ps160617  Dwarf Fortress and Emeralda: It’s all about re-inventing reality 

Reading about the hit video game, “Dwarf Fortress,” the inventor of “Emeralda: Games for the gifts of life,” discovers parallels that inform him how fantasy games reconstruct reality in the minds of video gamers, and how Emeralda has had this use for him.

 When I read about Tarn and Zach Adams—the brothers who created Dwarf Fortress—there were bits of the text written for The Stranger by Kelton Sear that struck a familiar chord. I have nothing like the programming skills of the Adams (nor the Miller brothers who created Myst, nor Richard Garfield of MTG).

Those pioneers of games who inspired me to make Emeralda: Games for the gifts of life are decades younger than I am, therefore it’s natural that they could skip the kind of hands-on, high touch, low-tech arts and crafts that I worked on for a generation before they were born. They had computers and music synthesizers and they knew how to use them.

Yet there is something about games, including collectible card games and computer games that kept the creative fires going in me despite that I don’t code and I don’t play games at all. The strategic back story of collectible card games interests me only a little. These games are all fantasy-based actually, and this fact is boring to me.

I would rather devote my time and energy on strategies with which I can deal with reality. Even if Jane MacGonigal, clarifying her view (shared by most gamers I suppose) that “reality is broken,” I nevertheless prefer real life versus the lives that I observe many people living by their games.

However, as Sear, writing about the Adams brothers for The Stranger offered, “The game is largely about dwarves and the fortresses they build, it’s mostly about life. Or, more accurately, the infinite narrative and experiential possibilities that can arise from the universe’ tangled web of natural laws and the unyielding flow of time time that carries it all forward,” I remembered my similar, parallel description of Emeralda.

Emeralda is about my experiences that I set in motion in 1972, a short story that began what is today a forty-four year narrative. The documents I made offer me an infinity of experiential possibilities that arise from the web of events that flowed over the time of my life. On my computers and a variety of media are documents about artworks, photos, ephemera, text and electronic recordings. That I have managed to keep Emeralda alive for so long is a wonderment.

From the mid-nineties, when the web came along and I was learning how to use it I wished I could be like the Millers, Garfield, the Adams and other game masters so that I could put Emeralda into a form that other people could play with it the way people play with Dwarf Fortress. The difference is that Emeralda is about real things—works of art, for example.

The nearest I came to realizing this wish was when I had coffee with two family attorneys to show them my Perfect Studios trilogy, and how the books were intended to be foundations for families of artists to insure that the artist’s legacy would not be lost. Instead, because of the design of the game, the artists’ legacy would be in a form prepared to transfer by selling or otherwise placing the works of art in some kind of socially and artistically beneficial way.

In this way, Emeralda is an artist’s legacy management and transfer system. It might be economically beneficial to the artist’s heirs would be a plus; and there was a strong possibility that the community might benefit, too, utilizing the economic valuation of the work and establishing nonprofit, charitable trusts or foundations. That’s what I plan for my legacy.

Emeralda is a lonely game—like playing Solitaire. Sears said that Dwarf Fortress is not as well-known as it should be. A Dwarf Moot was held a few days ago, and Richard Garfield was there to add his support, lauding the game and its creators.

“How could a game so influential and groundbreaking be so obscure?” quoting one DF player. Occasionally I hear that my nineteen years at the UW were influential, yet not as well-known as Dwarf Fortress, of course. If Emeralda were to be downloadable and families of artists used it, that would be my crowning glory.