An Intro to "Dwarven Epitaphs," Narrativization, and its Connotations and Implications

Monday December 28th

This blog post is going to centre around discussion on narrativization in Dwarf Fortress, a topic that has been explored at length by people both inside the DF community and outside. Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux in particular have a fantastic piece that deals specifically with the memorialization and narrativization of DF losses that situates the game in a fascinating historiographical position, between traditional and nonteleological histories.

A good place for this post to start, I believe, is a quick contextualization of Boluk and LeMieux's piece, "Dwarven Epitaphs: Procedural Histories in Dwarf Fortress," in order to summarize some of the best parts of DF that I've been exploring. They center their analysis around the term Dwarven Eptiaphs, which they characterize as "postmortem accounts of play navigate the interstices of fan fiction, fan translation, and fan archiving" (Boluk and LeMieux, 126). These kinds of accounts are necessary to Dwarf Fortress in order for people not actively involved in the gameplay process to understand the stories that emerge from gameplay experiences that might be obscured by the ASCII based interface. These stories that emerge are a culmination of the processes of world generation and the natural and social history generation that comes with that, individual styles of gameplay, and the random gameplay events that emerge from a game reliant on procedural generation. Boluk and LeMieux succinctly summarize the mechanics, structures and goals of DF, namely that there are no set goals in Fortress Mode, which they characterize as "a mixture of city building, military strategy, and physics simulation" (128).

An important aspect of the game that Boluk and LeMieux bring up in their piece, which I have discovered firsthand to much frustration, is the individual nature of each dwarf in the game. While individual tasks may be designated in workshops and stockpiles, even with extreme micromanagement of each dwarf's permitted labours (incredibly difficult to manage in a larger fortress without any third party applications), "there is no guarantee that any one dwarf will respond exactly to the player’s demands" (128). The individuality of each dwarf extends past this, however: each has preferences for food, metals, alcohol, furniture, etc., has personality feautres such as strong or poor analytical abilities or musciality, can be literate or illiterate, has relationships both positive and negative with every member of your fortress and other dwarves outside in the procedurally generated world, and lofty dreams of starting families, mastering a craft, and so on. Boluk and LeMieux recognize this, saying "As the game grows in complexity, the truly autonomous nature of the dwarves intensifes, as what could be called a “dwarven culture” begins to spontaneously emerge" (128). To take advantage of these traits takes an even more extreme micromanagement and is generally impossible given the diversity in dwarves, but still has major implications on gameplay and emergent culture and history - a dwarf with a stronger temper and a dislike of a certain type of food may get in fights with other dwarves that leads to a higher stress level for your whole fortress, for example. I will discuss this further when I come to the new developments in the latest alpha version of the game that allow even more engagement with these particular traits.

The bulk of their piece that I am most interested in discusses the narrativization of losses in DF by the community. Indeed, "the community ethos has become 'failing is fun,' and players have made it a practice to narrate their experiences, translating the inscrutable actions that take place in Dwarf Fortress into more legible accounts of play" (132). When players lose in DF and their fortresses fall, the game does not end there - instead, oftentimes fortresses are memorialized through narratives posted on the Bay12 forums and elsewhere. They discuss several examples: Tim Denee's comics /Oilfurnance/ and /Bronzemurdered/, detailing the fall of individual fortresses (135), and the forum story of Tholtig Cryptbrain, "a statistical anomaly discovered in Dwarf Fortress’s Legends mode and the sole survivor of a century-and-a-half-long war in which she claimed 2,341 unique kills" (135). What I find more interesting is their discussion of Boatmurdered, the community game developed in an early version of DF that has become probably the most famous example of community DF narrativization. In their narrativization, players "inevitably anthropomorphize computational processes by assigning psychological behavior to the dwarves" (137). Indeed, player agency becomes a major factor in these narrative experiences, and they write these narratives "embrace the peculiar narrative effects emerging from the extended feedback loop between authorial intent and the experience of play" (138).

There are plenty more examples of DF narrativization: indeed, an entire subsection of the Bay12 forums for DF is based on community stories, and to wade through the insane amount of narrativization, the community has put together a "Hall of Legends", where the DF community keeps record of "our greatest achievements, our most sorrowful losses, our gripping stories and our unprecedented displays of dwarven ingenuity." All of the works in this section have been vetted and nominated for prominence in the community, and to go through all of the stories would be a task, as they are, even though their style is much more understandable than that of DF's, the stories often get lost within the conversations going on around them in each forum post. The Hall of Legends divides their narratives up in different categories depending on how they are written, drawn, etc. Succession games are when a DF fortress file is passed around from member to member, played for a certain amount of time (be that in-game time or real-world time), and passed on to the next player - an example of this would be Boatmurdered. There are also community fortresses - games are played by one player, but aspects are contributed by the community at large through suggestions, polls, etc. Then there are the stories, which is a vague term, but I suppose just entails the narrative is just by one person. The category includes comics, typical narrative fiction, and simply encounters noted on the forum casually.

Boluk and LeMieux centre their discussion on DF narrativization around ideas of the "dissonant registers produced between human operators and nonhuman operations" (126) and the implications of computer-developed history. This is important for my analysis and discussion of DF, but I want to bring more attention to what that means in a pedagogical or scholastic area: how these narrative examples connect to players sense of historical thinking and historical consciousness in the community and the gameworld. Boluk and LeMieux touch on some interesting aspects of this in their piece, comparing what the game supplies as it's history to medieval chronicles and annals, versus the narrative structure imposed over that by the community. This will become an important part of the thesis, juxtaposed with further ideas on emergent cultures, archival theory, and so on. One thing I can say for certain right now is that narrativization is important in the context of nonteleological histories as created by DF: these noteleological histories can be considered in the same vein as the videogame as fonds idea I explored in my fourth blogpost. But, that'll be something to talk about in a later post (hopefully this break if I can continue making progress).

I think it's good that I've made a short post about narrativization by summarizing important aspects of the pice on Dwarven Epitaphs - this paper is going to be a foundational part of the final project with all of it's elements on DF and what narratives serve in the context of the same and the community. Ultimately though, talking about narrative in one blog post feels like a tall order - it's beginning to feel like a concept too large to explain in a couple paragraphs. Thus, breaking it into pieces for a future post is my goal I think. Off the top of my head, those sections are...

1. Narrative's purpose in the community. How does narrative act as a way to foster community in DF, whether in the Bay12 forums, their dedicated reddit, etc.? This question feels secondary to everything - I feel historical aspects of these games and stories need to be focused upon primarily. However, emphasizing the reciprocal relationship between community and narrative in DF is important: as the narrativization goes on within communities, more people are drawn to that aspect of DF as a way of engaging with a video game and so continue the practice.

2. Narrativization as translation from game to story, and the implications of this for historical thinking, historical consciousness. I could do another 500-750 words on this aspect of Boluk's piece simply on the translation aspect, with my own interjections about the historical thinking that comes along with this translation. Pulling in the ideas of Peter Seixas and Sam Wineburg, along with observations made by Trevor Owens in his piece on Fallout 3 and Emily Johnston's dissertation, this will probably be my next post. I would love to get an actual post out pulling quotes and ideas frm multiples sources formally - hopefully something that can be pasted right in as material for the final product.

3. Narrative through archival theory. How does the DF community translate unorganized archival material of the gameworld into organized narrative in terms of my ideas of the videogame as a fonds? Is this comparable to the work of historians and archivists when engaging with real-world history? I'm going to try and look at specific examples of narratives in DF communities, and how they specifically translate primary documents of the gameworld into cohesive narratives with implied meaning. Also, is the process here the same as what I might consider for an RPG like Fallout or Skyrim?

4. Narrative elements inherent in the new DF. For those who are unaware, DF 0.42 was just released at the beginning of Jaunary, with some major updates to the processes of the game. Many of the updates have to do with social and cultural life in fortresses and the larger world, playing further into each dwarve's particular nature and unique emergent dwarven culture. There are guests who bring their own belief systems, cultural forms, scholarly discoveries, etc., all procedurally created and disseminated through the DF world. Scribes and scholars can ponder ideas and write manuscripts that can then be disseminated over the world, and dwarves have knowledge of poetry, music, stories, and both micro- and macro-histories in local areas and beyond. How does all of this fit into the previous three categories: do these forms of narrativization clash or work together, and do these narrativization techniques in-game make the same developments in player mentality as other narrative forms do? My initial reaction and what I have seen on the forums tells me yes, but this will take some searching and researching on the forums and new gameplay mechanics in DF that haven't really been documented in an academic environment thus far.

I'll be writing these posts over the next week and a half that I am on break and beyond, hopefully making some real progress to come back to Ottawa with in order to build a finished product for the end of the year. Feel free to tweet at me at @rapickering or open up an issue on my Github page if there are any issues or ideas one might want to send along. Thanks very much for reading, and be on the lookout for future posts!