/lit/ - Literature

>>12486530
i used the wrong pic, aaaaahh

if you look at something like Dwarf Fortress you have a kind of fascinating model of how the mind also works. underneath it is Hell; there's no question about that. and the more that things work, the more Tarn/Toady has arranged the machine so that we wind up in the long run destroyed by our own prosperity. Dwarf Fortress is also afflicted with a complicated migrant situation, but the catch is that *they're royalty.* it's not always a train of asylum-seekers, it's even worse - it's fucking king and queens, who have enormous demands for your fortress, and they too have to be met. quite a reversal!

the other thing is that the dwarves aren't really afflicted by a drive to *accumulate,* but by a mysterious *art drive.* they're not interested in money; what makes them go insane is when they need to *create* something, and they don't the materials. then maybe they want to drink, and god help you if you don't have liquor on hand for that.

needless to say i completely love this. what sucks you down towards the Fun at the bottom can be partly because of course at higher intensities rarer minerals and materials are found, and you can build the lava forges and so on - or, conversely, simply because building *upwards* is impossible. True Dwarves only build *downwards,* and of course things only get crazier and worse and more dangerous the farther below you go.

but the question about madness is posed in a different way. there really is no Big Evil Thing in Dwarf Fortress - hell is down there, and it was always down there, and you knew exactly what it was going to look like, and what it would do, and this is coded directly into the game also. you are explicitly warned: beyond here is hell, and nothing but hell, and there is no colonizing of hell, or absorbing it productively into your base.

the dwarves want to *create* things even more than they want to own them. and the Fortress itself can make itself completely impregnable - this is always fun, and you as the defender can come up with all kinds of ways to torment and abuse the goblins who attack, although the colossi and giant spiders and carp and whatever else will fuck your shit up completely. but it is never impregnable in an internal sense, precisely because the dwarves themselves are internally driven by desires that - were they otherwise - would bring into question the nature of Dwarf Fortresses themselves.

i'm wondering if it really isn't a kind of exquisitely Deleuzian game now, at the moment. anybody want to take a swing at that one?