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[hermes]

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.

This is an interesting point, and one I've asked myself of other art forms, like music, theatre or literature, but I've come to the conclusion it just doesn't hold traction anymore.  In days of yore, it was required that art be instantly accessible, perhaps through endemic cultural memes, because people could only access works of art rarely and transiently.

 But around the turn of the twentieth century this changed because there was easy, mass access to art along with access to cultural history through libraries.  The internet is simply a transposition of this same phenomenon.  The upshot is, it is entirely commonplace to experience artworks that are bewildering on first consumption ( modernist literature or cubist painting for example), and moreover this has been the norm for over a century.

So I would contend that she was in fact an inept reviewer and, though amusing at times, not particularly talented and entirely unfair and unskilled in the way she dealt with DF.

TLDR:  her premise was intellectually flawed and her inability to use Google more telling than all of the above drunken analysis.

[Boltgun]

As an attempt been made to do a step by step tutorial with a provided save ?

The actions you do on a new fort tend to be the same, but it may differ if you start with several layer of soil on a flat ground. The former seem to have happened in this review.

At least we can write 'dig north toward the stone' because we know stone is there. Just a thought.

[Mishrak]

As an attempt been made to do a step by step tutorial with a provided save ?

The actions you do on a new fort tend to be the same, but it may differ if you start with several layer of soil on a flat ground. The former seem to have happened in this review.

At least we can write 'dig north toward the stone' because we know stone is there. Just a thought.

Yes, this has been done:

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=31928.0

It's a dated version, but the basics are very similar.  I used it to first get involved in the game.

I would love to see one of the Ars editors (or this same one) try to tackle this game properly, perhaps posting a series of articles as time went on to review their playstyle, rather than just assume that "well this game is really hard so I'll set a time limit as to how long I'll beat my head against it without seeking proper help".

There is a lot less patience and tolerance today for games that don't hold your hand or take real, genuine effort to get good at.  People really don't like having to use their brains and think.  They want to sit down, mash buttons and beat the game.  Dwarf Fortress is not like that (and subsequently, Dwarf Fortress players are not like that), and it will require mental energy, planning, thought, failure, and use of every resource available to do great things in it.

I agree with Hermes and Idranel.  I liked the article and the press, but it was lacking any real journalism because she wasn't using the resources available to her.

[edit]
As a side note, I could have a pretty freaking awesome fort in 10 hours of play.  Maybe one of us should make a 10 hour fort with a write-up and send it to the author of this article? I'm tempted to do it.

[smirk]

As an attempt been made to do a step by step tutorial with a provided save ?

The actions you do on a new fort tend to be the same, but it may differ if you start with several layer of soil on a flat ground. The former seem to have happened in this review.

At least we can write 'dig north toward the stone' because we know stone is there. Just a thought.

Yes, this has been done:

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=31928.0

It's a dated version, but the basics are very similar.  I used it to first get involved in the game.

Yeah, that's the tutorial that taught me the game as well. Also note that the second image in the Ars article, this one:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

...is the 5th image in TinyPirate's awesome tutorial. So presumably she actually went and bothered to learn the game properly after mining comedy material for the article. 'Cause come on, how does someone miss the 'k' and 'v' functions for that long?

Still a hilarious read though =D

[Ruhn]

(( I didn't realize the author was a woman either  ))

As a side note, I could have a pretty freaking awesome fort in 10 hours of play.  Maybe one of us should make a 10 hour fort with a write-up and send it to the author of this article? I'm tempted to do it.

!!CHALLENGE!!Start at worldgen and make the best fort you can in 10 hours, including some documentation of events.  We vote on best fort+writeup of those who accept, and post on some website and link as response.

Yes, this has been done:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=31928.0
It's a dated version, but the basics are very similar.  I used it to first get involved in the game.

!!SCIENCE!!We find our own n00b and get them to play 10hr and document progress with the tutorial as reference (it helped me in the beginning too).  Part 2 of the experiment would have a different n00b uses only TinyPirate's book for the 10 hours.  Bonus points if the subjects are female + college graduate + working in the media.


edit: a link to the challenge
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=123408.0

[Boltgun]

As an attempt been made to do a step by step tutorial with a provided save ?

The actions you do on a new fort tend to be the same, but it may differ if you start with several layer of soil on a flat ground. The former seem to have happened in this review.

At least we can write 'dig north toward the stone' because we know stone is there. Just a thought.

Yes, this has been done:

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=31928.0

It's a dated version, but the basics are very similar.  I used it to first get involved in the game.

Yeah, that's the tutorial that taught me the game as well. Also note that the second image in the Ars article, this one:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

...is the 5th image in TinyPirate's awesome tutorial. So presumably she actually went and bothered to learn the game properly after mining comedy material for the article. 'Cause come on, how does someone miss the 'k' and 'v' functions for that long?

Still a hilarious read though =D

Wow, if I followed this tutorial instead of using the wiki I would have made sustainable fort in like... only 5 tries instead of 10 (most early failure were due to starvation, the others were flooding fun).

[Mishrak]

I learned the basics and the interface through that, and then put it down for like a year.  When I came back to it, I watched Captain Duck's videos on Glaciersacks and Snarlingurn, took about 2 pages (literally) of paper notes of how he built things, and I did 4 or 5 forts blindly copying what he did until I understood it and had it memorized.  Now I don't copy his steps verbatim anymore because I know how to think about what I want, but his videos shaped how I build stockpiles, lodgings, hospitals, shooting galleries, wells, and pretty much everything else.

[Necrisha]

o.o wow. I don't think I did that bad on my first fortress... Although having moved from a dungeon-crawl rouge-like to dwarf fortress does give one a leg-up. And having fond childhood memories of figuring out controls of second hand Nintendo games like star tropics without any sort of manual or information outside the cartridge itself...

Basic wisdom- learn from a wiki unless you are used to working blind with much older video games. and even then it's a good idea to look at a wiki when you're three fortresses stuck on something.

[Nyan Thousand]

This is really commentary about Dwarf Fortress' counter-intuitive UI and hatred of user-friendliness, if anything. She's raising fair points. Don't deny it. The first time you played this game, you were lost as well. DF isn't really a game that tries to look good, I understand that, but her points aren't any less valid. The fact that you need to rely on the wiki in order to get by at first only proves that fact. I don't really see this as a journalistic piece. Gaming journalism is a farce and doesn't exist. More importantly, this article doesn't present itself as one with journalistic merit. It's not meant to review Dwarf Fortress. It's literally a story about babby's first fort.

The problem with DF is that it's simply too unwelcoming at times. We've all been through that so we should all understand where she's coming from.

Lastly, you can't deny that reading about how she was making burrows and thinking it was doing anything was fucking hilarious.

[flabort]

Lastly, you can't deny that reading about how she was making burrows and thinking it was doing anything was fucking hilarious.

That sums up the BEST parts of the whole article.  And while first time I played, I didn't make the burrow mistake (since they didn't exist yet), I could not for the life of me find out that < and > did anything. After a while of digging, I was like, "Ooh, out of the U menu I can zoom to my dorfs!", and then I was like, "AAH! WHERE IS MY FORTRESS? WHY IS THE MAP ALL DIFFERENT? I'M LOOKING EVERYWHERE, NORTH, SOUTH, EAST, WEST, BUT NOTHING IS DUG ANYMORE?!". Which is actually... Well, she got the hang of that a whole fort or two earlier then I did. Yeah, two forts earlier, since it seems she figured it out on her first.
After my first initial breakthrough/breakdown, I figured out that there were more than one Z level, but not how to use them. So I would zoom to a dorf, hope he was on the level I was looking for, and if he wasn't, look for a dorf that was and zoom to him. And I had no idea how stairs worked. Yeah, stairs were just awful. Trying to line them up after zooming to a dorf to find the right level? Heh, and that's after I finally figured out that building a down stair DOESN'T make an up stair.

I found the article more of a just-for-laughs-and-giggles read, and that the author was a hoot. Someone introduce her to NetHack.

[Xinael]

This is really commentary about Dwarf Fortress' counter-intuitive UI and hatred of user-friendliness, if anything. She's raising fair points. Don't deny it. The first time you played this game, you were lost as well. ... The fact that you need to rely on the wiki in order to get by at first only proves that fact.

The problem with DF is that it's simply too unwelcoming at times. We've all been through that so we should all understand where she's coming from.

I hope you'll forgive me for ignoring your commentary on gaming journalism, but that's quite a different point that I feel would need addressing separately.

You're absolutely right that Dwarf Fortress is unwelcoming at present at that that was her problem. But she isn't "raising fair points". She deliberately takes action to make the game harder by not using any of the utilities and resources that have grown around the game. She says that she will seek help from them when she feels lost, but then she doesn't. For hours and hours. That's an unrealistic amount of masochism when she's fully aware that tilesets and other community resources would help her. I could understand where she was coming from when she was feeling confused and needed help. I failed to understand how, upon becoming confused, she refused to use resources that she knew would help her be less confused. You're right that it's a farce.

Secondly there's a subtext in this article that you've drawn out more explicitly - Dwarf Fortress does not have a "hatred of user-friendliness". User-friendliness and the interface simply haven't been a focus up to now, and there's no reason for them to be while new features are being added so often. Being obtuse and hard to grasp is not a development goal or a stylistic choice, it's a practical consequence of the game not being finished yet. Implying otherwise does Tarn and the game a disservice, I think.

Oh, and I disagree with her burrow problems being "fucking hilarious". I personally find schadenfreude boring, and this article was chock full of it.

[Cruxador]

This was a fun read, I laughed a lot at her confusion.

I’ve played complex simulation and management games before (Civilization, SimCity)

This one caught me by surprise. I don't think it's even supposed to be a joke, but it really reminded me of how different some people's perspectives are.

Casey wouldn't have a BS in Applied Physics if she were stupid.

So paying for an expensive degree (but stopping before coursework gets difficult) and then getting a job totally unrelated to that degree is now a sign of intelligence?

[Chagen46]

ITT: Misogny.

Would you people be hating on this woman as much if she was a man?

[WealthyRadish]

ITT: Misogny.

Would you people be hating on this woman as much if she was a man?

Chances are the opposite is happening. Giving the article the analysis it would deserve as a review, it's terrible. But I doubt it's meant as a review, more just a funny piece written to be laughed at... especially since DF would be impossible to review anyway. The fact that a woman wrote it does make it funnier for many, but not in a "Heh thas wat hapens wen they try to play a man's game!" way, more just due to this weird automatic courtesy people have towards women on the internet.

[Xob Ludosmbax]

ITT: Misogny.

Would you people be hating on this woman as much if she was a man?

About the same really.

I would guess a lot of people find it funny because they can relate.  Pretty much everyone goes through a similar experience (albeit a lot less dramatic if they read the help first).  Learning DF is a lot like learning to cook.  At first everyone starves.  Then there's smoke and fire everywhere.  A bit later it's water everywhere.  After a bit of practice, you end up with something just barely palatable.  And finally you end up with an immensely satisfying feast.  But trying to cook and actively refusing to look at a cookbook or any kind of reference, even though you heard it can be hard; well, I'm sure there's a word for it. 


(For the record, when I was learning to cook, the recipe called for 3 cloves of garlic.  I put in 3 heads of garlic.  I love garlic, so I didn't understand why everyone else refused to go near it.  See also: "Garlic salt is just like garlic powder, right?")