This was a lovely little thread I had with my friend and colleague Moses Wolfenstein. Minor edits for clarification and format, but otherwise…Moses is ACTUALLY THIS SMART EVERY TIME YOU TALK TO HIM.
Dan:
Subject: I’ve now tried Dwarf Fortress three times…
This time following a painstaking step by step tutorial. Dwarves just wouldn’t dig, they went fishing instead. With no feedback to confirm whether or not my “dig” command was even successfully given, I had no idea what the problem was. I feel like I’m trying to join a club where the members hit themselves in the head with a hammer.
Thoughts?
Moses:
My first reaction is laughter at “they went fishing instead.” You’ve provided me with yet another piece of evidence for why I’m unlikely to ever play DF, but am nonetheless very glad that other people in the world are.
If you want help, try asking [a friend of Moses]. Also, I noticed on BoingBoing that there’s a guy giving a class:
http://boingboing.net/2011/07/25/online-class-to-teach-dwarf-fortress.html
Dan:
That class thing is actually what spurred me to email. If games are such brilliant learning devices, why in god’s name should i be required to take a traditional class just to play it? Why not just play TF2, which has plenty of strategic depth, but also happens to be ACTUALLY ENJOYABLE to play and learn?
There’s an RPS thread about the course, and I’m heartened that the common consensus is “it might be a brilliant game, too bad the UI is needlessly obtuse”.
Moses:
Here’s where we get into “not all games are created equal.”More importantly, not all games behave the same way in relation to humans simply because they’re games.
Jim’s [He means James Paul Gee] assertion (that we’re all generally in line with) regarding games as brilliant learning devices only works for those games that are designed to be brilliant learning devices. We can think about this in terms of books for that matter. Some books are actually brilliant learning devices so long as you have the requisite reading ability (The Way Things Work or Drawing on the Right Side of the Mind are pretty good examples). Others are hopeless as learning devices despite the fact that they have massive chunks of knowledge embedded in them (i.e. anything ever written by a German or French philosopher).
Dwarf Fortress is perhaps the Karl Marx or Pierre Bordieu of digital games. There’s a whole lot to get out of it if you are willing to slam your head against a wall repeatedly. For the rest of us, there’s Civ and Portal.
Dan:
So true. Mind if I take this email correspondence and turn it into a quick post on dannorton.com?!
Moses:
Go for it!