For the past week I’ve been playing a game called Dwarf Fortress. It is a game where you play the role of a group of dwarves sent to a cliff face to survive and make something of yourself, whatever that may be.

The amazing thing about the game is how deep it is, on the surface it looks like a simple text based game, then you get into it and you are wondering what all the symbols mean and how to make your dwarves do things you need them to do. 2days of reading the wiki later and you are finally ready to spend the next hour losing your first fort to stupid mistakes. You can do almost anything in this game and it’s viable in some way. The graphics may be simple but behind them is a game more complex than The Sims or Sim City or almost anything I have played. You don’t so much control your dwarves as just assign jobs to them and hope they go about the business swiftly. Of course there are ways you can ensure that this happens, but without much direct control. I would suggest anyone who enjoys playing deep and interesting games to give this one a try.

Now the main reason why I’m talking about this game in particular is that I would like to take the idea furthur. What if you were a human outpost in rugged territory surrounded by enemies, could you survive? What about elves in their vastly forested landscape, could you protect yourselves from the orcs nearby without losing too many trees to their devestation or your own industry? Just the number of environments and challenges would be boggling, all with the complexity that runs Dwarf Fortress. This is a topic I intend to explore as time goes by, what kind of gameplay complexity enriches the experience, past fun and into pure amazement.

With the processing power of computers increasing, game complexity has been decreasing, while graphics have been improving. I’m going to try the opposite and see how complex a game I can make, lets see what happens.