Doing things the hard way on purpose

First though, a little housekeeping.

This week on stream we started Mass Effect 2, complete with occasionally pausing to talk about the colonial view of the series (something i’ve been exploring in detail during this replay. If you haven’t been keeping up, past episodes are on YouTube.) Tomorrow we'll be starting with rescuing Archangel and seeing where we go from there.

We also started Death Stranding, and may well continue with it. Who knows! Not me.

On the ttrpg and writing side of things, there hasn’t been much recent development, but this week I’m going to be putting my whole Promptober doc on Patreon for the higher couple of tiers, to tide you all over until I write something new.

I also have a couple of things bubbling in the background that’ll show their faces sometime in the next month or so, so keep an eye out.

Ok now I’ll talk about Dwarf Fortress

So. As you may have noticed on twitter, earlier this week I purchased the new Dwarf Fortress edition on Steam and immediately lost 5 hours of my evening to it. It fits so neatly into my playstyle, which is “if the game needs me to know something, it will tell me about it” and then winging it from there.

Its not always a great method. Some games, like Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley, are resistant to this approach, because they don’t tell you shit about anything and the gap between failure and retry is too long. I don’t hesitate before looking up what to add to the soup at the Pelican Town Luau and I have a Polygon article showing the fake paintings Redd sells bookmarked for easy reference.

Minecraft also isn’t lush with in-game guides, but it’s very forgiving when it comes to showing me what I can and can’t do. Well. As long as I don’t mind trying a hundred things and failing 99 times.

After a few months of fruitless effort I did look up what levels iron and diamonds spawn at. But otherwise, I can wing it and have a blast just running around making it up as I go along. Even if I get confused when people say stuff like “the dragon”.

I love a survival game too. The Long Dark is a favourite of mine. Subnautica, and the sequel held my attention for ages. In the same vein, the Failbetter Sunless series is amazing for keeping me on my toes. There’s something deeply satisfying somehow about screwing up once, and then not screwing up again in that same way, about learning from your mistakes - and in a way that doesn’t require fine motor control like a Dark Souls or a roguelike. It’s about learning, not about whether or not my hands will obey their commands fast enough.

But Dwarf Fortress. Oh man. This thing has tooltips for days, and just little enough information in each one that I can still fuck around and find out how things work my way. Somehow my first settlement is still going, and has reached a size large enough to be called a City, but I almost want some disaster to take it out so that I can do it better next time.

Like I was told by the tutorial, and also by the Gita Jackson article that convinced me to buy the game, Losing is Fun.

See you next week for the last newsletter of the year!

-Jack