent use of home-terrain advantage.

I love elephants for their massive size.

I love unicorns for their intensly valuble bones and guts. Dwarves killed the last unicorn, don't cha know.

Surprisingly I don't really care about metal that much. It's not really as useful I thought it would be.
Though I horde it anyway.

I love the pathing algorithm for it's simplification, and yet still loath it for it's speed.

I love pumps for their pressurization.

Those are way more prefstrings than any one person should be allowed to have. (You forgot tentacle demons for their corrupt intentions, btw.)

[Spaghetti]

i love battle axes for their lovely smile

[Samalander]

I actually registered to respond to this post.

So, the reason I (and I suspect, many of the people who do so) play this game for hours on end is a mixture of two things. Depth, as has been mentioned many times before, and reward-addiction theory.

Bear with me, as this gets a little in depth (and I'm trying to find references, curse you Wikipedia!).

So if you've ever been in a casino you'll see people sitting at the slot machines, completely zoned out and going through the steps of insert coin>push button>watch spin>insert coin (etc) without apparent thought or emotion. Scientists have found (and I can't find reference to, but trust me, I listen to NPR  ) that getting little rewards for your actions at random intervals for doing some task can actually be more addictive than getting large rewards in a predictable manner.

I see the way this relating to DF is that the game rewards you for taking actions (You have struck Microline!) but does so in a random fashion.

The game generates things like minerals at random, so you don't know when you are going to hit something, but you know if you dig in x direction you will probably hit something. While you are at it a goblin raid shows up and you get to watch it get taken apart by a champion (reward) then someone gets a mood and creates a nifty object (reward) then you hit a gold vein (reward) and is that Magma?...

The total effect is that once you get through the horrible interface and the graphics(or lack thereof if you're like me and get more info from ASCII) the reward center of your brain is stimulated in such a way to keep you interested. The loss of time is similar to those people you see at the slot machines 'zoned out' but much less expensive.

I know I've had to ban myself from playing on weekdays because I'll tell myself 'one more thing, then bed' and I'll find myself still playing 3 hours later, zoning back in and having to go to bed NOW so I at least get 5 hours of sleep, and just one more thing to do before bed...

[elthar]

Oh, so many long boring answers here...

Why do i play DF so much? For god's sake, because i'm a goddamn antisocial freak with no life? Yeah, that must be it.

[Roxorius]

Oh, so many long boring answers here...

Why do i play DF so much? For god's sake, because i'm a goddamn antisocial freak with no life? Yeah, that must be it.

But if you were truly antisocial, you'd be superficially charming and adept at using others, but cold and devoid of empathy beneath your false facade. I think you mean to say "I'm a damned neckbeard!" or "I live in mom's basement!" rather than the admittedly rather cooler word, "antisocial".   

[HungryHobo]

Same reason I love oblivion.

Choice.

The game doesn't force me to do anything.

I want to tell a story?
I can pay attention to the personalities and dramas of the individual dwarves.

I want a strategy game?
I can build and arm champions and send them to do battle with the Orcs and ignore most of the fine detail of building an impressive fort.

I want a sandbox to build a giant monument?
I can wall off my fort and ignore the combat element.

The game gives you ultimate choice about what kind of game you play but it also rewards you for each of these things.

I can wall my fort off and ignore combat but then I have to get wood some other way.
I can ignore the traders and not risk goblins getting in behind them but then I don't get the reward of all the nice things they bring.
But the game can be played whatever choices I make.

Oblivion is very similar.
It never forces you to do any quests.
You can ignore the story and the plans of the developer and still play a fun game.

Now to compare this to games which were terrible:

Spore. It was an ok game for a while but it immediately stopped being fun for me when the game started making my choices for me.

I wanted to build an empire on a huge variety of heavily modified worlds with lots of sandbox play and use of the world editing stuff.
What happened was 30 seconds into working on a planet I'd get another of those fucking "your colony us under attack! your collony is under attack!!! " messages and I'd have to abandon my projects.
This ruined the game.

I wanted to play the game my way.
The game designers had decided I had to play the game THEIR way OR ELSE.
this sucked all the fun out of it.

So I'd have to say, this game isn't fun just because of the deapth though that helps.

It's fun because you can play it the way YOU want, now however anyone has decided you should want to play it.

[QuantumSawdust]

For myself, besides the cool traits of minimalist graphics (so I can use my own imagination, like books), and the amount of care and attention put into the game world, and everything else people have said... I think one of the biggest draws of DF is that I can give whatever sort of attention I want to playing it.

Conversely, most games require a pretty steady amount of focus and attention from the player. If you don't put in that focus than you kind of lose the purpose of playing (usually because you will be dead). However, with DF I can play it when I have nothing better to do and the game provides more than enough interesting things going on to make that worth it. However, I can also play it while I do other things, play other games, or talk to friends. Or when I am studying, or doing homework, or while I'm fixing someone's computer at work. Sometimes I can only manage a quick look back at DF every 20 minutes and it still is fun to see what happened to a fortress, even if I miss all the details.

Unlike other games, DF doesn't take time I don't want to give, so it hardly affects my grades or social life. So while I generally get fed up with other games for being wastes of time when I have a lot going on, I can let DF run and just adjust how I play it. Which is an awesome, awesome feature when you have a busy and hectic life.

[Diablous]

Depth. I don't think I have ever played something so deep.

[xoen]

It's tough to play different games after DF.

This is SO true!

[Slappy Moose]

Hey. I am doing an online survey for a university project on what makes games so good at making you play them so much. We all know that some games just glue you to the computer or console for hours... like WoW or DF - so I am collecting information to find out exactly what that is.

To you I ask:

What is it in the game that makes you keep playing it for hours on end?

It is the mix of challenge and feeling of reward? Is it that you feel part of the game, making a difference in it? Is it that it allows you to challenge yourself? Is it that it allows you to set your own goals and challenge yourself to achieve them? What is it?

Please also mention what game it is that has this effect on you - feel free to give examples from any number of games you play, not just DF.

It's the freedom, complexity, and depth of the game. You can play how you want: the game is entirely moddable, and even vanilla DF you can compeltely change your playstyle and have fun no matter how you play. Examples: make an underground bunker that's completely cut off from the world, an above ground city, or a massive fort carved into the side of a mountain. Use liquid physics to create massive machines of war or beauty. Have massive armies or massive trap systems. It's all up to you.

DF is by far the best of this sort of game, though others exist. Garrysmod, for example, although that is entirely different since it is completely sandbox. Bad Company 2, Men of War, Mount and Blade, and Supreme Commander all have similar feelings of freedom for me, but never to the extent that DF has.

It's just that there are so many possibilities in DF. Read my signature story for another example of the depth. DF is not just a form of art, but it even creates its own art through stories and tales of breath taking badassery.

Feel free to quote me, and good luck with your report.

Edit: Oh hey, I thought of something else. I couldn't really word it just right before, so I ended up forgetting about it but here it is: the ability for you to control EVERYTHING. I don't want to say that it's the feeling of power you get, but rather that there are no limitations to your actions. At every point during the game, you can look at what you've created and know that it was only because of you that that stuff exists.

In DF, you can feel proud and satisfied knowing that you and you alone created the little world that your dwarves live and die in, and there was no wimpy tutorial or set of rules or assistance that helped you get there.

It's very hard to word my exact thoughts on this last issue, but I hope you understand. I'm not exactly talking about difficulty, but more the fact that when you are succeeding or failing, it is YOUR fault that it happened, and that is always a good feeling.

[Pagz]

Nothing is as satisfying as seeing the front of your fortress, which you build out of the side of a mountain, turn into a goblin grindhouse.

Its the beating all odds feel of creating a successful fortress that makes it so enjoyable.