Dwarf Fortress Story
I'm still playing Dwarf Fortress, and frequently, but I slowed down on the story posting to give you guys a chance to recover. Here's an excellent one from Jim Riegel, though.Dwarf Fortress is definitely one of the most deep, intelligent games I’ve played to date – when you can apply economic theories on specialization of labor and JIT inventory management to a game, you KNOW you’ve found something amazingly well done. I want to share with you a quick note on a bug that I found vaguely disturbing though: First, I’m sure you’ve learned by now that dwarves don’t like death. It leads to depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. Put simply, if they see enough, they flip out and kill something – themselves or those around them. However, certain dwarves are sociopaths. They lack the natural emotional empathy and sensitivity of the proper dwarf. They look just like every other dwarf – they act just like every other dwarf… yet, like Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Terminator, they are perfect little emotionless machines. They make excellent butchers and fantastic soldiers. I happened to get lucky and had one of these little soulless wonders as my butcher. I have a policy of making newborn puppies and ponies available for adoption and, if ponies are not adopted by the time they grow up, I send them off to be knackered. It just so happens that I sent out my butcher to round up the herd and thin the ranks one day. I saw ‘Stray Horse (Tame) has been struck down! Stray Horse (Tame) has been struck down! Krazen Ergoblasbit (Tame) has been struck down!’
A sinking feeling hit me. The butcher had just grabbed the wrong horse. He’d somehow found someone’s pet and killed it. I expected a dwarf to go crazy any minute. When I looked at the corpse, I saw that Krazen was marked as being the pet of the Butcher.
I blinked. He’d never owned a pet before. I checked his thoughts. He was ecstatic. He had been comforted by a pet recently. He had adopted a pet recently. The little bastard befriended and adopted the horse while leading him to the block, improved his mood, killed him and had ZERO sense of remorse, guilt or loss. He just didn’t care. I’m starting to think about waiting until he’s asleep, removing his door and replacing it with a floodgate just to give the creepy bastard the Cask of Amontillado treatment.
And knowing how sophisticated and complex this game is, that may not even be a bug.
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