In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Dwarven Epitaphs: Procedural Histories in Dwarf Fortress 6 125 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux with the rise of digital inscription technologies, the history of the twenty-first century will not be written by human hands alone. From surveillance systems to medical databases to networked computers, automated processes of information and exchange are already encoding an alternative history of humanity and coauthoring the stories of the next century. Smart phones log global position, online advertisements count clicks per capita, search engines index content (and “personalize” results) in real time, and automatic backup applications record the state of your hard drive so you can “revisit your [computer] as it appeared in the past” (Apple 2012). Nowhere are these invisible informatics more deeply felt than through the algorithmic operations driving contemporary financial markets. At 2:45 p.m. on May 6, 2010, subsecond stock exchanges between networked trading systems on Wall Street produced an unprecedented, system-wide“flash crash,”which caused the Dow Jones to plummet a thousand points, only to recover just moments later. Now known as the “Crash of 2:45,” this microcrisis inspired a group of physicists at the University of Miami to recover and analyze 18,520 ultrafast black swan events to study the long-term economic impact of algorithmic trading on global financial systems post-2006 (Johnson et al. 2012). Considering the massive amounts of data being produced at speeds and scales that exceed the limits of human phenomenology, future historians will find themselves in a similar situation, studying the history of the twenty-first century not in terms of human-legible days, weeks, months, and years but in machine-scale microseconds. Like researchers applying physics to flash crashes, communities 126 STEPHANIE BOLUK AND PATRICK LEMIEUX have formed to study the complex dynamics governing play within contemporary videogames. Of the games that foreground their operational qualities and create play from the engagement with complex systems, one stands out: a text-based computer game by Tarn and Zach Adams called Dwarf Fortress (2002–). The game begins by generating an expansive, highly detailed world in which up to one thousand years of natural and social history are dynamically produced. Despite its minimal textual interface, the process of generating this history weighs heavily on the central processing units of most computers. The millions of events logged during world generation are granular enough not only to correspond to the history of the gamespace represented on-screen but also to ultimately historicize the processor cycles of the computer itself. In rejecting the conventions of standard game design and traditional narrative storytelling, Dwarf Fortress produces textual inscriptions that not only mark one horizon of human experience but recall forms of historical writing that depart from human-centered and teleological models of history, such as the annal, chronicle, and calendar. In response to (and despite) the difficulty of actually engaging with the game’s deanthropomorphized, speculative terrain, a community has formed over the past decade dedicated to exploring, documenting, and translating the results of Dwarf Fortress into texts we call Dwarven Epitaphs. Dwarven Epitaphs are monuments of human play and a powerful form of comparative textual media produced amid a computational wilderness. These postmortem accounts of play navigate the interstices of fan fiction, fan translation, and fan archiving not only to expand the field of play beyond the boundaries of software but also to explore the intersection of making and critique. Whereas Dwarf Fortress embraces the granularity of computation over the specularity of graphical realism, delighting in the strange, formal logics of the computer, Dwarven Epitaphs convert world generator to story generator and mark the dissonant registers produced between human operators and nonhuman operations. STRIKE THE EARTH! Before playing Dwarf Fortress, one must first write the history of the world.There are no preset level designs or narrative scenarios [3.17.75.227] Project MUSE (2024-04...

Share