Annales History in Dwarf Fortress's Legends Mode, Translation from Game to Story, and Implications for Historical Thinking Concepts
Wednesday January 6
This blog post intends on continuing a basic analysis of Boluk and LeMieux's piece on "Dwarven Epitaphs" as I discussed in my last post. However, the focus will be taken to one of the topics I discussed near the end for future considerations, namely ideas of narrative as translation from game to story. Boluk and LeMieux discuss this at length, but I'm looking to expand some of those ideas within the context of Peter Seixas' ideas of historical consciousness along with my ideas of the videogame as fonds. These ideas of engendering historical consciousness through primary document engagement fit very well with Boluk and LeMieux's consideration of DF history as akin to White's ideas of annals, and similarly fit with fonds theory. While still needing to be fleshed out a bit, these concepts work very well together to understand how DF specifically engenders historical consciousness through the way it structures its historical information.
As I wrote last post, Boluk and LeMieux centre their discussion on DF narrativization around ideas of the "dissonant registers produced between human operators and nonhuman operations" (126). To begin this post, I'm going to revisit their concept of narrative bookends that DF works within in order to explore the translation process that players engage with in producing narratives. The concept of "bookends" refers to the fact that much of the programming and game mechanics in DF are drawn from the fantasy short stories written by Zach Adams, the brother of main creator Tarn Adams. They attempt to deconstruct these fantasy stories for rudimentary elements of the fantasy genre in order to understand what makes up the core of a fantasy world and implement these elements in a procedurally generating way. These implemented algorithms in the gameworld interact with each other in complex and unimagnable ways to allow for emergent gameplay not planned by the creators. This is seen at one point in "Boatmurdered," where mechanics of entity hatred and looting manifest in a comedic situation where dwarves run to their deaths at the hands of hateful elephants while attempting to loot the bodies of their fallen comrades - who just moments before had been going after the same goods they were (136-7). Events like this are then translated from strange gameplay moments to exciting, original narratives in the community, the second narrative bookend that ends the DF game just as the narratives of the Adams brothers began the game. These narratives translate the unpredictable effects of procedural gameplay into something readable by the average user.
This idea of narrativizing complex ideas is essential for my discussion of what this game does for the player's historical consciousness engagement. The emergent cultures coming from DF, as I mentioned in the past post, are difficult to understand without a narrative structure imposed on top of them or a more in-depth analysis into what they mean. Going back to "Boatmurdered," Boluk and LeMieux observe that "in writing their collaborative history of [the fort], the succession of players inevitably anthropomorphize computational processes by assigning psychological behavior to the dwarves, describing them as irrationally 'bound and determined to march to their deaths'" (137). In narrativizing, players assign meaning to the objective processes of the game in order to create emotionally affective stories for their communities. This process of assigning meaning and giving different weights to inherently similar processes is an essential part of engendering historical consciousness in a player, even in such an ahistorical situation as a procedurally generated fantasy world.
Boluk and LeMieux devote a significant part of their piece to compare concepts of medieval annals as nonteleological histories, as discussed by Hayden White, with the historical material of DF's Legends Mode. It is a fascinating comparison, and one I think is incredibly important in considering HOW DF's historical material is a) actually history and b) engendering historical thinking and consciousness. Legends Mode, instead of allowing small-scale engagement with the massive amount of material generated in world creation, gives the player access to every historical event of that same world. The game indexes thousands of processes and gives them textual labels that "reads more like The Silmarillion than Lord of the Rings" (143), in the sense that it is less of a formed narrative of history than lists of names, dates, events, and so on. The game hides the complexity of the processes used to develop this history through the simplicity of the output. Boluk and LeMieux draw a connection between this kind of historical representation to medieval annals and chronicles as discussed by Hayden White, who argues that, instead of being primitive and undeveloped methods of historical recording, instead point to "a fully developed but radically different philosophical worldview" (145), indeed deprivileging the place of human experience in history in exchange for an acceptance of theological supremacy over earthly events (148). This medieval cosmology is seen as well in DF's conceptions of recording history - no moral law is utilized to guide what is recorded or privileged; conversely, everything is recorded and privileged equally simply for it's existence. Thus, players in DF "resort to assigning metaphysical and supernatural explanations to unexpected in-game phenomena" (148), once again depicting the agency players must take upon themselves in exploring the gameworld and explaining it in formal or informal narrativization. White argues that "the form of the annal rejects Hegelian grand narratives of historical progress and presents a world indifferent to human struggle" (147), and this is similarly seen in DF's treatment of history: Boluk and LeMieux observe that "in one game set across a thousand-year time scale, Dwarf Fortress’s world generation will typically produce about fifty thousand noteworthy characters participating in over half a million events in thousands of locations" (134). Within all of this, and without any guidance from game AI, players are left to wonder what is so important about individual events and what their bearing might be on their own existence in the world, whether as a fortress or an adventurer. They thereby give preference and weight to certain events and histories over others. This giving of significance is a key part of historical thinking and shows how DF has a great deal of that kind of engendering of historical consciousness. A historian today must give context and shaping in the form of narrative to material they might find that subscribes to this sort of historical worldview, and so too must a DF player engage with their world in order to translate this alternative viewpoint into something more consumable by a modern audience. They engage with historical thinking techniques in order to essentially write history from primary documents of the gameworld.
All of this can be drawn into my ideas of the videogames as fonds quite naturally. The "flattened ontology" of DF as discussed by Boluk and LeMieux has parallels, both in name and key concept, to my idea of a flattened gameworld, where all material is privileged equally and analyzed from that perspective in order to draw as much as possible from a game. As I wrote in that fourth blog post, "this is a way of looking at gameplay material in an "objective" way, without the artistic subjective structuring of the videogame's narrative." I posited that DF was a prime example of how this idea of a videogame as a fonds could work, as all material is privileged equally and much more easily recordable than a traditional graphics-heavy videogame. This conception of DF's historical processes by Boluk and LeMieux only helps to further develop this idea, and I hope to explore it even further. Organizing the videogame as a fonds maintains much of the integrity of the annal qualities of DF's history and allows for engagement with it more naturally as opposed to imposing the narrative structure of a wiki or other type of story upon it. Legends Mode in itself is practically a fonds: organization of the material is straightforward and does not affect the integrity of the material within. I think that the fonds theory might be more interesting/applicable if applied to specific fortresses or adventurer's experience, then placed in context (when narrativized or re-examined) within that larger history. That allows for players/users to engage with the material themselves, without outside guidance, and shape historically-informed narratives that utilize historical thinking techniques and that will engender ideas of historical consciousness.
To conclude, I want to take a quick look at how this process of translation in narrativization when working with the primary source of DF engages historical thinking techniques. To do this, I'm using Peter Seixas' 6 elements of historical thinking, laid out below, a list of things students must do in order to engage in thinking historically and critically.
1. Establish historical significance - This is something essential in working with DF in order to construct narratives. Seixas represents history as too large to consume all on it's own, and thus historians must sift what is significant for inclusion. As we have just discussed at length, both the DF Legends Mode and ideas of the gameworld as flattened do not give preference or weight to elements of gameplay on their own. Thus, players must engage with that material on their own in order to draw meaning from it. The mechanics of DF specifically force players to value certain things over others, not just in Legends Mode but often in fortresses. As talked about earlier, the anthropomorphization of the computer processes of dwarves, for example, is an act of valuing certain game elements over others in order to give meaning and narrative to the history of a world.
2. Use primary source evidence - Since mostly every player's world is their own creation, unless they are playing a community succession game, they cannot rely on other's interpretations of it - even if it is a succession game they must engage with the world they are given in whatever way they choose to in order to shape the world further. Thus, a DF world is primary evidence rather than secondary in many ways, and players must engage with the difficult to navigate GUI themselves and piece together and give preference to fragments of gameplay and world creation in order to narrativize their world.
3. Identify continuity and change - When engaging with DF in any of it's modes, the processes of world generation, game mechanics, and so on are all obscured from through the interface view and so are not obvious in their effects to the gameworld at a particular moment. A player who wants to engage with DF mediations of translation must organize annal/chronicle history in a way that engages with continuity and change in respective areas of the world, civilizations, settlements, etc. When presented with something unfamiliar they can explore the happenings of their created world to unearth areas where change and continuity have shaped what they are presented with. This can be seen in the example of Tholtig Cryptbrain, the anomaly who survived a centuries-long war and took thousands of lives as talked about by Boluk or the example of an elven king emerging in a Dwarven civilization, as seen in the Hall of Legends in the Bay12 forums.
4. Analyze cause and consequence - This is the same idea as discussed above. Players, when engaging with the history of a world or settlement in DF, recognize the context of events within the gameworld and frame them as such within narratives. Placing them in a framework of causality and contingency promotes doing so in the real world with historical material.
5. Take historical perspectives - Each community or individual narrative, the "Dwarven Eptiaphs," has a viewpoint, a certain understanding of each world and civ. and settlement, and so on. What is powerful about the DF narratives coming from an engagement with historical thinknig combine a subjective player's game experience with the objective intricacies and complexities of a procedurally generated and ultimately meaningless world into a unique narrative voice that attempts to convey meaning.
6. Understand the ethical dimension of historical interpretations - This is one of the more difficult concepts of historical thinking to ground within DF. The narratives created out of DF games themselves do personalize dwarves and the computer processes that make up characters in narrative, as seen with the anthromorphization of dwarves that has been discussed earlier. Interpretations of worlds into narratives can potentially have ethical connotations dependent on several factors: how the player represents their dwarves or views them in light of their abilities in-game, what meaning is attempted to be conveyed through narrative and how the game represents that, etc. Exploring this might take more in-depth examination, but it is interesting nonetheless.
And thus concludes my 6th, technically 7th blog post. I look forward to developing ideas of the DF annals, epitaphs, and the flattened ontology of the gameworld into my own ideas of a videogame as fonds in the next semester, and hope that doing so gives me more ideas relating to how DF and other games might develop historical consciousness through engaging players in historical, archival and archaeological processes. As always, please open an issue on this post or any within my Github repo if you have any comments or concerns, and please continue to reach out to me on my Twitter, @rapickering. Thank you for taking the time to look at my writing once again - I will hopefully have another post up in a week or so.