So far so exciting, but Earth B has its problems as well. In Earth B, Crawford's 1980s claim that "process intensity" rather than "data intensity" was the future of games has been brought to fruition, and Dwarf Fortress is an example-this little 5 megabyte application spends tens of minutes of processing time building the world you play in, rejecting multiple worlds as not being sufficiently balanced to play effectively - and consuming virtually all of the cycles of your modern, high-end device as it does so, as you can readily see by how slowly other open applications respond while it's world-building - even though all it's doing is processing, not throwing polygons onto the screen.
In Earth B, computer games have existed since the inception of the computer revolution, as on our own world but lacking the need to spend the vast bulk of their processing power pushing pixels to display pretty images on the screen, game developers have instead harnessed their power to produce incredibly detailed and sophisticated simulations that are presented to the players thereof entirely in ASCII. In Earth B, Moore's Law has progressed just as it has in our own, so that most computers now have multi-gigahertz processors. In Earth B, there never was a revolution in computer graphics, all games are ASCII and VGA was never invented. I deduce this from its main characteristics, and I think can very clearly describe the alternative universe it came from-let us call it "Earth B." Clearly, no one in his right mind would have created it in our own. I'm not sure I can offer higher praise.Īnd yet-it is also frustratingly difficult to get into, and utterly obtuse in terms of its UI.ĭwarf Fortress is a game from an alternate universe. I mean "amazing" at the level of Sim City and Civilization, as amazing to encounter today as they were when first released.
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