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[Urist_McArathos]

I found this interview on Boing Boing very interesting

I didn't.
It quickly devolved into: "This game Dwarf Fortress is really hard and boring, but wouldn't it be awesome if Minecraft had these features?"

You know, I really have tried not to arbitrarily hate Minecraft.  So far, I'm doing quite well.  The player base, though, is making that increasingly difficult.

[tiresius]

Toady and ThreeToe, that was an excellent article.  I grabbed a NYT Sunday edition yesterday for $7 and promptly yanked out the magazine and discarded the rest, despite having read it online already.  It is just something precious enough to keep a hard copy of.  I wish I had kept that article with the pic of you both sitting at a Go board, I think I tossed it by accident during a cleaning raid.

I was not surprised very much about the lifestyle, diet or lack of a love-life.  Big deal, you don't go out and meet friends regularly, you have hundreds, if not thousands, of friends/fans on the internet, giving you money.  How often do friends do that?

I was more surprised by the nervous tic and anger at the code, but hey... whatever.

The crayon art was even more fantastic than I could have imagined.  Next time I donate I will definitely ask for that.  Did Grandma value those three pictures in the article at $100 ?  I never bothered to google-image the crayon art.

Keep up the good work, fellas.  Hopefully it doesn't take 10 years to get to Ver 1.0, but I'll be along for the ride either way!!

[Vector]

I was more surprised by the nervous tic and anger at the code, but hey... whatever.

I suppose it says something about me that those were the most expected parts of the article >_>  We share habits, if not lifestyles.

Ahhh, made me smile.

[MaskedMiner]

I don't really understand why people compare the Minecraft and Dwarf Fortress o-o Only similar thing is that you dig stuff and you can build stuff, there are monsters and you can create tools out of stuff you dig, but otherwise everything is different.

Minecraft is building game where you search for block to build stuff with with monsters existing to make that harder, in Dwarf Fortress you try to create fortress which can survive, you don't create stuff just for sake of fun before you are at the point where you are very bored. I myself prefer Dwarf Fortress since I'm not interested in creating large block buildins, I prefer adventuring and fighting monsters  Hence why I prefer Terraria over Minecraft too.

Anyway, point was that Dwarf Fortress and Minecraft are completely different.

[Hitty40]

Has anyone noticed the recent spike in spambots ever since the article came out?

[Capntastic]

No, there've been tons of spambots in the last two months.

[drkpaladin]

Congrats on the NYT article!  I thought the article was mostly positive, I wanted to add to the comments section there online too but caught wind of it a little too late.  I was annoyed at the focus on dietary habits in the comments down there rather than info for people curious about the game, and although its fun to reminisce about how learning the game was difficult and how losing is fun, I wanted to stick in my two cents there to encourage people to give it a try, I think every fan of the game has tried to talk someone into trying it out and failed horribly.

I was lucky enough to stumble across dwarf fortress through a link on youtube, so hopefully this helps get the word out a little more.

[Xanares]

It could be an interesting thing for a podcast to elaborate on Toady One's view on the making of the article. Obviously it's a trade-of letting someone into your life in order for him to portray some of it, as well as in order to spread the DF-word, which goes hand in hand with being able to live of it.
I doubt it was an easy decision, but I think it paid well off this time around as the portrayal is lovingly made.

Re. the boing boing podcast/interview, it highlights "normal" gamers problems with DF, which is fine albeit a very very dead horse to beat on. DF is hard and it's what in many cases keeps it alive. I got bored with Minecraft after 2 days. Quite accessible interface yes, depth no, evolutionary world no, interesting characters no.. etc etc. It's a building sim that Lego should have made 5y ago... but still - an indie earning doe on game can only be good, so power to Notch for making it.

[Sutremaine]

I would bet my shirt Scamps attacked the poor guy at some point. 5 days in Scamps' house ? He must've been mauled to near-death at least 3 times.

I'll just leave this here.

[Footkerchief]

I winced involuntarily when I saw the part about drinking tons of soda and no water.

[DFPongo]

What a good writer.
Without going back into the nutrition thing, the whole modern life style is not good for you, not good for any of us. Toady is pushing it a bit, but that is his choice. As the article clearly shows, he is eyes wide open as to how he wants to live his life and what he wants to accomplished.

I would say its not often you read a story in a general paper on something you know a fair amount about, and learn so many things that you didn't know. Be sure, if Toady can find a way to make his game accessible to me(too hard for me) he will be a multi millionaire.

[drvoke]

So many people on this forum felt melancholy about Tarn's life after reading this article.  I felt a lot of nostalgia.  I have two things in mind specifically that I won't go into except to say that for one, I have a hard time explaining it because it tends to be such a fundamental part of their satisfaction with life for most people that they can't envision a satisfied life without it.  So I'm surprised Toady talked about it.

Anyway, I thought the article was fair, but I wouldn't expect many NYT Magazine readers to start trying to find out much more about Dwarf Fortress by either playing it or coming to the forums.  I suspect the readership is probably such that this will serve as more of, say, an anthropological piece.  Like, "Look at the weird food and clothes these weird foreigners have."  The reader is not going to go track down kangaroo knob to eat and sport the latest trends in hunter-gatherer fashion.  Neither will they be likely to pick up Dwarf Fortress (with nary a link in the whole story to the DF home page in any case) or deliberately hunt down the forums.  That's my analysis, anyway.

The BoingBoing cross posting/mention, etc... will probably generate more interest than the NYT Magazine article itself, for purely demographic reasons.  At any rate, I really find it hard to imagine that there are still very many people out there who would "get" Dwarf Fortress and who also have never heard of it.  But maybe I just misunderestimate people, and folks being introduced to it at MOMA or by reading NYT Magazine will totally understand why a game like DF is brilliant.

[Anathema]

Anyway, I thought the article was fair, but I wouldn't expect many NYT Magazine readers to start trying to find out much more about Dwarf Fortress by either playing it or coming to the forums.  I suspect the readership is probably such that this will serve as more of, say, an anthropological piece..

I agree with your analysis, the vast majority of NYT readers aren't ever going to play DF no matter how much publicity it gets, it's just not a game oriented at the average person. To them it'll be a 'human interest' story, hey look how those crazy gamers live.

That being said.. consider that a LOT of people read the NYT, 1.3 million people buy the Sunday paper, 30 million people visit the website per month. That's a lot more exposure than DF gets from websites where it is more typically mentioned (geeky gaming review sites, forums where stories are posted, etc.). If only 0.1% of those NYT readers are inspired to try the game, that's still a significant boost to an indie game like this.

Anyway I did my part, gave the online version of the article some comments on the difficulties a new player faces, and some links to the invaluable tutorials on these forums. I admit to still being cynical about most people getting into this game, it really does need a better interface among other things, but this publicity certainly can't hurt.

[franti]

I wanted to grab a copy for posterity's sake but it seems to be impossible to get a copy of a New York Times magazine down here.

Am I just looking the wrong way?  I know there's a newspaper, but am I wrong thinking there's a magazine too?  Or does wal mart simply not stock anything but tabloids?

It's in the 24th's Sunday paper -- the Sunday paper wraps around it, and it is nestled inside.  A lot of the papers have probably been removed after not being sold, but some places will keep the Sunday paper until the next Sunday rolls around, so it is probably out there somewhere.  The table of contents is funny -- they have the three crayon art reward pictures we drew there taking up like a third of the page, telling you to go to page 16.  The ASCII portraits are also more giant so that you can see the characters.

TOADY HAS SPOKEN. ALL HAIL HYPNOTOAD.

[caknuck]

Now that I know that Toady has his doctorate, I'm going to insist on calling him Dr. Toady One. Much in the same way that Wladimir Klitschko is Dr. Steel Hammer (but much less Ukrainian)