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[umiman]

Yeah, she's definitely not dumb and there really is never any reason to insult the intelligence of anyone finding it difficult to play Dwarf Fortress. Reading the article she gave it plenty of fair chance and sure she made a lot of misunderstandings, but seriously... it's not like DF tells you anything like "go consult the wiki right now!!!!" in a way that newbies can tell.

I don't know how your first few times went, but mine were completely boring. And this was back when it was relatively easy in 2D and everything being fixed. I had no idea what was going on and thought the game was ridiculously stupid. So I gave it up. After a few weeks I ran into Boatmurdered. Then I got super pumped to play and invested way more time into it. If it weren't for that Let's Play, I would still not give a damn.

[SquatchHammer]

She says 10 hours played...

That is not enough time for a game review of any kind really (even with modern FPS twitch play shooters). To be honest you need about a good 100 plus just to get a feel for the game from just failures and successes. I KNOW that I'm a horrible player, but since the start of playing it (even with the help of a roommate that played it longer) I started to get better.

To write an article after 10 hours and say its a bad game needs to be rewritten to be honest, and I'll throw in my opinion its much easier to play with a tileset that doesn't burn out your eyes in a matter of moments.

[Mishrak]

Boo, how did I miss that it was a woman who wrote the article?  I guess I just wasn't paying attention.

I enjoyed what she wrote, and I think DF gets enough negative press on its own, so it's really not an issue if an Ars article writes a negative spin.  To be quite honest, if  someone makes decisions to play or not play a game based on a single article, then that's pretty silly.  I don't think this is a negative article though.  If anything, it shows a person that they should not just try to randomly jump into a game as deep and complex as DF without using the information available.

[Durin Stronginthearm]

To write an article after 10 hours and say its a bad game needs to be rewritten to be honest

Where does she say it's a bad game?

I don't think this is a negative article though.  If anything, it shows a person that they should not just try to randomly jump into a game as deep and complex as DF without using the information available.

This. The article is light in tone and quite clearly meant to be humorous, not a serious, in-depth examination of DF.

[Xob Ludosmbax]

This was my first thought after finishing the article:

Spoiler: Image (click to show/hide)

I'm hoping for a part two, where the game's richness and depth redeem the inscrutable UI.  I'd also settle for a part two that said that once she got past the UI, she didn't like the gameplay for this and this and this reasons.  As it was, the article felt like a big tease.  She had just started to figure out the UI and stopped in the middle of

[Neonivek]

I did find it particularly amusing that he was trying to put his dwarves in burrows thinking he was digging, and while digging out a soil layer he was wondering why he wasn't uncovering rocks.

SHE

I think she's made a good point about the wiki. It's not really made for new players. It's mostly written for experienced players. Even the built in '?' in DF is not very intuitive. Having rock is one thing but getting it requires a whole lot of explanation, including the most basic of ideas: the world is a giant layer cake/stack of paper and you can only see one layer at a time.

You NEED to use the starting guide (That may or may not have been updated) everything else is just for reference.

The older versions of the wiki's starting guide was good enough to get you a competent fortress first time through.

[smirk]

While I was moving my smiley face icon around the screen before, I can’t seem get it to do it again. I want to put burrows everywhere and put dwarves in them because that suddenly feels like enormous progress in this game. Stockholm syndrome is swift and unforgiving.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaand I burst out laughing.

Seeing that DF is practically synonymous with "90-degree learning cliff", and she declared that she was approaching from a "design paradigm on discoverability that's flowed from mobile apps", I was expecting a humorous article. So far she hasn't disappointed =D


EDIT:

Gray X’s start streaming in from one wall of the fortress and settle into the clump of icons that were already displayed on the screen. They blink aggressively. One turns into an R, maybe. The rest disappear. I receive no alerts. I have no idea what just happened.

[Caldfir]

Alright, I read the article, and then several pages of comments and everybody has said they learned from the wiki or from video tutorials.  The wiki and video tutorials were not how I primarily got my start in DF.  I knew what to do because I'd read a couple succession games (boatmurdered and... some other one that was more up to date at the time).  Then I built every workshop I could, and tried stuff until I had it figured out.  Ended up at the wiki when I wanted to figure out military.  Stuff in between was pretty much just me looking and trying stuff. 

At the time I didn't feel like it was punishment, and I wasn't really all that mad when things didn't go my way - I just enjoyed figuring the systems out.  I distinctly recall a profound sense of despair when I created my first bar of soap, since I realized then that I finally understood the entirety of the production process, and I hadn't anything left to learn. 

I guess if you don't like figuring stuff out maybe dwarf fortress would be un-fun to learn?

[Mishrak]

While I was moving my smiley face icon around the screen before, I can’t seem get it to do it again. I want to put burrows everywhere and put dwarves in them because that suddenly feels like enormous progress in this game. Stockholm syndrome is swift and unforgiving.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaand I burst out laughing.

That was basically my reaction as well.  I could see the logic there, burrow, dwarves like holes, lets put them in holes because that's what a burrow is right?  So funny.

[Idranel]

She says 10 hours played...

That is not enough time for a game review of any kind really (even with modern FPS twitch play shooters). To be honest you need about a good 100 plus just to get a feel for the game from just failures and successes. I KNOW that I'm a horrible player, but since the start of playing it (even with the help of a roommate that played it longer) I started to get better.

To write an article after 10 hours and say its a bad game needs to be rewritten to be honest, and I'll throw in my opinion its much easier to play with a tileset that doesn't burn out your eyes in a matter of moments.

I dont agree that you have to invest 100 hours in general to have an informed opinion about any game, especially for people who already have experience with the genre.
But 10 hours seems to be not enough for something as complicated as DF or most other roguelikes.

The premise of that article was as follows:

I decided to give the game ten hours of my life. I set a goal of doing my legit best to avoid using external guides or hints and to hold off using internal explanations unless I felt lost. I’d experiment and explore, seeing what I could ascertain from the user interface and environment and making as much progress as I could by my wits alone. And I learned one thing well: Dwarf Fortress is not a game that will hold your hand.

That sums up the whole article right there.

Its the perfect way of setting oneself up for failure when getting into dwarf fortress. And some more research in advance would have indicated that quite clearly.
It is bad journalism because the journalist tried to become an expert in the matter herself instead of talking to experts first while also allocating not enough time and not doing enough research to understand the subject.

So in the end we got an article that conveys only the confusion of the author but doesnt provide as much meaningful information as it could have.
It also highlighted some of the issues with DF: The learning curve and dependency on guides and wikis make it pretty much impossible to understand the game within 10 hours and its not obvious enough that this is the case and where the documentation can be found.
The necessity of guides and documentation is not a problem by itself.

But then again, I really admire that someone actually decided to write an article on DF.
Except that I dont consider this to be an article... its more like commentary representing a journalists own opinion instead of an (reasonably) unbiased representation of facts.
If you cant tell the difference between commentary and articles at a glance without actually reading the past the headline not only the journalists but also the editors are doing something horribly wrong...

[WealthyRadish]

If was a funny read, and suitably cringe worthy. I did glaze over when Minecraft and TVtropes got involved, but hey, internet.

My experience learning DF was to read pretty much the entirety of the wiki and any updated guides I could find, before actually trying it. I've never actually lost a fort (that wasn't on purpose, anyway) so I guess I skipped the most frustrating part of the curve. Very few of the people I've mentioned it to that have tried it have had any success, so hey, not for everybody.

[Sizik]

"I decided to give quantum mechanics ten hours of my life."

[King Mir]

A lot of people seem to be saying that she is dumb for not starting with the wiki from the start. That's not true. It's totally reasonable to expect games to be playable without external material. What she did was reasonable. She started playing the game the way you'd start any game. Then she lost. Fun for her. Then she read the wiki. The she stated to get somewhere. Slowly.

Over all, I thing it's a faithful review. And hilarious. I especially liked "I’m trying to build a skyscraper by banging two rocks together." You know that's true. But you can build skyscrapers in dwarf fortress. After you learn to bang rocks together. And after all the steps in between.

[darkflagrance]

What I simultaneously admire and deplore is the ability to spend 10 hours pursuing an approach you acknowledge is subpar. 10 hours spent hacking away at an obtuse interface with no hints, expecting it to get easier and more intuitive as time went by despite the opposite occurring. That requires amazing perseverance and a great deal of pride...or something else...

[King Mir]

She did use the quick start guide after she lost her first fort. So after 2 hours or so.