I was playing some Dwarf Fortress and wondering why I keep returning to a game that so clearly hates me. Okay, not me personally but the game definitely has some kind of grudge against humanity in general and is designed specifically to inflict as much annoyance on the player as possible. And yet I keep playing it.
So I’ve come up with two reasons. The first is that I enjoy the playground to build wildly complex architecture and small scale urban planning. The other is there’s something inherently interesting in the emergent behaviors of the game: the ant farm effect. Plop in your sea monkeys and watch them grow and play.
So I started thinking about other games that feature emergent behavior as a major portion of it. That is a game system where the player sets up a few simple conditions and observes the result.
The Game of Life is the grand daddy of these games and the most basic form: you’ve got your grid, you’ve got on and off, and you’ve got three rules that determine the next state.
Effectively all of the Maxis Sim- games have some aspect of this, though the ones where it comes out the most is The Sims. I’ve never actually played the game but after recognizing what I liked in Dwarf Fortress I’ve ordered The Sims 2 where I’ll hopefully find the the same thing in a less frustrating package.
There was also the spiritual ancestor of The Sims called Little Computer People, but as I recall there wasn’t anything that the player did to influence the environment.
So what other ones are out there? Where can a player tweak the world and watch the whole system change?
JSG: Note that you still have to keep an eye on Sims to keep them alive. In other words, you oft times have to intervene after the initial setup. Fortunately, you generally WANT to.
Oh, and you might like the Black and White series.
A spiritual descendant of Little Computer People, there once was a great game called “Creatures”.
You were given a fixed game world on a CD, and a few “eggs” on a floppy disk. Each egg had a randomly determined genetic code, and once hatched it was erased from the disk. The “goal” was to teach your creatures how to survive, and possibly eugenics them so that strong traits (like “willing to do what he’s told rather than pushing buttons to see what happens” or “unlikely to push the ZAP ME! button a third time after the first two presses have ZAPPED YOU”) were kept while weak traits (like an allergy to honey, or a chronic stupidity) were weeded out. Ultimately, however, the object of the game was to watch the little creatures do their thing with as little player input as possible.
Black & White (the first one, in any case) was also interesting in that regards : your avatar could be taught to do stuff, but also had some autonomy and you never knew what teaching him one trick would result in in the end. For example, I once chained my monkey to a tree on a beach, and showed him how to break rocks, then throw them as far as possible. The idea was 1) to boost its strength and 2) to unleash my crazy rock-flinging monkey on my enemies. While he was doing that, I concentrated on other stuff. Then I noticed my villagers were losing their shit and I laughed my ass off when I saw why : Monkey had ran out of rocks to break, so he’d thrown the tree he was tied to, freeing himself. Then he went to the village to eat, because he was hungry. Then he started flinging villagers as far as he could for shits and giggles. They were not as amused as he was
There were actually two sequels to Creatures, as well as a free add on called Docking Station. The docking station could be used in conjunction with Creatures 3, or as a stand-alone app. It appears to still be available from here, though you’ll have to register to use it I think. Still, it’s fun to play around with.
If you want to save some money, then yeah Sims 2 is cheaper. On the other hand, the amount of content in Sims 3 is comparable to Sims 2 plus pieces of several of its expansions, and a lot of new stuff besides. (Let’s just say I’m in a position to know.)
Oh, man, I’ve been on a major DF kick lately. It’s actually surprising to me, because I frequently muck about with Sim games for a bit and then get bored and quit before long. DF is lasting quite a bit longer, probably because there’s so much more weird little bits to play with.
That said, have you tried any of the old Sierra citybuilders? The Caesar series was quite good, but I haven’t tried any of the offshoots (they did Greek and Egyptian as well, I believe). Similar kind of set-up-your-industries-and-let-them-go-at-it gameplay as DF, but less detailed/more polished. Worth a look, at any rate.
The best Sierra city builder is the Chinese one (Emperor : Rise of the Middle Kingdom), although Zeus : Master of Olympus and its monsters/heroes mechanic can be entertaining, if you don’t mind random shit tearing through your cities once in a while.
That said, I wouldn’t call them emergent behavior games, everything is very predictable. Yes, a single new warehouse, or a modification of existing warehouses’ get/refuse rules can totally change the dynamic of your city, and a pottery shortage can start a chain reaction that sends 3/4th of your population away, but again, if you know what you’re doing, you’re in complete control and there’s little randomness.
An entertaining one is Evil Genius : it’s a spiritual descendant of Dungeon Keeper putting you in the shoes of a James Bond villain. Pirhana tanks and stupid henchmen galore !
Um, at least in the first game, sims don’t make any decisions that don’t directly contribute to their survival, and even that autonomy can be turned off. I think they have the ability to surprise you a little in Sims 2, but nothing on the scale of Dwarf Fortress.
[OP, I’m taking this thread to Beirut] Are there any UI mods for Dwarf Fortress that add mouse support? I liked the game back when it didn’t overwhelm with options, but the last time I installed it, there was a RPG mode, dozens of stat screens, and a bunch of extraneous stuff every time I selected something. I’m not memorizing five dozen keyboard commands (or sequence of keyboard commands) just to do the bare minimum to keep my dwarves alive. Seems like a well-designed context sensitive menu would take a little bit of the sting out.[/hijack]
Hmm… I can definitely let the Sims 2 run and for the most part they’ll do okay. They won’t excel but if their environment is set up right they’ll get by. The big complication seems to be the social aspects which the player manages about a hundred times as efficiently as the Sims themselves through use of dates.
I don’t get this urge often but I really wish Dwarf Fortress was open source. I’d fork it in a heartbeat to strip the needless complications, clean up the interface, add context information, and so on. It’s almost reached the point that I want to just clone it and be done with it.
AFAIK, there aren’t any mouse-enabling UI mods. I’ve only played the current version, but for the most part there isn’t much (necessary) memorization. Sure, you’ll pick up sequences of commands, but all available commands are listed in the menu panel. I’ve read threads discussing the possibilities of a program that essentially sits on top of DF and changes the display and interface, but apparently the menus are sufficiently buried in the program that it’s impractical. Also, reading the game memory every frame to see what’s available would be nasty on your framerate.
That said, you can at least use AutoHotKey to assign specific strings of keys to hotkeys, if you like. That can help tremendously with the pain of complicated digging designations - I ended up writing a script to go through a bunch of bitmaps and assign the contents as diggings, so I don’t have to deal with the rather abominable interface.
